I am so sick of hearing about this allegedly awesome tea party.  Time Magazine has just published a longish article on the subject of Why The Tea Party Matters, thus demonstrating that a) the general consensus is the tea party does not matter; b) to the extent it may matter, it takes three long internet page-jumps to explain why it matters; and c) Time Magazine no longer matters.

I know, I know, Scott Brown.  But you know what, even Scott Brown doesn’t care about this dumb tea party.  As far as I am concerned, a bunch of ill-informed, reactionary white people does not make a revolution — that’s just business as usual.  You can’t invite a couple of xenophobic teddy bears to the tea-table and call it a legitimate national movement.  That’s just a xenophobic teddy bear you’re pretending is your friend, and the whole thing is weird, frankly.  In fact, it’s embarassing.

So please, let’s get back to the time when we made teabagging jokes and appreciated how funny it was that Fox News managed to galvanize a few hundred people around probably one of the few Historic Events they managed to learn in spite of the American education system.  Whatever we do about this super-lame garden party of sorts, let’s just make sure we don’t take it seriously.  After all, dumb things we start to take seriously have a bad habit of becoming real.

-AS

Rather than grapple with the crisis in American democracy that’s been laid bare by the events of the last week, I’m just going to quote liberally from a fairly perfect summation from James Fallows about why our government is so fucked up:

Fifty-nine senators, representing. . . some 63 percent of the American public, accompanied by a large House majority and a president recently elected with 70 million votes, cannot enact changes in the nation’s health-care system that have been debated for decades.
A 59-41 margin is not enough for a change of this magnitude.

Five Justices of the Supreme Court, outvoting their four colleagues, can work a fundamental change in election law that goes far beyond the issues presented by the parties to the case. . . Courts always have the option of deciding cases narrowly or broadly. The breadth of this one, reaching far beyond the merits of the case so as to enact the majority Justices’ views, is staggering even to a non-lawyer like me. A one-person margin is enough for a change of this magnitude.

In the least accountable branch of government, the narrowest margin prevails; in our elected legislative branch, substantial majorities are neutered.

So what’s next for America, and health care reform, and President Obama, and corporations, and the Democratic Party, and David Letterman? At the moment, I’m too disheartened to offer any ideas or predictions. But I promise to at least be more diligent about commenting on the thoughts and actions of others. At least until finals starts.

-AR