Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Friday, September 17, 2010

Tea Party and the Republican's dead cat bounce!

Commentary By Ron Beasley



Michael Tomasky has a piece on the Tea Party in The Guardian. 

Thus the historically situated question is this: is the Tea Party
movement a flash in the pan, or is it a historic fulfilment of an urge
that has been building for 230 years and is on the cusp, with the help
of Rupert Murdoch's "news" channel, of becoming a permanent fixture in
American politics?



If most of those eight candidates lose on 2
November, the more establishment Republicans will attempt to rein in the
movement. Whether they can do so is another question.





Tomasky gets close but he misses what has really happened here.  During the Bush/Cheney presidency all Republican policy originated in the White House. A vacuum was created when the White House changed hands in 2009 because there essentially was no Republican leadership. The Vacuum was filled by FOX and the talk radio clowns. These people are entertainers interested in making money � not policy. Glenn Beck actually admitted as much in the Forbes interview.



With a deadpan, Beck insists that he is not political: "I could give a

flying crap about the political process." Making money, on the other

hand, is to be taken very seriously, and controversy is its own coinage.

"We're an entertainment company,"



The Koch brothers money would not have been able to keep the Tea Party going without Glenn Beck and FOX news. The Republican Party has essentially been taken over by entertainers/snake oil salesman. Lack of policy is a feature not a bug to these people. Of course they are interested in not paying taxes on their millions so tax cuts is the only thing that even resembles policy.



As I have said before the Republicans will make some gains this year.  I don't really think anything is going to be accomplished the next two years anyway so a Republican takeover of the House might actually be a plus looking ahead to 2012. The economy isn't going to be any better and if the Republicans in the House spend all of their time investigating and trying to impeach the Kenyon born Marxist Muslim President they will impress about 25% of the population and really turn everyone else off.

So the Republicans will get a bounce this year but the Tea Party created by their new masters - the entertainment industry - will make it a dead cat bounce.



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2 comments:

  1. John BallardSeptember 17, 2010 at 10:37 PM

    Great headline!
    Wish I had thought of that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. SRW1September 18, 2010 at 2:40 AM

    I don't doubt that the Tea Party phenomenon will burn out because there is no viable idea of a functioning society in the 21. century behind it. What I find worrisome though, is how long that process will take and what it might set on fire.
    Not to claim that these things are the same, but the idea of German exceptionalism was an 'established fact' in imperial Germany. It took two world wars and 60-70 million dead for that idea to burn out.
    If the Tea Partiers were get a Republican into the White House in 2012 and that person would be foolish enough to, for example, start a war with Iran, the burn-out process may take an unfortunately literal turn.

    ReplyDelete

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