Commentary By Ron Beasley
Over at Rolling Stone the great Matt Taibbi has a great article on an old fashion Tea Party revival in Kentucky. And what's a revival without a goddess?
It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin � who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate � is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.
The entire thing is worth a read but this description of the audience is classic:
Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression � "Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!" � the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.
"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."
A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.
Yes that's the Tea Party - a collection of old and angry white tribalists who want to cut government spending except for the trough they feed at. Cut the benefits of "the others" but not ours. As Steven Thrasher explains the election of a black president broke their brains.
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