The Hatred Of The Other

The one unifying thing that ties together everyone in David Barstow's NY Times profile of the Tea Party movement is that everyone in it is driven by hatred and fear of the Other.  It's a long article but worth the time it takes to read it, if only to arm yourself with the knowledge of what is out there.

The ebbs and flows of the Tea Party ferment are hardly uniform. It is an amorphous, factionalized uprising with no clear leadership and no centralized structure. Not everyone flocking to the Tea Party movement is worried about dictatorship. Some have a basic aversion to big government, or Mr. Obama, or progressives in general. What’s more, some Tea Party groups are essentially appendages of the local Republican Party.

But most are not. They are frequently led by political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession. Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.

That is often the point when Tea Party supporters say they began listening to Glenn Beck. With his guidance, they explored the Federalist Papers, exposés on the Federal Reserve, the work of Ayn Rand and George Orwell. Some went to constitutional seminars. Online, they discovered radical critiques of Washington on Web sites like ResistNet.com (“Home of the Patriotic Resistance”) and Infowars.com (“Because there is a war on for your mind.”).

Many describe emerging from their research as if reborn to a new reality. Some have gone so far as to stock up on ammunition, gold and survival food in anticipation of the worst. For others, though, transformation seems to amount to trying on a new ideological outfit — embracing the rhetoric and buying the books.

"Whom to blame" is of course Obama.  Blaming the banks, the Republicans, the multi-trillion dollar wars, the defense contractors, the real causes of our problems...well, that would be cause for inner reflection at how the American people were duped and cheated.  Nobody likes to admit they were played for fools bu Bush and company.

It's much easier to blame the black guy for destroying the country.  It becomes even easier when the Right Wing Noise Machine is on-call 24 hours a day to justify the hatred for Obama, too.  It's been so bloody effective that we have people seriously contemplating the next US Civil War.

They want to be on the "winning side" now, you see.  In 2010, a black man is President.  The backlash from that couldn't have been timed any better for the Republican party to ride that wave of hate.  And these guys will be with us for a very, very long time.