The Harmony of Cognitive Dissonance

Matt Osborne has the Tea Party schtick down cold, especially Rand Paul.

Rand Paul would like to raise medicare reimbursement rates. Half of his patients are Medicare recipients, after all, and physicians (he says) should be "allowed to make a comfortable living." Which is what Paul actually means when promising to apply "real free market principles" to fix our broken health care system. To wit:

If you argue that healthcare providers alone are not expected to pay for everyone's health care, then whom? The taxpayers? But who are the taxpayers? They are your neighbors. If you maintain a right to healthcare or housing, you must argue that your belief, which you call a "right," is sufficient to send armed tax collectors to your neighbors house to expropriate that "right."

See, taxing Americans for health care is wrong until it benefits Rand Paul. Since Kentucky Medicaid probably doesn't pay for adults to visit his office, it's no wonder he calls the program "intergenerational warfare." The senior citizens patronizing his libertarian opthalmology practice don't benefit from a program that keeps 18 million American children healthy, either; no wonder we've seen grandma telling Obama to keep his hands off her Medicare.

After all, Medicaid is for the deservedly poor (i.e., Wal-Mart employees). So what if they're children? They're not your grandchildren, why should you pay taxes to keep American children alive? As religious conservatives march into the tea party, a new cognitive dissonance forms with the decidedly non-Christian ethos of resentment. The "right to life," it seems, ends at birth; and this has nothing to do with race except that it does. 

And that's what makes the Tea Party work:  convincing downtrodden, screwed over Americans that everyone else except them is the problem, and that when social spending is cut, entitlements will be taken away from everybody except them because after all, they're the ones that got Tea Party Candidate X elected, right?  So there's no way they are going to touch their entitlements...just the elimination "waste and fraud" that constitutes "them" getting entitlements, them being (insert scapegoat here), from African-Americans to Latinos to gays to Muslims to whomever.

And of course the Republicans and Big Business are glad to see people willing to twist the knife into the backs of their fellow Americans, because the Tea Party wants theirs, dammit...and they will sacrifice anyone who gets in their way.

And yeah, that means everyone else but themselves.