Wind Bags

How many, do you suppose, of the participants in the upcoming tea-bagging parties are actually negatively impacted by President Obama's planned tax increases? My guess: other than the Fox News (sic) stars and starettes, approximately none. It's yet another example of the craven and insincere tricking the crazed and insecure into rising up against their own self-interest. Think anyone will ask them to which taxes they are objecting? "Thirty-six percent now not thirty-nine in two years" doesn't have the same je ne sais quoi as "fifty-four forty or fight."

It will never cease to amaze me; and, of course, it will never cease. You can't fix this kind of crazy. Or maybe these are the real tea-baggers, and the rest are just suckers.

Blessed with a certain failure of reality testing, many are only too happy to buy into what Fox is selling. In a country of 300 million, even if there were a million nutjobs like these it isn't much of a chunk. But insanity is motivating, so they make a lot of noise, seeing demons where none exist, believing demagoguery even as the disproving facts dangle before their eyes. Were I to address these people there's absolutely no way I could convince them of my point of view; nor could they persuade me of theirs. I have only the hope that the extrapolation is also true: that their numbers aren't growing.

And I wonder -- assuming I'm right that Obama's efforts will turn the economy around and effectively address health care, energy, and a few other things, WITHOUT sending dissenters to camps, stifling capitalism, or destroying democracy -- if at some point any of these folks and their outFoxed leaders would be able to admit they were wrong. Or, for that matter, even recognize it.
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