“Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding.”

- Mohandas Gandhi

In a recent article published in Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi recounts his visit to a Tea Party rally in Louisville, Kentucky.  After he noted the large number of senior citizens there who were either sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their over-sized butts on motorized wheelchair-scooters, Taibbi was told by one of the Tea Partiers - “The scooters are because of Medicare.  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.”

He then relates the following encounter with an elderly couple Janice and David Wheelock, who were fairly itching to share their views –

David:    “I’m anti-spending and anti-government.  The welfare state is out of control.”
Matt:     “OK, and what do you do for a living?”
David:    (proudly) “Me?  Oh, I’m a property appraiser.  Have been my whole life.”
Matt:     (frowning) “Are either of you on Medicare?”
Silence.
Then, a scooter-bound Janice slowly raised her hand, and offered a faint smile, as if to say, “You got me!”
Matt:     “Let me get this straight.  You’ve been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare.  How can you complain about the welfare state?”
David:     “Well, there’s a lot of people on welfare who don’t deserve it.  Too many people are living off the government.”
Matt:     “But you live off the government.  And have been your whole life!”
David:     “Yeah, but I don’t make very much.”

So here we have a convention hall full of people, many taking full advantage of Medicare benefits, listening to the Judas sheep of the Tea Party movement, Sarah Palin, do her tiresome impersonation of Ronald Reagan — “Government’s not the solution!  Government’s the problem!” — and complaining about the size of government spending.  Apparently, though, to them the only bad government spending is the money government spends on everyone else.  As long as government dollars are spent on me, it’s okay.  Does anybody see anything wrong with this picture?

After some fairly lengthy reviews of the Tea Party phenomenon and their obscene rhetoric (several hours of my life that I’ll never get back), I’ve come to the conclusion that the entire miserable narrative espoused by these people boils down to nothing more than a huge pile of the stuff you try to avoid stepping in when you walk through the barnyard.

The Tea Party purports to be furious about government spending.  In reality, the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and didn’t give a hoot about the down side of Bush’s deregulation.  But, now they want to (1) lay all of the blame for their economic situation at the feet of the Obama administration and (2) return to power the very people who were the tour guides in charge of escorting us to the perdition in which we now find ourselves.

The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — except for the money spent on them.  Their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse for themselves and decrying that which goes to those they deem not worthy has to make one wonder just when we fell down the rabbit hole.

For Americans still suffering from persistent unemployment, falling incomes and rising inequality, it is hard to generate much enthusiasm for politicians from either party.  But while this political ennui is understandable, it has created a dangerous political vacuum that is being filled from the Right with misleading data, urban legends and outright lies.

Indeed, the entire Tea Party movement was founded on false assumptions about the economic program that probably saved the country from a second Great Depression.  The ills against which the Tea Party leaders now rant began as angry populist opposition to the Troubled Asset Recovery Program (TARP), that notorious “bailout” of drowning banks and insurance companies, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the “stimulus program.”

Angry and red-faced people without a whit of understanding of just how much worse the situation would probably have been without TARP have been convinced it was a way for Obama to launch his program to turn the United States into a socialistic society.  They grew virtually apoplectic when the Obama administration directed hundreds of billions of dollars in TARP funds toward the auto industry in loans and shares — more socialism!

For most of the Tea Party faithful, motives range from xenophobia to paranoia.  And as the recovery has lagged — and the Obama White House failed miserably in communicating both its aims and its achievements — those typical symptoms of right-wing delusion have began to show up in a broader segment of the voting public.

In the meantime, Republicans have established a record during the first two years of the Obama Presidency which shows they care not a whit about providing jobs and restoring economic viability to the middle class, only about returning to power.  So they, and their allies in the media, have managed to mischaracterize the president’s health care reform bill as both a “government takeover” and a gift to the health insurance industry, although in reality it is neither.  Most Americans who say that they dislike the bill have very little knowledge of its actual provisions, and it turns out those same provisions end up being quite popular when they are polled individually.

The average voter is equally unlikely to know the essential facts about the preservation of auto companies, the stimulus or TARP — which was approved with the votes of the same Republican leaders they may soon return to the majority.  Nonpartisan experts both within and outside government have said for months that TARP not only saved the country from untold economic disaster, but that its repayments and warrants will end up as highly profitable investments.

Tea Party publicists like to shout that the stimulus program didn’t work and may even have done harm.  The Republicans insist that government cannot create jobs and that public expenditure only “crowds out” private-sector investment.  But contrary to this mythology, the private sector is currently sitting on more than $3 trillion, in banks and corporate accounts, which is not being invested and is not being used to create jobs.  What it is being used for is to inflate the balance sheets of these banks and corporations so elite toplevel managers can shamelessly avail themselves of obscene bonuses.

The Obama stimulus program was enough to prevent the complete deflation that might have led to a depression, but because of Republican party line opposition to all Democratic programs the government has not been able to do enough to begin a full recovery in employment.

The same conservatives who now claim that Obama’s program didn’t work are those who have done everything they can to thwart its success.  They are also the self-same politicians who once warned that President Clinton’s program would lead to ruin — just before the United States saw its greatest peacetime economic expansion in history.  Believe them at your own peril.