Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi on the narcissism of the Tea Party
While I’m not one to mind some adult words thrown into an article, Taibbi seems to rely on profanity as a crutch in his writing. But buried in his four-lettered vocabulary are some important insights. Taibbi realizes, as I’ve argued that the polling data has shown, that Tea Partiers are just dissatisfied voters.
But here’s the one excerpt from this piece that I think deserves more attention, and more discussion. It’s a possible political attack, and definitely an opening for some real liberal framing and messaging to get through.
It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They’re completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I’m an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I’m a radical communist? I don’t love my country? I’m a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.
It’s not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It’s just that they’re shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid.
