And, as a postscript to what I just posted about who is pulling the strings of tea partiers (and their Catholic hierarchical fellow-travelers), and why those strings are being pulled, I'd like to post an excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's commentary on the tea party movement at Salon yesterday (with a hat tip to Pam Spaulding, who posted a link on her Facebook site today).
Greenwald writes:
It requires extreme blindness or extreme dishonesty to deny that our politics is more racially and ethnically polarized than it has been in a long time. Virtually every Fox News/right-wing-talk-radio controversy relies on scaring economically anxious white Americans into ignoring the prime cause of their economic insecurity -- plundering by Wall Street bankers, abetted by the government they own -- and focusing instead on some manufactured menace from powerless racial and ethnic minorities: black people preventing them from voting (New Black Panthers), stealing their elections (ACORN), and treating them unequally (Shirley Sherrod and Eric Holder's Justice Department); Muslims who want to conquer their country and celebrate over their Christian corpses (the Triumphalist Ground Zero Mosque); invading, marauding Latino armies coming to steal their property and rape their women while their Marxist allies in Government (led by a black Muslim President) disarm the white victims. Matt Taibbi, in lamenting the takeover of the GOP by the most riled-up of these factions -- the Tea Partiers -- recounts just some of the lowlights here.
And, as Greenwald adds, the success of this execrable script depends not only on the wealthy interest groups producing it and on the Republican party that promotes it via the tea partiers, but on "cowardly and opportunistic" Democrats, as well. It depends on those "pragmatists" within the Democratic party who find it impossible to take a stand or to articulate clear ethical principles for their political agenda.
Thus playing right into the hands of the rabid haters who, while they're a minority, are nonetheless in the driver's seat of our culture, due to the refusal of the spineless leaders now holding the reins of power in D.C. to stand up to them . . . .