alexch's almanac

Q Thanks for having us here, Mr. President. Just to start off, because the news of the day is obviously what just happened in Kentucky. What’s your feelings on the thought of a Rand Paul supporter actually stepping on the neck of a female MoveOn supporter?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, look, I think that one of the things that I’ve always tried to promote is civility in politics. I think we can disagree vigorously without being disagreeable. And what we saw on the video was an example of people’s passions just getting out of hand in ways that are disturbing.

As for Profitt, he remains defiant. “I don’t think it’s that big of a deal,” Profitt said.

And when asked if he would apologize to Valle. “I would like for her to apologize to me to be honest with you,” Profitt said.

A spokesperson for MoveOn.org says Lauren Valle has been released from the hospital and is recovering from injuries including a concussion and a sprained shoulder and arm.

I can’t even tell you how many people I interviewed at Tea Party events who came up with one version or another of the Joe Miller defense. Yes, I’m on Medicare, but… I needed it! It’s those other people who don’t need it who are the problem!

Or: Yes, it’s true, I retired from the police/military/DPW at 54 and am on a fat government pension that you and your kids are going to be paying for for the next forty years, while I sit in my plywood-paneled living room in Florida watching Fox News, gobbling Medicare-funded prescription medications, and railing against welfare queens. But I worked hard for those bennies! Not like those other people!

This whole concept of “good welfare” and “bad welfare” is at the heart of the Tea Party ideology, and it’s something that is believed implicitly across the line. It’s why so many of their political champions, like Miller, and sniveling Kentucky rich kid Rand Paul (a doctor whose patient base is 50% state insured), and Nevada “crazy juice” Senate candidate Sharron Angle (who’s covered by husband Ted’s Federal Employee Health Plan insurance), are so completely unapologetic about taking state aid with one hand and jacking off angry pseudo-libertarian mobs with the other.

They genuinely don’t see the contradiction, much in the same way that some Wall Street people genuinely can’t see the problem with their company, say, taking $13 billion in bonuses in the same year that they accepted $13 billion in state bailouts. You wave a pitchfork at them with little post-its of the relevant figures taped to the ends, and ask them to confess – and they can’t, because they literally don’t see your point.

After all, these bankers will protest, we needed to pay out those billions in bonuses to stay competitive! It’s not like we’re just taking the money willy-nilly, like those dreadful people in ratty army coats who shop with food stamps in the bodega downstairs!

The rationalization continues: If I can’t help my department heads buy Porsches, they say, the whole system collapses, and the system is what’s important. It’s not like simply handing out money to people who can’t pay their mortgages, which of course is real waste.
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You probably heard about the story of David Jungerman, the Kansas farmer who created a billboard that read as follows:

ARE YOU A PRODUCER OR A PARASITE?

DEMOCRATS – THE PARTY OF PARASITES

Of course it now turns out that Jungerman himself took over a million dollars in farm subsidies since 1995. When asked about the apparently contradiction, Jungerman offered the Miller defense:

“That’s just my money coming back to me,” Jungerman, 72, said Monday. “I pay a lot in taxes. I’m not a parasite.”

In Tea Party legend the “parasites” would I suppose be people who don’t pay taxes, or pay few taxes, and receive government support in excess of what they pay. Maybe they mean the 39-odd million Americans (about 1 in 8) who are now receiving food stamps. In the Hobbesian jungle the Tea Partyers would prefer we all live in, it’s true, most of those 39 million people (including the just under 50% of all children, and 90% of black children, who will at some point in their lives eat a meal bought with food stamps) would indeed be sucking wind instead of eating cheese.

These are the parasites they’re probably talking about. You know, children. Meanwhile, a slick grownup yuppie politician with a GI Joe beard and a breeder wife and eight kids, leeching off the state at every turn and gunning for a U.S. Senate salary and pension on an anti-welfare platform, he’s just a hardworking citizen who simply needed a lift during a “transitional” period.