This just in: The Tea Party Nation will be holding their first convention in Nashville, TN, this coming February. This AstroTurf gathering of Baggers should prove to be a lively affair with panels on how to disrupt town hall meetings, forums on the similarities between President Obama and Hitler, workshops on promoting fake issues to protest, and media tutorials led by Fox News anchors.
“The convention is aimed at bringing the Tea Party Movement leaders together from around the nation for the purpose of networking and supporting the movements’ multiple organizations principle goals.”
As a special treat, Sarah Palin has just been announced as their keynote speaker. That should bring the Baggers out in force. The Tea Bagging will be televised. The Baggers are indeed revolting (have you ever eaten with one of them?). And what could be more exciting than to spend three days with these folks:
The Tea Bagger contingent will provide plenty of opportunity to learn about the many important issues facing the nation. And who better than these motivated and engaged citizens who represent the best of the right-wing and the Republican Party. This is, after all, the party for which it has just been revealed that a majority don’t believe that President Obama was legitimately elected. A new PPP poll asked the question:
“Do you think that Barack Obama legitimately won the Presidential election last year, or do you think that ACORN stole it for him?”
Amongst Republicans only 27% say Obama actually won the race, with 52% – an outright majority – saying that ACORN stole it. That would mean that ACORN would have stuffed about 10 million ballots. But the Tea Party Nationalists have no more problem accepting such nonsense than they do doubts that the President is an American citizen, or that “death panels” exist in the health care bill, or that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or that Marxists are running loose in the halls of the White House.
All of this insures that the first ever conference of Tea Baggers should be a real hoot. Boy, I wish I could be there.
This phenomenon – believing the factually impossible – reminds me of a kid finally realizing that there are just too many houses in the world for Santa to visit each in one night, and that, therefore, painful as it is to admit, the resulting cognitive dissonance can be dissolved only by concluding that Santa himself does not exist. With these alleged adults, there never is such a realization – that ACORN could not physically alter the results of a national election, nor a state one, nor, probably, even a regional or local one, if it wanted to, thus it didn’t. It’s that fervent desire that some concept be true which trumps evidence to the contrary, evidence which must not be confronted much less examined lest the breakthrough to reality occur.
It truly is a community of deliberate delusion. I would not be surprised by a small minority of any group believing this nonsense. But this is a majority of a major political party.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.