{"id":2991,"date":"2010-10-18T09:41:01","date_gmt":"2010-10-18T16:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=2991"},"modified":"2010-10-18T09:41:01","modified_gmt":"2010-10-18T16:41:01","slug":"newsweek-nails-tea-party-constitution-worship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=2991","title":{"rendered":"Newsweek Nails Tea Party Constitution Worship"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"TeaThis may be the best Conventional Media article of the year: How Tea Partiers Get the Constitution Wrong<\/a>. It was written by Andrew Romano for Newsweek and is a fairly comprehensive look at how the Tea Party sanctifies the Constitution while simultaneously basking in their ignorance of it. It is worth reading in its entirety, but here are some choice excerpts:<\/p>\n

“Tea Partiers engage with the Constitution in such a selective manner, and for such nakedly political purposes, that they’re clearly relying on it more as an instrument of self-affirmation and cultural division than a source of policy inspiration.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is demonstrated every time a Tea Bagger makes the fatuous claim that [fill in the blank]<\/em> doesn’t appear in the Constitution. This can refer to anything from separation of church and state to gay marriage to income taxes. However, it never refers to the FAA, workplace safety, the minimum wage, or corporate welfare like farm subsidies or incentives to ship jobs overseas.<\/p>\n

“In the current Congress, conservatives like Michele Bachmann have suggested more than 40 additions to the Constitution: a flag-desecration amendment; a balanced-budget amendment; a ‘parental rights’ amendment; a supermajority-to-raise-taxes amendment; anti-abortion amendment; an anti-gay-marriage amendment; and so on. None of these revisions has anything to do with the document’s original meaning.” […]<\/p>\n

“The truth is that for all their talk of purity, politicians like Palin, Angle, and Miller don\u2019t seem to be particularly concerned with matching their actual positions to the Constitution they profess to worship. For them, the sacred text serves a higher purpose.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tea Baggers are quick to gush their reverence for the original intent of the Constitution – slavery, sexism, and all. And they are just as quick to disparage it and rush to desecrate it with oppressive and irrelevant amendments that are contrary to its underpinnings of freedom.<\/p>\n

“Like other fundamentalists, they seek refuge from the complexity and confusion of modern life in the comforting embrace of an authoritarian scripture and the imagined past it supposedly represents. Like other fundamentalists, they see in their good book only what they want to see: confirmation of their preexisting beliefs. Like other fundamentalists, they don’t sweat the details, and they ignore all ambiguities. And like other fundamentalists, they make enemies or evildoers of those who disagree with their doctrine.” […]<\/p>\n

“The point is always the same: to suggest that the Constitution, like the Bible, decrees what’s right and wrong (rather than what’s legal and illegal), and to insist that only they and their ilk can access its truths. We are moral, you are not; we represent America, you do not. Theirs is the rallying cry of culture war.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Umm…..Are you listening, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, et al?<\/p>\n

“Thomas Jefferson put it best. In a letter to a friend in 1816, he mocked ‘men [who] look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched’<\/em>“<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The effort to transform the Constitution into a divinely inspired, holy document, and its authors into saints, is not new. I wrote about this<\/a> last June in an article about the right-wing movement to advance the theory of American Exceptionalism, which is nothing more than warmed-over American Supremacy and just as repulsive as Hitler’s conception of a Master Race.<\/p>\n

“[Beck] has declared that the Constitution was the result of divine inspiration and is as immutable as holy scripture. He regards the nation’s founders as saintly. One of those founders, Thomas Jefferson, expressly disagrees with Beck. On the matter of Constitutional immutability, Jefferson wrote that ‘\u2026with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times.’<\/em> That’s hardly an argument for strict constructionalism. And with regard to the divinity of himself and his contemporaries, Jefferson spoke disparagingly of the arrogance of one generation dictating the terms of existence to their heirs, castigating those who would ‘…ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.’<\/em>“<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is encouraging to read an article like Romano’s in Newsweek. Hopefully it will be read and heeded by many more and this fallacious notion that the Tea Party has been ordained by God to restore our Constitution will be discarded for its arrogance and complete disconnection with reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This may be the best Conventional Media article of the year: How Tea Partiers Get the Constitution Wrong. It was written by Andrew Romano for Newsweek and is a fairly comprehensive look at how the Tea Party sanctifies the Constitution while simultaneously basking in their ignorance of it. It is worth reading in its entirety, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[832,534],"class_list":["post-2991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-newsweek","tag-tea-party"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Ijg-Mf","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2902,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=2902","url_meta":{"origin":2991,"position":0},"title":"Poll: Tea Party Is Wildly Out Of Touch With America","author":"Mark NC","date":"10\/5\/2010","format":false,"excerpt":"A new poll (pdf) by the Public Religion Research Institute reveals what most conscious observers already knew: The views of the Tea Party are wholly removed from those of the rest of the American people. The differences between the Tea Party and everyone else are so stark that it should\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election"","block_context":{"text":"Election","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=152"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6376,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=6376","url_meta":{"origin":2991,"position":1},"title":"Fox News Poll: Obama Shines, Tea Party Whines","author":"Mark NC","date":"2\/10\/2012","format":false,"excerpt":"There are a number of uber-conservative commentators who have arrived at the conclusion that Fox News has slithered down the rabbit hole to a Hades-flavored Wonderland of liberalism. They have convinced themselves that Fox has become as liberal as what they perceive the rest of the media to be. For\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election"","block_context":{"text":"Election","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=152"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3900,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=3900","url_meta":{"origin":2991,"position":2},"title":"Tea Baggers Plotting To Sabotage Union Rallies","author":"Mark NC","date":"2\/21\/2011","format":false,"excerpt":"America is about to learn how the right-wing engages in community organizing. Rather than working to get the support of like-minded citizens to participate in public events on behalf of their agenda, Tea Partiers are planning a campaign of dirty tricks that fails to advance the debate, but succeeds in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=1"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2809,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=2809","url_meta":{"origin":2991,"position":3},"title":"What You Missed At The Beverly Hills Tea Party","author":"Mark NC","date":"9\/27\/2010","format":false,"excerpt":"In lieu of the next 1,000 words... The much ballyhooed Beverly Hills Tea Party took place yesterday and exceeded all expectations - for lameness. It was the epitome of a Beverly Hills Flop. The turnout was a paltry couple of hundred in a city of four million. And, not surprisingly,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=1"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3291,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=3291","url_meta":{"origin":2991,"position":4},"title":"Yet Another Poll Reveals The Tea Party Craze Is A Fraud","author":"Mark NC","date":"11\/24\/2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Despite all the evidence of repeated surveys, the media continues to treat the Tea Party as if it were an influential player in contemporary politics. They salivate at plastering their pages and airwaves with red-meat melodrama that lacks relevance or substance. That's how they end up so pathetically far off\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "General"","block_context":{"text":"General","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=1"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10284,"url":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=10284","url_meta":{"origin":2991,"position":5},"title":"Tea Party Poopers: Old, White, Evangelical, Men Spell Doom For The GOP","author":"Mark NC","date":"7\/31\/2013","format":false,"excerpt":"The fortunes of the Tea Party have declined considerably since their founding a couple of years ago. Majorities of Americans view them unfavorably and they have caused some notable electoral losses where otherwise a conservative Republican was expected to win. A new survey by Pew Research reveals an even more\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election"","block_context":{"text":"Election","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?cat=152"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2991"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2997,"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2991\/revisions\/2997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}