Axelrod On Tea Baggers: 'They're Wrong'

These teabaggers will kill soon, just look !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mlf_rUVGRNw

I'm sure this point has been made elsewhere, but it's amusing to think of just how many ways the Tea Baggers are benefiting from tax dollars as they make their trip. You start with the obvious things like the roads they drove on, and the police and Parks Dept. personnel who protected them and directed traffic for them and cleaned up after them. Then there's the salaries of the mechanics who were contracted to inspect the charter buses that didn't burst into flames en route, to say nothing of the air traffic controllers who guided their planes into the municipal airports. Did they know to bring an umbrella because of their keen frontiersmen's sense of the weather, or because they downloaded a weather report based on NOAA satellite data and forecasting via the DARPA-created Internet over wireless frequencies regulated by the FCC? Which corporation paid to drain the former swampland they assembled on, or was that tax dollars too? Who made sure that local restaurants (who know that tourists will not, by definition, be repeat customers) weren't serving them tainted horse meat? And on and on and on. I'm guessing you could probably think of a hundred different ways in which the "gubmint" made their collective tantrum possible in the first place.

After a while you realize that where we've really failed them is in not devoting enough tax dollars for public education in basic civics.

I was flipping channels last night and happened to come across the PBS documentary "The Sixties". At the time I tuned in the show was at 1968. and after about 40 minutes of watching the subject of George Wallace came up.

Based on the film and interviews I saw, the similarities between the teabaggers and 1968 Wallace devotees are striking. Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if some of the teabaggers are themselves former Wallace supporters. The inchoate rage and the seething contempt for their political opponents looked exactly the same in 1968 as it does today.