Tea time with the deadenders

After six days of R&R, I've resumed my normal routine of scanning online newspapers and a few blogs to catch up with what's happening in the country. I found a lot of self-congratulatory bullshit from conservatives about their teabag parties this week. If those people are real revolutionaries, they'll all have refused to file income tax returns for 2008, and eventually we can get around to prosecuting them for tax evasion.

Several conservatives used the terms "jealousy" and "envy" to explain criticism of the teabag events. The thinking seems to be along this line: Liberals who ridicule them are just envious because they can't stage the same kind of fabulous protests as the teabaggers. This delusional thinking passes for analysis among people that time and events are rapidly leaving behind. I've seen photographs taken at their rallies, and I haven't spotted anything that stirs me to jealousy. I'm mostly thankful that I'm not related to or friends with any teabag people.

In Texas, some teabag people are also getting behind a secessionist movement. I've decided the image of a black guy at the podium with the presidential seal has driven the most delusional conservatives into fantasies of the good old days when the Confederate States of America had their own currency and no black people running the government.

Based on opinion polls from the last year of the Bush 43 administration, it can be reasonably determined that hardcore conservative deadenders make up about 24 percent of the total population. That percentage thought W. was doing a swell job until his final day, and even now believe he'll be remembered in history as one of our greatest presidents.

At 24 percent, there aren't enough deadenders to win elections, but because they're half of the Republican bloc they have a lot of influence with GOP politicians at all levels -- especially weaklings like Rick Perry. El Perro has gotten attention for his willingness to entertain the fantasies of the make-believe revolutionaries, hoping to keep their support in his upcoming struggle with Kay Bay.

Basically today's teabag people are just the same old gang of usual suspects, not an emerging force of revolutionaries. These are probably the same people who agreed with Dick Cheney when he said budget deficits were overrated as an economic concern (when the deficits were being created by conservatives).

What really has them worried is not the debt being passed to future generations, but the possibility of Barack Obama presiding over a booming economy with the approval of 70 percent of the voters. As unlikely as that is, the mere possibility has them in panic. People who can't define "fascism" are throwing the label around like they invented it.