What's Eating The Right Wing Now?

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dom: Aka Koch Bros.

Have you noticed how quiet the Tea Party has been lately?  Is it just that Mad Dog has not been paying attention or is it simply that Congress is not in session?

They are still out there, even when you don't see them. But you know they are there, like cockroaches, busy, unseen, ready to come out when they think the time is right.

President Obama has been taking punches on the roll out of Obamacare, but now, as more and more people have locked down policies, you are, at least if you listen to NPR, beginning to hear stories from more or less ecstatic people who have health insurance, who either never had it before or who had dreadfully inadequate policies.

If this keeps up, people might just get to like having health insurance; they may even get to depend on it like Medicare and Social Security, and if that happens, people may just begin to believe government is good for something.  And if the government is good for something, then what can those anarchists in the Tea Party sell?

Well, maybe  they can always try to kill Obamacare with a thousand cuts and bleed it anemic until people start to dislike it  because it cannot run up the mountain in its weakened state.

Presumably, Ted Cruz and Eric Cantor and the entire Congressional delegations from South Carolina and Texas and Arizona are huddling with the Koch brothers and Carl Rove and other luminaries of the Tea Party Thought Palace, rehearsing their songs.

Charles M. Blow, notes in today's NY Times that 43% of Republicans (Pew Research) are now "staunch conservatives" in terms of their ideas on the size and role of government, economic policy (trickle down good,  government rescues bad),social issues (gay marriage, bad, guns good, government restrictions bad) and moral concerns (Heaven only knows what constitutes moral concerns in Tea Party Republican eyes nowadays.) A majority of these "staunch" types watch Fox News regularly.

 Of white evangelical Protestants 73% disbelieve evolution. This is in contrast to all Republicans, of whom 54% believe in evolution.  This means 73% of evangelicals and 46% of all Republicans believe "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time."

Billy O'Reilly has been inveighing against the "War on Christmas," which he hears in the greeting "Happy Holidays" as opposed to "Merry Christmas."  Newt Gingrich picked up the Christians-under-attack theme, "There's a lot more anti-Christian bigotry today than there is concern on the other side, and none of it gets covered by the news media." Apparently, Mr. Gingrich does not watch Fox News.

Tea Party Republicans, which is to say, Republicans, or at least 43% of Republicans, the staunch set,  depend on anger, resentment and a sense of having been wronged.  (Actually, Mad Dog would like to know who those other 57% of Republicans are who are, who are not staunch. And who represents them? John Boehner? Mitch McConnell? How are these guys different from staunch?) Republicans are the party of anger. 

This is not the first time the Republican party has been the party of grievance. Of course, there was the McCarthy era Republican party of Who-lost-China?  and deep paranoia. But, originally, when the Republican party emerged from the Whigs, and nominated Abraham Lincoln, a lot of them were abolitionists, and being angry about slavery, even today, more than 150 years later, that seems appropriate. But there is a world of difference between being angry about slavery and being angry about Obamacare.

During Mad Dog's youth, there was the war in Vietnam. America was killing peasants in their rice paddies, burning babies with Napalm, and sending off its sons from America to die for "honor" and glory and to "fight for freedom" and to "defend our country."  That was something to get mad about. Republicans weren't bothered by all that then. It was disaffected Democrats who roiled about Vietnam. It was Democrats who served notice on their own sitting President he would not be renominated and it was Democrats who rejected the candidate of smoke filled rooms, Hubert Humphrey, because he supported the war in Vietnam, and it was Democrats who self destructed and handed the election to Richard Nixon because Democrats were angry at their own for having blundered into Vietnam.

But what issue today rises to the level of evil reached by the institution of slavery or  war? The War on Christmas?  Gun control?  Teaching evolution in schools? 

Mad Dog must be missing something here. But what have the Republicans got to get America boiling mad about now?