The dog that caught the car: Postmortem on the National Tea Party Convention

By Dan Brooks in Tea Party 3 Comments

"The Tea Party movement has no leader, and neither did the American Revolution." —Conservative talk radio host Phil Valentine, addressing the convention

The National Tea Party Convention took place in Nashville this weekend, and the only thing anyone seems able to agree upon is that it did actually occur. Considering the preliminary disputes over the ethics of holding a political convention for profit, whether it was really national, and whether the Tea Party even exists as a single entity, the “[National] ‘Tea Party’  <finger quotes>Convention</finger qutoes>” was a huge success. The Tea Partiers successfully established that they love Sarah Palin, who announced weeks ago that she would be paid $100,000 to speak at the event, but also wrote in USA Today that she “would not benefit financially for speaking at this event…any compensation for my appearance will go right back to the cause.” What “the cause” is remained unclear to everyone. Once again, the Tea Party boiled but failed to coalesce, and the convention that we at Combat! blog hoped would finally define the movement—as a national party, an activist agenda, or even a political platform—turned out to be another exercise in playacting. ABC News captured the mood best: “Delegate William Temple from Georgia, who was dressed in a kilt, said he wanted to work against ‘Republicans, Democrats and Independents who have been in Congress too many terms. We’re sick of everyone.'” Thus spake the petulant ignorance of a generation.

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Friday links! Directionless assemblage of events edition

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 5 Comments

Oh, to be young in Warra Wanna

It’s Friday, and that means it’s time to fit the irregular detritus of the week into a taught chain of causal, um, links. The problem with contemporary life—if I can just jump right into it here—is that it’s increasingly non-narrative. Ever since the basic unit of work went from stalking a mastodon over the frozen plains for two weeks to franking insurance forms in a cubicle for eight hours, human life has become more and more episodic. That’s great for creating a mood but bad for developing character, to put it in workshop terms. Maybe that’s why the character of our nation has been so moody lately, with alternating factions declaring crisis amid recovery, victory in stalemate, strategem in disaster and vice versa, pretty much anew every morning. There must be a narrative in there somewhere, since yesterday will definitely not be happening again today, but sometimes the story seems hard to follow. Maybe we’re just looking at another week’s episode in the long-running melodrama of stupidity versus sense. Maybe stupidity has won, and the rest of the performance will be a puppet show, with shrieking socks debating each other in the same idiot’s voice. The fact of the matter is that not everything happens according to some plan, and our best evidence for destiny is still assembled in retrospect. This week, retrospect reveals only a startling refusal to cohere. As you move from the structure of your workweek to the short-form improvisations of the weekend, consider Camus’s assertion that meaning is only something we make for ourselves, and therefore so is meaninglessness. It is the edge between our desperate understandings and an indifferent universe where stories are made, and it’s the friction in the joint that gives them heat. It’s a cold morning in the Combat! blog offices, so let’s get a little fire going, huh?

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Meghan McCain ideologically pure, ready to be thrown into volcano

By Dan Brooks in Meghan McCain 4 Comments

The four secrets to Meghan McCain's success

Remember yesterday, when we mentioned the ideological purity test that has become so popular among Republicans? Of course you don’t. Just because you’ve forgotten doesn’t mean that it ceased to exist, though, or that it didn’t recently vindicate perennial victim  Meghan McCain. The latest entity to unjustly persecute Me-Mac—after Michelle Malkin, Karl Rove’s Twitter account, and her own boobs—are the George Washington University College Republicans, who recently pulled their sponsorship of her upcoming campus speaking engagement. According to McCain, it’s because her support for marriage equality violates one of the tenets of Republican purity, although it might also be because she’s an idiot. The GW College Republicans can all go sit in their Audis and eat dicks now, though, because Meghan McCain took the purity test, and she totally passed! First of all, if you want to talk ideology with Meghan McCain, it’s best to present it in a form that she already understands from Facebook. Second of all, despite being proud of her ideological purity, Me-Mac is sick of all the labels. Her planned speech at GW promises to induce confused grimaces right from the title, which is “Redefining Republican: No Labels, No Boxes, No Stereotypes.” See, Meghan McCain thinks beyond words like [actual words not supplied] when she thinks about what words like “conservative” and “Republican” mean. As she points out, that puts her in a hunted minority, since “apparently some student organizations feel more comfortable being able to group all Republicans into one place.” You know, like a political party.

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My god, I hope this isn’t real

By Dan Brooks in conservatism 8 Comments

It's time to wrest polits away from the politians and return it to the American people, 16% of whom appear to be utter morons.

While I was languishing in the airport yesterday, beacon of vigilance Ben Fowlkes sent me the most recent Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll of registered Republicans. It is disturbing. It starts off okay, with a healthy number of respondents expressing their intention to vote in the 2010 congressional election and their reluctance to settle on a candidate for president in 2012. It’s disappointing to see Sarah Palin in the lead—and terrifying to see Dick Cheney in third—but three years ahead of the actual election, name recognition is pretty much all there is. Things start to get a little crazy with question three, in which 39% of Republicans opine that President Obama should be impeached. Exactly what crime he has committed goes unspecified, but perhaps respondents were rushing to get to the next question, in which nearly two-thirds of those polled agree that the president is a socialist. Thus begins a series of money shots, in a barrage of insanity that leaves the reader crouched numbly on the floor like a Japanese girl on the internet. If this poll is to be believed, 73% of Republicans think homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to be schoolteachers. Seventy-seven percent want the Biblical account of creation from Genesis to be taught in public schools. Thirty-one percent want to outlaw contraception. And fully 23% of Republicans believe that their state should secede from the United States of America.

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