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On Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:58:29 -0400, " bozak" <...@gmail.com_____
Teabagging Michelle Malkin
Conservatives and the Right
by Matt Taibbi | April 16, 2009 - 10:45am
I have to say, I'm really enjoying this whole teabag thing. It's really inspiring some excellent daydreaming. For one thing, it's
brought together the words teabag and Michelle Malkin for me in a very powerful, thrilling sort of way. Not that I haven't ever put
those two concepts together before, but this is the first time it's happened while in the process of reading her actual columns.
Previously Michelle Malkin's writing was on the edge of unreadable; she's sort of like Ann Coulter, only without that tiny fraction
of P.T. Barnum/Mick Jagger-esque self-promotional flair that makes Coulter at least vaguely interesting. When you read Ann Coulter,
you know you're reading someone who would fuck a hippopotamus if she thought it would boost her Q rating. That's a rare quality and
it commands one's attention.
Michelle Malkin doesn't have that. She's just a mean little dunce who's wedged herself into a nicely paying career as a GOP
spokesclown, and she's going to ride that gig for as long as it keeps gas in her minivan.
And that's fine, good for her. But that doesn't make her readable. However, this move of hers to spearhead the teabag movement
really adds an element to her writing that wasn't there before. Now when I read her stuff, I imagine her narrating her text,
book-on-tape style, with a big, hairy set of balls in her mouth. It vastly improves her prose. See for yourself; just put your
thinking cap on and read this:
What and who exactly are President Obama's homeland security officials afraid of these days? If you are a member of an active
conservative group that opposes abortion, favors strict immigration enforcement, lobbies to protect Second Amendment rights,
protests big government, advocates federalism or represents veterans who believe in any of the above, the answer is: You.
[Note: I originally tried to redo that passage and phonetically sound out how the new, improved version might sound, but on the page
it came out too offensive even for me. If anyone can figure out a way to do it more tastefully, I'd love to see it.]
Anyway this teabag thing has really gotten out of control. It's amazing, literally amazing to me, that it wasn't until Obama pushed
through a package containing a massive public works package and significant homeowner aid that conservatives took to the streets. In
other words, it wasn't until taxes turned into construction jobs and mortgage relief that working and middle-class Americans decided
to protest. I didn't see anyone on the street when we forked over billions of dollars to help JP Morgan Chase buy Bear Stearns. And
I didn't see anyone on the street when Hank Paulson forked over $45 more billion to help Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch, a
company run at the time by one of the world's biggest assholes, John Thain. Moreover I didn't see any street protests when the
government agreed to soak up hundreds of billions in "troubled assets" from Citigroup, a company that just months later would lend
out a jet furnished with pillows upholstered with Hermes scarves to former chief Sandy Weill so that he could vacation in Mexico
over Christmas.
Look, I'm a taxpayer too. And I'm no less pissed off than any of these people about the taxes I have to pay. Just today I was
reading hedge-fund manager David Einhorn's book, Fooling Some of the People All of the Time, about his battles with a company called
Allied Capital. Einhorn was shorting Allied because he found accounting irregularities in Allied's books after analyzing the firm.
Among other things, he found that an Allied subsidiary called BLX was irresponsibly handling tens of millions in Small Business
Association loans, shoving this SBA money out to unworthy recipients and costing the taxpayer an enormous amount of money. When
Einhorn went to the SBA, they basically blew him off. "We see this all the time; what's so special about those?" was the SBA
official's response when Einhorn presented him with evidence of loan fraud. Einhorn pointed out that one of the reasons companies
like BLX got away with bilking the government was because the enforcement agencies were so understaffed: he routinely found that
agencies like the SEC and the OIG could not or would not investigate fraud against the taxpayer because they had no staff to pursue
the investigations.
That attitude, that complete and total I-don't-give-a-fuck attitude about taxpayer money, that's endemic to almost every branch of
the government. We saw in the last five years how contractors in Iraq nakedly robbed money from the you and me, running phantom
convoys across the desert (some companies called that transporting "sailboat fuel"), systematically risking human life and gouging
the taxpayer more or less right out in the open. There was over $100 billion in sole-source, non-competitive contracts in Iraq in
2006; a House Committee identified just 50 contracts totalling more than $21 billion that require "scrutiny," but not much has been
recovered so far. Why did they get away with it? Because there is basically no serious enforcement mechanism, in the military or
anywhere else, for preserving taxpayer money given to contractors. In Iraq, the military auditor, SIGIR, had about seventy men in
the entire military theater at the time I was there. We just bailed out AIG to the tune of more than $160 billion; its primary
auditor, the Office of Thrift Supervision, had exactly one insurance expert on its staff while AIG was falling apart. There were
staff cuts at the SEC several times in the last ten years; in fact there was a crucial cut of the SEC budget in an $821 billion
Omnibus spending bill at the tail end of 2003 (just in time for the housing bubble) that was packed with plenty of pork and, again,
inspired no protests from Joe Sixpack.
Meanwhile the federal government has systematically expanded a whole ecosystem of contractor-handout programs, most of them with
names the public has never heard of. How many people out there are aware of all the millions in grants given to fortune 500
companies over the years through the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), which basically subsidizes the R&D departments of already
rich firms while allowing those same companies to keep the benefits of those innovations? How about the nearly $5 billion in loan
guarantees given to Boeing over the years through the Ex-Im Bank? How about the Foreign Military Financing Program, which gives
millions of dollars to dozens of foreign countries every year so that they can buy American-made weapons?
Or how about the four or five billion dollars we spent annually for the last decade or so on Federal Housing Authority subsidies?
Well, actually, the teabaggers probably would get riled up about those programs, which subsidize mortgage loans to low-income
homeowners. The one constant in teabagger outrage is that the whatever wasteful government program they're freaking out about has to
benefit some poor slob, or else they usually don't give a shit. What they forget, of course, is that FHA loans ultimately benefit
the banks a lot more than the poor slobs - a homeowner defaulting on his FHA loan loses his house, but the bank that irresponsibly
issued the loan (without fear, knowing they are backed up by the government) is still fully compensated, with you picking up the
tab.
So yeah, government waste sucks, it's rampant at every level, and taxes are a vicious racket, and everyone should be pissed off .
What's hilarious about the teabaggers, though, is how they never squawk about waste until the spending actually has a chance of
benefiting them. You will never hear of a teabagger crying about OPIC giving $50 million in free insurance to some mining company so
that they can dig for silver in rural Bolivia. You won't hear of a teabagger protesting the $2.5 billion in Ex-Im loans we gave to
GE through the early part of this decade, even as GE was moving nearly a hundred thousand jobs overseas over the course of ten
years. And Michelle Malkin's readers didn't seem to mind giving IBM millions in Ex-IM and ATP loans at the same time it was giving
its former CEO, Lou Gerstner, $260 million in stock options.
In other words teabaggers don't mind paying taxes to fund the salaries of Bolivian miners, Lou Gerstner's stock options, deliveries
of "sailboat fuel," the Hermes scarves on Sandy Weill's jet pillows, or even the export of their own goddamn jobs. But they do hate
it when someone tries to re-asphalt their roads, or help bail their slob neighbor out of foreclosure. And God forbid someone propose
a health care program, or increased financial aid for college. Hell, that's like offering to share your turkey with the other
Pilgrims! That's not what America is all about! America is every Pilgrim for himself, dammit! Raise your own motherfucking turkey!
Oh, and there's one other thing. I heard today from Steve Wamhoff of Citizens for Tax Justice. He had an interesting tidbit to offer
on the teabagging movement. According to his research, 39% of respondents with incomes below $30,000 told the Gallup agency that
they felt that federal income tax levels were "too high." Which is interesting, because only 32% of respondents in that income
category will pay any federal income taxes at all on their 2008 income. You can draw your own conclusions.
The really irritating thing about these morons is that, guaranteed, not one of them has ever taken a serious look at the federal
budget. Not one has ever bothered to read an actual detailed study of what their taxes pay for. All they do is listen to one-liners
doled out by tawdry Murdoch-hired mouthpieces like Michelle Malkin and then repeat them as if they're their own opinions five
seconds later. That's what passes for political thought in this country. Teabag on, you fools.
--
Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater.
George Washington Carver
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