Why I cannot sympathize with the teapartiers' pain

I'm usually a very sympathetic person, but there was something disturbingly familiar in the cries of the teapartiers.
Then I got it.
They are the cries of the schoolyard bully who finally had one of his victims successfully fight back.
It's all there. The shock of having lost, the sudden reality that in spite of picking "weak" targets, they are suddenly vulnerable, and the fear that all their other victims might have the courage now to stand up and turn the tables on them.
I have no sympathy for this, only pity.

It's like when Ralphie beat the hell out of the bully in A Christmas Story.

Yes, they're all royally pissed off that their team lost, but that alone wouldn't provoke them out of their recliners and into the streets with badly spelled signs.

The truth is that their comfortable retirement nest eggs have taken a couple of big hits with no end in sight. They're deeply frightened and fear makes them say and do stupid things.

They are simply not smart enough to connect the dots on why this is happening to them. They just know they are losing money with no way to earn more and it terrifies them.

They're facing the remote possibility of poverty for the first time in their lives. That is what has socked them in the gut and gotten them out there.

and I'm sure your point might be part of their protests. But I think the main reason they've chosen now to protest and strut around with their guns and signs is that there is Black president. That was the impetus.

For eons the rich elite have used our minor differences to pit us against each other to make it easier to avoid sharing the wealth created by workers. When you take the majority of whites and tell them over and over their ever lowering standard of living is the fault of lazy blacks and illegal mexicans you are bound to convince a certain percentage of the less intelligent whites.

... rather than the rich and powerful, especially when you lack courage, which all bullies do.

just a little to dumb to realize who the real perpetrators of this whole mess are. Because they like the whoosh noises and bottle blondes on Pox News, they've been woefully uninformed as to what's going on in the world, especially in world financial markets. If they tune into CNBC, Pox Business or even Bloomberg, it hasn't helped them much.

Everything that is happening is coming as a shock. They're completely unprepared for all of it since they're so uninformed. They're given a convenient target--our first black president--and they are only too happy to put all the fear and anger right there.

Right now, they're easily led. As the shocks continue to happen, this might not continue to be the case.

But trust me, racism alone wouldn't have propelled them out of those Laz-E-Boys and out into the street. They're frightened about the future and feel the financial rug has been pulled out from under their feet and they're right about that and that is why they're out there.

Like the Germans after WWI, they are looking at a bleak, defeated future, and they desperately need a scapegoat to blame it on besides the banks, the corporations and themselves. And they believe they have found it, in a black president and any group of people who to them look like the "Other."

The danger is that if they keep gravitating toward groups and parties that will support their search for those scapegoats instead of going after the real causes of their misery, they will truly become another Nazi Party. The Nazi Party was full of average folks who wanted to be able to blame their misery on someone, and were more than happy to believe that everything would be great if they could just get rid of the Jews.

I've been to town halls, etc where the Tea Party nuts have been out in force and this is so obvious, you can cut the feeling in the air with a knife. Of course as a movement they can't SAY how they really feel about the current POTUS so they turn their feelings into howls against taxes, government in general, "socialism" (and a lot of other "isms"), "illegals", etc etc etc

I think a some of them are even having a hard time with a woman at the helm of Congress, but the black POTUS is really a big part of the equation.

They've lived their entire lives being proud of our military might and our kick ass ability. To them the US was the good guy keeping the bad guy, the USSR, in check. They believe that's 'their America'. That's what they really want to get back when they say they want their America back. Military supremacy.

We haven't won a single of our 'wars' since before Vietnam. Korea was just a stand-off. They want us to be the big winners like we were in WWII. These little countries like Afghanistan are just so pesky not letting us win. So they think we should just nuke them or kill them all off. We don't, so they want that back. The Big bully always wants the status quo back when he was the one on the top.

power (fascism).

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/052210.html

"In essence, Big Corporations are pulling a Big Con on the common folks attracted to the Tea Party movement, getting them to focus their anger at Big Government as a threat to their “liberties” when the federal government is all that stands in the way of total corporate dominance of the United States.

So, instead of pressing for a democratized and energized federal government that could serve as a check on unbridled corporate power, the Tea Partiers are being turned into foot soldiers for “owner rights,” to ensure that corporations are freed from government regulations and accountability."

Fuck um where they breathe.
Berserker