LUSH PARANOIA LIES

'At any rate I'll never go THERE again!' said Alice as she picked her way through the wood. 'It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!' Alice from her Adventures in Wonderland.


Time will tell whether Alice continues to attend the tea-parties, but the Republican establishment’s attempts to co-opt the tea-partiers, have turned off not a few of the originators of the movement.

The blogosphere is fairly critical of the event with the convention’s mingling of “grass roots” independents with the corporate multinational owners of Fox News and the Republican right wing base, its call for literacy testing for voters while many of their signs are misspelled, the attempted cobbling together of libertarians with those who would wire-tap everyone, the anti-tax crowd with the "keep government out of my Medicare" crowd. The anger of the folks seems real, but their aim is not true.

Fox News rolled out the red carpet for the favorite Daughter of the Revolution, Sarah Palin today. Her truth challenged, fact challenged approach to life has served her well; and so far she hasn’t been hurt a whit by her garlbed syntax, or her mental stumbling, or her willingness to repeat falsehoods over and over and over again until they appear to stick, or her secessionist husband who apparently was pretty involved in Alaska government, or her newly revealed tax problems in Alaska on their properties with unreported structures, or the assorted ethics issues that still chase her, or her hypocrisy in calling for Rahm Emanuel’s resignation for calling liberal Democrats “f****** retards” while at the same time exhibiting fawning acquiescence to Rush Limbaugh’s “retard” rant. There’s more, but I’ve got essays to grade.

And why is it that the most outrageous lies stick to President Obama like mud on a farmer's boot, but the truth bounces off Sarah Palin's shiny empty head like spotlights off a disco ball? What's with that anyway?

So this commingling of the Republican red-meat ultraconservative base with the Tea Party inchoate anger is what we’ve got out there at the moment. And for all you diviners of tea leaves out there, I did a quick “name anagram” search for Sarah Louise Palin and the winner was “LUSH PARANOIA LIES.”

Sip on that cup o’ tea for a while!