Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for April 01, 2010

Oh, you can’t help going among mad people…

“you must be mad, or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Zonk can be the hookah smoking caterpillar. That way he can put his tea in his pipe and smoke it too.

Zonker in Wonderland would be even better in 3-D.

“…it’s so nice to be insane, no one asks you to explain…”

The paper holds their folded faces to the floor, And everyday, the paperboy brings more….

I agree baslim, I’ll bet he’s a dancin’ fool. I may be totally wrong though….

Sheik, when I saw your name, it brought back such memories. We used to play that album at full volume our our dorm window (when speakers took up half your dorm room).

WRONG!!! Wrong, wrong, wrong. Since when would a teabagger understand, much less initiate, an appropriate and somewhat esoteric literary reference from a FOREIGN author (other than Matthew, Mark, Luke, John or Paul)?

(I don’t think some of them understand that the entire Bible was written, translated, edited and originally published by a bunch of furriners… including a lot of Middle East radical types!)

Yeah, Orgel. We know that all tea party people must be both illiterate AND prejudiced. Not like yourself, of course.

There’s a white supremist in MO running for office. His platform is to take over the country for whites. DumbA$$ thinks the whites were here first. God save us from STOOOOPID people.

read their signs , moran! (sic)

If they have no leaders how do they know where to go for the rallies?

All bulletins are posted by Fox. Since it’s owned by an Aussie I guess foreign influence is okay at some level.

“bradwilliams”, you ask too many questions. Get into the program; just go with the flow.

Actually, I suspect teabagger non-leadership is quite literate and knows exactly what it’s doing. Problem is the violence has escalated and will soon be VERY out of their control if they don’t stop. Of course, if they create enough nuts, they do have a few available scapegoats for an assassination.

Not crazy, just ignorant and afraid. Just like the Right likes them.

Interesting concept, not having leaders. Wasn’t it Comrade Lenin and his crowd who said that after they gave the country back to the people the government (or leadership) would disappear? I guess maybe the Teabaggers are closet Communists. Just a thought.

What a straw man!

The tea parties are made up of working people who feel that government is taking too much in taxes and regulating too much. Trudeau builds this straw man by depicting them as crazy, and misrepresenting their position. I guess it makes liberals feel less threatened.

Watching Obama’s popularity plummet in the polls has got to have shaken those liberals.

@freeholder:

What if the teapartiers’ “non-leadership” is like the leader in Dostoievski’s novel The Possessed? Acting on what he says are “orders from Paris,” he directs his band of terrorists to assassinate various Russians. When the terrorists eventually fall out with one another and kill their leader, they discover that he never received any “orders from Paris”; he just imagined he did.

I can think of several analogies with the teapartiers. The “non-leadership” they refuse to acknowledge, for instance, could be one of the personalities on Faux news. And Faux’s clowns in turn seem to get their orders from one “Paris” or another which they call “the Bible,” “the Constitution,” or “God.”

Ps. while I was writing this post, there appeared several more analogies with “Paris.” Foremost among the teapartiers’ faux gods are “taxes” and “government regulation.” They will rant and even do violence against these idols without ever examining them.

saw4 - straw men? Like warning about death panels or prison for the uninsured?

@sawfire + 4:

Can you correct GT’s absurd stereotypes by (1) naming some of the teapartiers’ actual leaders, and (2) by telling us which specific taxes and government regulations these “working people” think–excuse me, “feel”–so bad about?

Think about it…… Could the Tea Partiers even get to their rallies without there having been paid taxes? Roads, airports, etc.

This is getting almost as phunnie as the State of the Union comments.

How can “working people” t-baggers be so old, afford time and travel expenses to go to rallies?

These are the same guys that used to follow the Grateful Dead around, aren’t they?

Got a question for the anti-Tea-Party folks out there. Presumably y’all oppose out-of-control debt. Do you vote for people who fight to control spending? Or do you vote for people like Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Waxman, Frank, Dodd, et. al.? If the latter, you’re in no position to complain about the debt. That’s what you voted for.

@AKHenderson:

We were way ahead of the teapartiers. Where were they when Bush borrowed money in our name so he could (1) lower taxes for the rich, (2) enrich the drug companies with Medicare D, and (3) generate half-a-trillion per year for his wars?

Obama has to pay down this Bush debt while raising enough money to keep social security and Medicare running (they cost another trillion every year). You teapartiers blame Obama for adding to a debt that he’s trying to control and that you don’t analyze.

Which of his additional expenditures do you resent? The stimulus bill? It saved jobs. Health care reform? That will actually reduce the outlays that were projected for unregulated health care.

I suspect teapartiers are offended chiefly by Obama’s spending on education–because they have little use for it themselves.

I agree pd - look what some Conservative Republicans are trying to do to Texas Public School Textbooks!

Having “leaders” implies having “followers”, and Trudeau IS right in that the tea-partiers don’t look at themselves in that role. Think of the folks putting things together as “Community Organizers”… now how could any liberal have a problem with that?

What IS interesting is that so many on the left look at the leaderless aspect of the movement as a defect. Are you guys so in need of someone in charge to tell you what to do and how to do it? That explains much.

The ones who lead are behind the curtains (whispering cue lines to the performers).

PossumPete said

“These are the same guys that used to follow the Grateful Dead around, aren’t they?”

Oh…don’t even go there. Grateful Dead is my favorite band - and one doesn’t have to be a cliche to enjoy a band.

Nemesys highlights an interesting contradiction at the heart of American society. Any republic like ours will always comprise two groups of people–those who are ambitious to lead, and those whose strongest desire is not to be led.

That’s why our republic looks like anarchy to Europeans and other socialists who, communist or not, still think in terms of a king or central authority. In our government, authority is conferred by the people’s vote, and “we the people” rarely speak with one voice.

Nobody can govern us successfully unless s/he grasps the fact that we disagree fundamentally about what is best for “the people,” and unless s/he has the patience, like Obama, to find some compromise that will free us from political paralysis.

AKHenderson asked “Or do you vote for people like Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Waxman, Frank, Dodd, et. al.?”

Yes.

Yes, the tea party violence is starting to get dangerous. Nothing like the peace-loving, car-burning, window-smashing, storefront-looting lefties who protested the G8 in Seattle a couple of years ago.

Lefties protested the G8?

@NOLA:

The Seattle protests weren’t against government, they were against the global corporations and banks that Bush’s government was powerless to control because it was in their pocket.

Teapartiers ought to welcome such protests. Instead, they play Wall Street’s game by attacking government regulations while branding any violent reformer a “leftist.” Are teapartiers so naive that they unwittingly rush to the defense of their unacknowledged masters? Or are they just in awe of anyone who makes a lot of money–and therefore must be a “patriot”? (Maybe the red-nosed bozo draped in a flag is a retiree on a pension ravaged by the banking gamblers.)

Stop working for the corporate warlords that your taxes keep in business (see TARP). Wake up and discover your real enemies! You’ll find Obama is on your side, even if you reject him for your “leader.”

palin drome

Don;t forget about that group of folks who wish above everything else to be told what to do and what to believe? There are way to many of them!

It’s too bad that the “leftovers,” who realize that the only real way towards any decent solution is to work honestly with each other, are few and far between.

@jack:

Not being one of the demonstrating left, I don’t feel at all threatened by “Conservative activism” or any other intelligent activism. Delighted to hear that teapartiers have found a leader–or at least a cause–that makes them “ambitious to lead” (see my post in reply to Nemesys).

I’d written you off as one of those whose “strongest desire is not to be led.” Shows how we need to listen more to one another.

Ps. The last line of your song below says it all, cfimeiatpap.

My time coming, any day, don’t worry about me, no It’s gonna be just like they say, them voices tell me so Seems so long I felt this way and time sure passin’ slow Still I know I lead the way, they tell me where I go.

Estimated Prophet , Grateful Dead

Yup PP; I’m sure the tea partiers worship the dead, just as Ann Coulter claims she’s a Deadhead……………

“Ok first the Tea Partiers are smarter then your average politicians”

I agree with you, but that doesn’t make them particularly intelligent. I have a ficus that’s smarter than your average politicians.

Jack,, Obviously you are not a tea party member as you are not “smarter than the average politician”. That shows in your statement. The tea party has leaders. Without them there would be no demonstrations. They don’t want themselves known except for Ms. Palin because they don’t waant to be blamed for the damage when they tell you to, “Break bad!”.

Man, Zonk! Are you SURE you’re not having a flashback?

First off, I’d like to thank those who respond civilly to my postings Second, I’ll note that the G8 protests originated in Europe and were backed mostly by communist and socialist organizations, anti-capitalists and anarchists if you will. Third, the point was made simply to compare the singular violent acts, committed by a few unbalanced individuals with the mob mentality violence inherent in the G8 protests GLOBALLY, not just locally. Am I wrong or is the G8 a consortium of industrialized nations, vice a meeting of corporate heads? To the extent that corporate entities try to influence government action, can the same not be said about those adversarial to global corporatization? Do unions not lobby legislators and trade block votes for legislation leaning their way? Does the AARP not lobby the same for its own membership’s benefit? Do not environmentalists lobby for their interests? And in that vein, would you consider the bailout for GM to be a winning situation for corporate America or for the unions which work for GM? My bailout plan which I suggested to all of my Congressional repsresentation was for Treasury to give back all the income taxes paid by people making under $250,000 per year to the folks who paid those taxes. Instead of giving money back to the banks, who now refuse to lend it, giving that money to the people who originally paid it would have allowed them to ease their own debt burden, injected money back into the banks via folks repaying their obligations, and eased the personal debt load that too many working-class Americans bear due to the shrinking value of the dollar. The only problem with that plan apparently was that those folks could not sufficiently line the pockets of nor stuff the ballot boxes en masse for their favorite pols.

Wait a mo, tea parties? Strawmen? Is this Alice in Wonderland or Wizard of Oz you’re telling me?