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| RNC Chairman Michael Steele is erring on the side of "crazy" and jumping on the wildly ridiculous tea-party bandwagon with both well-manicured feet. At a speech to RNC leadership in Maryland yesterday, Steele stood before the sea of (almost exclusively) white male faces and attempted to co-op Obama's "change" meme, describing the new (cough) palpable energy of the conservative movement: "You know it's real. You can see it, and you can feel it. This change, my friends, is being delivered in a tea bag. And that's a wonderful thing." There are so many things wrong with this sentence -- aside from it's obvious unintended hilarity -- its hard to know where to begin. First, the only "energy" in the neocon party right now is dispensed in bilious clouds of gas by Rush "deaf by temptation" Limbaugh, Glen "gasoline" Beck, Sean "waterboard me" Hannity, and serial nuptialist/adulterer/ethics violator Newt Gingrich. And the tea-bag movement is little more than a Fox "News"-fueled assembly of wild-eyed Obama-hating Limbot Kool-Aid drinkers who have been brainwashed into protesting pro-middle-class economic policies that would actually put more money in their own pockets and fund their own state programs. It's bizarre. So why is RNC Chairman Steele prepared to wrap his wiry arms around the limp, comic metaphor of a soggy tea bag? Perhaps because his other messages have been contradictory, hypocritical, and outlandish. For example, he decried that it was time for the GOP to stop apologizing (uhm . . . when did they start?) and stop looking backwards, but then evoked Ronald Reagan three times during the next 15 minutes. Oh, he also mentioned Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley. All three have been dead a while, Mr. Steele. Hope that's not a problem with all your "looking forward" stuff. He finished his speech with the rallying cry to "expose the Democrat fraud" in this nation, adding that "nobody likes Nancy Pelosi." Finishing with the big winning line of the year, soon to be an all-time classic: "change is coming in a tea bag, and that's a beautiful thing." I love the slogan. I hope Steele has it printed on bumper stickers and issues them to every member of the GOP. I can see several different versions: "Go Change your Tea Bag," or "My Beautiful Tea Bag is an Honor Student at Steele High," or "My Economic Strategy has a String Attached." Heck, I'll help him print them up. |
