http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdeSsnjuS0Y&feature=related
We heard very little about the erroneously-named Tea Party during the past two weeks of the conventions. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean that these know-nothing extremists are no longer an influential part of the Republican base. The real news media has done far too little to expose the dangers which these Koch-Suckers present to the United States. The best coverage of the Tea Party came from Aaron Sorkin’s fictional television network on The Newsroom. See the two clips above.
Rather than trying to invent fictional news events for episodes of The Newsroom, Sorkin based episodes on real events. The second clip was from an episode on the debt crisis. This incident showed how far the Tea Party and the Republican Party were willing to go, regardless of the harm they were doing to the United States, and crash the economy for political gain. The Republicans threatened to renege on debts which they were largely responsible for rolling up, leading to a downgrading of the credit rating of the United States in direct response to the irresponsible acts of the Tea Party and Republican Party.
This week in Wing Nut Land, apologists for the party which wrecked the economy have tried to cherry pick items from Bob Woodward’s new book to rewrite history and place the blame on Obama. There are two major problems with their argument. First, their premise that Obama was responsible for the debt talks breaking down is false. Woodward’s description of events was rather simplistic, but even his account shows Boehner was the one who refused to negotiate in the end. Secondly, even if it was true that this was Obama’s fault, this would still not give any justification whatsoever for threatening to fail to raise the debt ceiling in order to pay debts which the Republicans had already approved.
Of course the most significant lies from the right wing in this election year are those from Mitt Romney. Steve Benen has posted Volume 33 of Mitt’s Mendacity.