The president was lofty. "We will move forward together, or not at all – for the challenges we face are bigger than party, and bigger than politics," he said in his State of the Union address. The official Republican response, too, aimed high. "Americans are skeptical of both political parties, and that skepticism is justified – especially when it comes to spending," said Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. "So hold all of us accountable."
And then there was Michele Bachmann. As the leader of the Tea Party Caucus in the House, the Minnesota Republican gave her own, unauthorized response to the State of the Union, live from the National Press Club, filmed by Fox News, broadcast live on CNN and telecast by the Tea Party Express. It had all the altitude of a punch to the gut. "After the $700 billion bailout, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks, many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money we don’t have," Bachmann said. "But, instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt, unlike anything we have seen in the history of our country." Armed with charts and photographs, but not a word of fellowship, she railed against "a bureaucracy that tells us which light bulbs to buy, and which may put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama’s health care bill."
The State of the Nation was conciliatory Tuesday night, as each side made gestures to the other, and lawmakers for the first time crossed the aisle to sit – and applaud – together. But Bachmann and her fellow Tea Partyers raged on…
Sadly, there are still too many crazies loose in America. I attribute the lunacy in part to the challenges of the times, but I’d say that the Fox News Network deserves a major share of the blame. If there has ever been anything analogous to it, I don’t know what it was. It doesn’t actually matter what Michele Bachmann said, it’s that anyone actually broadcast it that matters…
The producers at Fox are smart enough to ride the waves. The last wave was the Cheney Administration. The current wave is the Tea Party with the Dems and Pubs as yappy dogs with powerful owners. The Dem’s just have to find a demagogue that fits the Fox schema to get on the next wave. It’s that simple.
Don’t make the mistake of identifying the Tea Party as trouble. It’s the people paying to make it a national phenomena who are the trouble. No money and most of these jokers fade into the woodwork where they came from.