Near the tail end of a long piece slamming the press for the way it covers politics and campaigns, Taibbi gives the teabag crowd some straight talk:
What the people who are flipping out about the treatment of Palin should be asking themselves is what it means when it’s not just jerks like us but everybody piling on against Palin. For those of you who can’t connect the dots, I’ll tell you what it means. It means she’s been cut loose. It means that all five of the families have given the okay to this hit job, including even the mainstream Republican leaders. You teabaggers are in the process of being marginalized by your own ostensible party leaders in exactly the same way the anti-war crowd was abandoned by the Democratic party elders in the earlier part of this decade. Like the antiwar left, you have been deemed a threat to your own party’s “winnability.”
And do you know what that means? That means that just as the antiwar crowd spent years being painted by the national press as weepy, unpatriotic ******* whose enthusiastic support is toxic to any serious presidential aspirant, so too will all of you afternoon-radio ignoramuses who seem bent on spending the next three years kicking and screaming your way up the eternal ****** of white resentment now find yourself and your political champions painted as knee-jerk loonies whose rabid irrationality is undeserving of the political center.
Populists don’t win. This is one reason why.
But in comments, Taibbi underscores why Palin’s brand of teabag populism deserves some of the scorn it’s received:
I was just in DC during a massive tea party rally that as going on — they were protesting health care. I was there on an unrelated matter, to cover a markup in the House Financial Services committee of legislation that would formalize the government’s role in future bailouts.
Out of curiosity I went through the teabagger crowd and asked at least a dozen people what their feelings were about the regulatory reform effort. Not one of them even knew what I was talking about. They all went on and on about the socialistic health care plan and immigration, and the stimulus, but I didn’t hear word one about handouts to Wall Street.
And incidentally, when Paul Kanjorski passed an amendment last week, a crucial amendment giving the government the power to break up “too big to fail” companies before they required bailouts, he got blasted by conservatives for creating an intrusive government bureaucracy with too much power to interfere with “private business.” I would say he got blasted by the teabaggers, but even if you look long and hard you won’t find much coverage of financial regulatory reform on the usual teabag sites, and what coverage there is is mostly centered around opposition to new regulatory agencies like the CFPA.
