Dear Dirty America

Matthew Reichbach

 You know what they say: One man’s terrorist is another man’s democratically elected congressman.

That’s just one of the many lessons of the debt ceiling compromise, a deal that heralds a new era of electrifying political rhetoric. Nazis are out. Jihadists are in.

The Tea Party “acted like terrorists,” Joe Biden reportedly said of negotiations. One reasonableNew York Times columnist called the tea party the “Hezbollah faction” of the GOP, and the other advised the radicals to “put aside their suicide vests”—for now. And in a sweeping assault on the Tea Party, metaphors, syntax, and clarity, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews packed everything he’d read on the blogs into a glorious globule of rhetorical confusion.

I agree with Harsanyi to a point. Calling the Tea Party terrorists is extreme, but only because the word ‘terrorist’ has taken on a massive, seething national appeal to all of those Americans who like to wave their flags and flap their jaws about freedom and capitalism and the Gipper (whose remains were stolen, by the way, and a reckless left-wing group, Thunder Overhead, has taken responsibility).

Martin Leng

Terrorist has become, for at least a decade, the worst English word, and to label the Tea Party as such might be irresponsible within that hyper-tense national climate where orange means a high level of terror possibility, and red means run and scream and panic because somebody riled up the Muslims, but don’t forget to hang out your flag first.

Are the Tea Party Patriots terrorists? Not according to the new, more intense connotation of the word, but do they incite terror within the hearts and minds of rational Americans who still believe that paying taxes for essential government services is not tyranny but, well, civilization? Yes. Does the Tea Party terrorize public workers who are making a decent salary? Yes. Remember how the Tea Party terrorized the working class Wisconsin protesters who wanted to retain collective bargaining rights and were desperately trying to save their unions? Does the Tea Party wish to balance America’s budget on the backs of the children, the sick, and the elderly? Yes. And in turn, they are savagely fighting to save the richest Americans from even a minor tax hike.

The fact that the Tea Party are mobilized foot soldiers for billionaires like the Koch Brothers doesn’t seem to phase the patriots who would rather demonize public workers who receive pensions instead of focus their energies on multi-national corporations that have been making billions in record-setting profits and not hiring new workers, or paying their employees more than minimum wage (which equals poverty-level wages).

So instead of calling the Tea Party terrorists, I would maybe say they’re foolish sons of bitches helping to funnel the last of middle America’s prosperity into the blood-sucking vampire called Wall Street and corporate America.