Stockholm Syndrome?

Tea Partiers In The Bible Belt Explain The Fire In Their Belly : NPR:

Folks like Darriel and Shelby Burnett, of Danville, Va., explained why they felt inspired to get involved.

'I was unaware of what was going on around me until I retired,' says Shelby Burnett, who formerly worked at a financial company. 'And we started watching Fox News, and getting more informed on what was going on in our nation.'

Heard this in the car this morning. It made me nearly drive my car into a ditch. Well, this combined with the heavy downpour that had me hydroplaning toward my off-ramp.

"I'm Old, White, Angry, Ill-Informed
and I Vote Like the Wind"

Stockholm Syndrome is the only way I can even start to understand these folks. Upset because you lost your retirement savings just before retiring? Understandable. Who should you be upset with? First, yourself. If you were invested so heavily in equities and equity funds so close to retirement, I hate to say this, but you didn't know WTF you were doing. Second, you should be deeply skeptical of, if not completely disgusted by, anyone who preaches deregulation ("a return to Constitutional Limited Government"). These are the people who to screw you. Think Fox News is cluing you in to "what's really going on"? Now I think you're just a sucker. A maroon. I want to respect your opinions, but how can I when you've drunk the kool-aid, put the blinkers on, and refuse to use logic or evidence to arrive at your opinions? You don't get things like "news" or "facts" at Fox News. You get propaganda. It makes you stupid. 

Serious professional people who should know better are trying to tell me the Tea Party is "for real." I know it's real. But it's not the grassroots campaign of Constitutional scholars you're trying to sell it as. It's the people P.T. Barnum (?) identified as being born every minute letting some ringmasters put red noses on them and march them out of the bleachers into the clown act. I'm like a lot of Tea Partiers: I don't like high taxes, I'm worried about the incompetence of our government, my health care costs are going up, I have kids and worry about how we're getting so far into debt as a nation and what that means for future economic development and our ability to maintain and improve the country's infrastructure. I'd like my kids to go to good public schools and be able to make a living when they graduate. I hope they'll have clean water to drink and swim in, and air, y'know, to breathe. I also hope they'll still have basic human and civil rights. (I'm talking about rights like free speech, freedom of association, privacy and due process, by the way, not the right to carry concealed weapons. If you're worried more about the latter and none of the former, that's another conversation we should be having.) Turning our country over to corporate interests who care about none of those things is not the way to address those concerns.