Here's What The Tea Parties Are All About, Charlie Brown

Amusingly, and not surprisingly, the most virulent outrage against American citizens peacefully protesting against government spending has come from the faculty lounge. Led by Paul Krugman (who was ably dissected by Tom Maguire, who reads Krugman's columns so you don't have to), the academic Left is in full-throated apoplexy over the Tea Party movement. The common memes are ridicule (how dare these flyover-country rubes question The Savior?), fixation on former GOP politicians who are neither in office nor responsible for the Tea Party movement, specious and unsupported charges of "right-wing millionaires" funding the whole thing, and a shrill insistence that everyone--most especially the press--pay no attention.

This bit of windbaggery from journalism professor Marc Cooper in the LA Times today, is a prime example. Cooper doesn't bother to back up any of his accusations, most of them transparently lifted from leftie blogs, he just blathers about black helicopter conspiracy theorists and evil Republican "country clubbers." The fact that Cooper, ostentatiously identified as "director of Annenberg Digital News at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC," is associated with teaching journalism is exquisite icing on the cake of his nakedly partisan rant.

While Cooper isn't actually interested in the answer to his question, "[W]hat's the beef behind today's protests?" (he regurgitates Obama Administration talking points about how everyone but the Evil Rich should be signing hosannahs for their delivery from the scourge of Chimpy McBushitler), I'm still not above educating him.

They're about this:



... which in turn leads to this:

• If you’re a 50-year old-with a college degree, you will pay approximately $81,000 over your working life just to pay the interest on the debt in the Obama budget.
• If you’re a 40-year-old, you’ll pay $132,000.
• And if you’re a 20-year-old, just starting out after college, you will pay a whopping $114,000* just to service the interest on the debt created by the Obama budget.

Now, I'm positive that the faculty-lounge editorialists know this stuff already, but the fact that they're hell-bent on distracting attention away from the actual grievances of the Tea Partiers is more telling than any of the ridicule they're trying to dish out. Conspicuously, none of them are addressing the King Kong-sized gorilla in the middle of the room, namely Obama's massive increase in federal spending.

These guys are scared to death that the marks are on to the scam, and they're desperately trying to convince the rest of the electorate to not pay attention... because all it takes is a very quick look at the Obama spending numbers to realize that we're all going to be on the hook for them. Once that realization sets in, the electoral politics of the next few cycles will not look good for the faculty's preferred political party.

And this, of course cannot be allowed.

* I suspect that this is a typo in the linked post, and should be $214,000.