The People Speek:

KEEP BIG GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY MEDICARE!

Editors' Note: You can take your Miss America [Although it would be a felony – Ed.], you can take your Golden Globes, but the one award that really matters is of course the Spy's coveted Douchebag of the Year Award. This year, with so many worthy candidates from which to choose, we didn't! Instead, we have bestowed the Spy's highest honor on an entire, um, movement: the "Tea Party" and the humble down-to-earth billionaires who bought and paid for it. Congratulations!

By Geoffrey Dawson
of the Board of Editors

It turns out Dean Wormer was wrong: fat, drunk, and stupid is a perfectly good way to go through life, as long as you've got your Medicare, Social Security, government pension, and Medicaid to fall back on.  And who better to prove it than the well-holstered [Surely, well-upholstered? – Ed.] members of the Tea Party, that grass roots movement fertilized with the excrescence of America's reactionary elite?

Here's a Tea Party leader exercising his First Amendment rights. Good thing he wasn't exercising his Second Amendment rights.

It wasn't just the hatred, ignorance, selfishness, or racism of the Tea Partiers that won them their DOTY award for 2011, although to be sure those were all significant factors in edging out any number of worthy candidates, up to and including 2009 winner, reality show star Sarah "Grandma" Palin.

No, what really led the judges to award the Tea Partiers the Golden Nozzle for 2011 was their rank, unapologetic, uncompromising, and perhaps even uncomprehending hypocrisy. We're not just talking about their masquerade as a populist, anti-elite movement financed by billionaires seeking to hold on to every last farthing of their ill-gotten and often inherited gains.

It turns out that for all the yelling and screaming about freedom from big government, not a single member of the Tea Party was heard to complain about any big-government tyrannical taxing and spending program that they benefited from, like Medicare, Social Security, or in one unforgettable case in Boston, the Medicaid program that provided free health care for the six children of the Tea Partier attending an anti-government rally on the Boston Common.

When the contradiction was brought to the attention of the Tea Party mom by a reporter who could bear it no longer, the mother replied that of course she needed to have health care for her children. As for your children, well, apparently they could just go f*** themselves.

As usual with DOTY winners, there's always too much more. A surprising number of them were in fact either public employees, and thus spent their entire working lives sucking the public teat, or were in fact retired public employees, whose lush and unaffordable sweetheart pension deals gave them the freedom to gas up the RV and chase around the country protesting high taxes and big government.

What causes people to make such jackasses of themselves in public? We'll just tick off a couple of obvious factors. First, there's nothing like unrelenting media hype manufactured by a former Nixon flack and financed by – you guessed it – a reactionary alien elitist billionaire. If the TV says you're a hero, then, hey, it must be true. It's on Schlox, isn't it?

Second, and we're just taking a wild guess here based on the ethnic makeup of the Tea Party (99% non-African American, non-Hispanic, non-immigrant, non-Asian, non-Jewish) and speculate that maybe there's a tangy scosh of good old American racism in the teabag.

The Tea Partiers respond with roars of manufactured outrage when this accusation is made, claiming that posters held up at rallies like: "What's the difference between the White House and the Cleveland Zoo? One has an African lion, the other has a lyin' African!" are not representative of their warmly inclusive movement. That must be why the attendees who wave those signs are shunned by other rally goers and why self-anointed Tea Party leaders are never caught slinging racial slurs in speeches and e-mails.

That record would pretty much sew up a DOTY award, but there's more, or perhaps less. Another contributing factor is what our old friend Dick Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics:" the fear that unseen forces, usually demons (Socialism, Communism, racial mixing, immigrants, world government, Jewish Masons, etc., etc., etc.) conjured up by a reactionary elite eager to derail any true populist movement for change, are threatening the foundations of the lives of the people.

Tea Partiers too inveigh against maleficent elites – not the real ones, like the Tea Party paymasters, who have rigged American capitalism so that all of its rewards go to the top 1% or less – but an imaginary elite of Kenyan/Jewish "eggheads" who want to take away their assault rifles, SUV's, and Triple Whoppers with Extra Cheese.

Why do Tea Partiers direct their anger not at those who have caused their economic pain but at those who are trying to ameliorate it? That's easy: they're idiots. And the stupider you are, the more you fear and resent anyone who's smarter than you. 

Is it any wonder that Tea Partiers prostrate themselves at the feet of the last two winners of the DOTY award, both multi-millionaires. Say what you will about Glenn Beck and Grandma Palin, no one would ever say that they're not as smart as those two. Of course, they'd be wrong. When was the last time someone paid you seven figures to spout nonsense?