An Update From Teabagistan

Things are still hopping down here in Teabagistan, even if I haven’t been writing about them very much of late.

Part of that has been a basic unwillingness to deal with the subversion of the United States in general and Wisconsin in particular by a humorless oligarchy run by pantsless buffoons, which seems to me to be something the Founding Fathers did not really intend. As someone who has spent most of my life studying the political thought of the Founding Fathers, the knowledge that the republic is being actively destroyed by right-wing extremists is rather depressing.

It’s even more depressing knowing how effectively they’re doing it, and how much support they have for it. Well, the Founding Fathers never expected the republic to last this long - "virtue," the willingness to sacrifice one's private interests for the public good, being a fragile and perishable thing.

Part of it also has been the general workload of this semester, which has not allowed me much time to do anything but frantically scramble to keep up with things and what time it has allowed I have not wanted to devote to traitorous thugs undermining the foundations of the republic. Life is short.

But once in a while you just have to peek up over the parapets and see what the bastards are doing.

The official campaign to recall Governor Teabagger starts this week, and already several Republican operatives have openly declared that they will be posing as signature gatherers in order to burn the petitions, impede the recall and subvert the rule of law. As you would expect from the Party of Treason they represent, not a single word of objection has come from any Republican official or lawmaker disavowing this willful assault on the democratic foundations of American law and politics.

You are the company you keep, Teabaggers. Either disavow these unashamed felons or accept that they represent everything you stand for.

We’ve also had a Special Legislative Session On Jobs for what seems like the last several thousand years, one with the announced purpose of – wait for it – promoting jobs in Wisconsin. Leaving aside the question of whether this is something a legislature can actually do, it is instructive to note that of the several dozen bills debated or passed during this session not a single one – not one – had anything to do with jobs.

Instead they spent most of their time passing a version of Concealed Carry that would essentially force university campuses to allow students to have guns in class, because that is so helpful to the learning process. It would also allow guns on boats, in shopping malls, and pretty much anywhere some genital-deficient paranoid decided he needed to compensate for his shortcomings at the expense of public safety.

The bill even allows people to bring their guns into the State Capitol and into the Gallery overlooking the Legislature itself, though oddly enough the Teabaggers are still arresting people who bring cameras or wear t-shirts with sections of the US Constitution printed on them. Because knowledgeable citizens are so much more dangerous to their subversion of the country than guns are, I suppose.

Seriously. A 12-year-old was given the bum’s rush for daring to hold a piece of paper in his hand that had a doodle on the back reading “Free Speech.” Hell, kid, you should have brought a revolver instead.

The reason behind all this rush to turning Wisconsin into Somalia might just be the recalls, since at least one Republican official has publicly threatened to kill any recall worker who dares to ask for his signature on a petition. Wouldn’t it be ironic if he murdered one of the Republican fakes?

But rather than take their chances with thwarting the recall elections through violence – which is, after all, inefficient – Teabaggers took some time in the Special Legislative Session On Jobs to push for a bill that would immediately redistrict just the State Senate while leaving the Assembly districts alone. They’ve also clamped down on voting rights by further restricting the kinds of IDs that you can have in order to vote. When the independent elections board decided that college IDs would be acceptable to allow students who live here to vote here, the Teabaggers in the legislature ordered the board to formalize that into a rule “so we can suspend it.”

All across Home Campus they have these posters up advertising a public meeting sponsored by the that well known group of radicals, The League of Women Voters, offering to explain the new Voter Suppression Law. I think they could save a lot of time simply by reducing the law to its essentials: “Poor? Brown-skinned? Enrolled at a university? Stay home!” See how much more efficient that was?

The Special Session On Jobs also spent two full days arguing over something that had already been done. The first day was spent in raging debate over whether to remove race as a factor in giving out scholarships to state universities, not realizing that race was no longer being used as a factor in giving out scholarships to state universities. And then, when someone pointed this out, they spent another full day arguing about the same thing.

Grandmom, wherever you are, know that you were right about the things that float.

There were any number of other brilliant bits of legislative history being made by Teabaggers in this Special Session On Jobs – making sure consumers couldn’t sue corporations over defective products or services, rendering the highways less safe by gutting regulations over the size and load of semis, removing any meaningful sex education from the schools even if local districts and taxpayers want it there, changing the rules for teacher evaluations to allow easier removal of any teacher who speaks up against the destruction of public education in Wisconsin, allowing people to cherry-pick legal venues to sue from, and so on. I’m not sure how they fit into the whole “laser-like focus on jobs” thing, but there you go.

Perhaps I should have stayed below the parapet.