Ohio Teabaggers Shake Fist at Nation

“Tea Party” groups across Ohio are being invited to an event described by Dr. Gregory Thompson as one that will “bring together many warriors inside and outside of Ohio that [sic] are determined to return this nation under God and the Constitutional Republic it was for centuries.”  Thompson, a Missouri resident and former school superintendent, is a featured speaker at the Shake the Nation event and promises to “give you answers to questions like:

• Has the National Education Association adopted a communist agenda?
• What happened to the effectiveness of our public education system?
• Is the education system dumbing-down our children intentionally?”

The event, which claims not to be a political rally, is slated for January 9 at the Ohio State Fairgrounds and includes such known conspiracy-theory purveyors as Dave (“I’m closed-minded and proud of it”) Daubenmire, who wrote on his web site this gem:

The radical Left was a fringe movement in the 60s, comprised of politically marginalized and socially outcast hippies. Their joke-of-an [sic] army consisted of racial minorities, militant feminists, out-of-the-closet homosexuals, environmentalists, student radicals, atheistic intellectuals, counter-cultural revolutionaries and the antiwar movement. Now, four decades later, their once marginal far-left views are normal, mainstream, a cultural majority, and the philosophy of the Obama White House.

Shake the Nation presents other speakers, including proponents of the “Sovereignty Amendment” who would like nothing better than to get all John C. Calhoun on us.  (Why, oh why didn’t Dems think of this when Bush reigned?)

I am baffled by the teabagger movement.  Are they religious zealots?  Conspiracy nutcases?  Secessionists?  We certainly can’t call them Libertarians, because that would mean they would have rallied years ago when President George W. Bush systematically chipped away at basic civil liberties—and Libertarians certainly would not be invoking God every other sentence. They couldn’t just be angry because of the deficit.  Again, George Bush and his Republican congress did far more damage to the country’s financial integrity and no one sounded alarms then.

It seems too simple to brushstroke them all as racist…and yet I can’t think of any other reason for the sudden fist-shaking outrage and fear.