THE TEA PARTY SILLY SEASON

The silly season, having degenerated into stupid on its way to the psychotic season, moves on. Two recent Huff Post posts may be seen as guide posts to the end of the journey. Or to put it another way, there seems to be a stampede on the road that should be less traveled. One from June 28 reports:

“Matt Davis, a Michigan attorney who was once the state Republican Party's spokesman, sent out an email that asked whether armed rebellion would be justified in the wake of the court's [Affordable Health Care Act] decision. 

… It begins: ‘Implicit in Benjamin Franklin's fabled response at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention was a dire warning: That the Republic would one day devolve into tyranny unless we the people prevented it.’ 

It goes on to characterize Obama's election as the end point of a "100-year progressive trek to tyranny."

In fairness, according to the Detroit Free Press, Mr. Davis later apologized for sending what he called “unedited work product.” He took back what seemed to be a call for armed insurrection but he didn't retract or explain his misquotation of Ben Franklin.

Franklin never said what Davis attributes to him. He did say this at convention’s end about the Constitution,

“. . . I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”

The meaning is obvious: despotism will come only if the people become so corrupt they are otherwise ungovernable. Then, Franklin goes on to laud the constitution:  “It approach[es] so near to perfection … I expect no better, and … I am not sure that it is not the best.” Yet conservative websites quote only the part about despotism and pretend, as Davis has, that Franklin predicted the inevitability of despotic government. Quoting out of context and distorting the plain meaning of the words, Davis and others have wandered far from the truth to tell a bald lie.

The other whiff of political sulfur came July 2.

“Tea Party lawmaker in Montana [Krayton Kerns] said the relocation of 60 bison -- which he blamed on Walt Disney's creation of "Bambi" -- could lead to gas jumping to $25 a gallon as part of a liberal federal government plot.” …

Kerns said the moving of the 60 bison from Yellowstone National Park to the Fort Peck Native American Reservation this winter is part of "a four step process to crush the republic and bring our populace into perfect dependence on big government -- just as Karl Marx dreamed.”

I don’t know what Marx’ dreamt but there is no record of it in his voluminous writings. It’s contrary to what he wrote in “The Communist Manifesto” where he predicted that at the end of the process begun by a working-class revolution the state would “wither away” because people satisfied by economic justice won’t need a government.

These folks are not ordinary private idiots, but serious public ones. As Davis made up a pseudo quotation for Ben Franklin, Kerns put an idea into Karl Marx’ dreams that would have been anathema to him. Two Tea Party activists, two plain lies, batting a thousand for the team. The level of divorcement from reality that informs these people and their websites is awe-inspiring. Their willingness to distort and ignore the truth for political ends is a fine example of the corruption among the populace that Franklin was afraid of. Ironic, no?

Thomas Huxley wrote, “If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is a man who has so much as to be out of danger?” 

Surely not in the Davis-Kerns wing of the Tea Party.

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