Big surprise. Teabaggers aren't real patriots. They're just unemployed and have nothing better to do with their time than watch Glenn Beck and get outraged about...stuff.
At rallies, gatherings and training sessions in recent months, activists often tell a similar story in interviews: they had lost their jobs, or perhaps watched their homes plummet in value, and they found common cause in the Tea Party’s fight for lower taxes and smaller government.
The Great Depression, too, mobilized many middle-class people who had fallen on hard times. Though, as Michael Kazin, the author of “The Populist Persuasion,” notes, they tended to push for more government involvement. The Tea Party vehemently wants less — though a number of its members acknowledge that they are relying on government programs for help.
The astonishing thing about these teabaggers is that they, like so many Americans, are legitimately hurting in this economy. But because they listen to the likes of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and their elected officials from the Party of No, they think the answer to their problems is to demand that the government stop trying to help them with their problems.
And thus, you have people like those featured in the New York Times article, who have lost their jobs and are upside down on their mortgages, calling their congressional representatives for help and at the same time devoting all their free time to organizing protests against their congressional representatives who try to help them.
Mr. Grimes, who receives Social Security, has filled the back seat of his Mercury Grand Marquis with the literature of the movement, including Glenn Beck’s “Arguing With Idiots” and Frederic Bastiat’s “The Law,” which denounces public benefits as “false philanthropy.”
“If you quit giving people that stuff, they would figure out how to do it on their own,” Mr. Grimes said.
Apparently, the New York Times reporter did not bother to ask Mr. Grimes when he would be giving up his Social Security so he can figure out how to do it on his own.