"This is our moment!" the voice-over proudly snarls in a video reminiscent of the exact same Republican claptrap that's been shoveled up before, during, and after elections.
Few, however, can match the same cartoonish punch as Mama Grizzly Sarah.
Just listen to that populist roaring now that GOP, Inc. has overrun our House of Representatives!
Hold on a second. There appears to be something less than a complete consensus about all this. Famed populist activist and commentator Jim Hightower has a strikingly different perspective from Tea Queen Palin.
It seems he finds all this hooey, ehhm, unbearable:
"The tea party spoke! Loudly, powerfully and proudly.
But besides, "Throw the bums out," what did it say? And now that the party part is over and the nasty business of governing begins, what does it all add up to? What's its governing agenda? How does it make anything positive out of the disparate mish-mash of issue positions within its own rank and file?
And then there's the big one -- the huge, grotesque, democracy-choking monster that the party invited into the center of its own movement: corporate money. Throughout the election, tea partiers demurely averted their eyes from this ugly dude, for the monster was lavishing millions of corporate dollars on their candidates. But now, whether they meant to or not, they've ensconced it as the unrivaled, controlling power in the new Congress. What will they do as it asserts its selfish interests over theirs, devouring their ideals and their pretension that they are in control?
The media establishment insists on referring to the tea party as a "populist" movement -- but real populists fight corporate power, they don't hug it! The party certainly is a popular uprising, and a successful one, but there's nothing populist about it. Indeed, its leaders and candidates have vociferously opposed the populist ideals of egalitarianism, social justice, cooperative action and the common good.
"Shrink the Government" sounds good as a campaign cry, but its substance, as expressed by many of the most prominent teabag nominees and electees, is to kill Social Security, privatize Medicare and Medicaid, eliminate unemployment compensation, strip away the regulatory reforms on Wall Street's big banks, undo the EPA and the Education Department, extend the privileged tax breaks of super-wealthy hedge fund speculators, cut food stamps, do away with minimum wage, cripple unions, take away the pensions of public employees ... etc., etc.
This reduced the election to a massive, despicable blitz of TV ads consisting of lies, shameless pandering and silliness. It was America's first $4 billion election, with the likes of the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, the Chamber of Commerce, Karl Rove, Dick Armey and other designers of corporate rule secretively channeling unprecedented, unconscionable (and, I believe, unconstitutional) sums of cash directly from corporate coffers to create a House majority obligated and dedicated to them."
Sounds pretty compelling. "Rupert Murdoch....and other designers of corporate rule......" Of course, one wouldn't see any of that in Palin's little fairy tale sound bite. She's one of Murdoch's employees, after all.
We as a nation have weathered a lot worse than this. Extremists and opportunists on both sides of the aisle have run amok before. We'll survive, though, somehow, some way.
Just speak out, walk the walk, stand tough.
If you think the middle class is up against it, shudder to imagine Tea Party/GOP, Inc's attack plan against the working poor. The images in this video are riveting.
Still, like the Trouble Man, "Ain't gon' let it sweat me, baby....."
Sadly enough naive people get taken in by their messages marketed by special interests, usually commercial ones craving for a buck. A Republican mouth organ network grandstands crazed Glenn Beck, reeling in ratings and fat profits.
Meanwhile left-wing directors and T-shirt companies hawk images of "heroic" communist gangsters. You've seen those flashy red shirts with the noble face of Comandante Che Guevara. Buttons, too. There was also Steven Soderbergh's "Che," a 2008 biopic that shamelessly lionized this ruthless killer.
Guevara may have been a brave guerrilla fighter but the glory ended when he joyfully worked overtime as Castro's drooling, hyperactive mass executioner. Notably he was also was an amazing bumbling nitwit when it came time to mismanage the "new & improved" Cuba.
Open the eyes of this incensed electorate so they'll realize they've been poisoned by the GOP mouth organ all along to hand over the keys to our city to marauding Huns. Don't hand 'em over, please. There's just too much at stake. 
Someone asked recently what was on my backside--of my "Restore Sanity Rally" shirt. It was a message I delivered in the company of the 200,000 plus people flood in our nation's capital. Something strident enough to show my disgust with right-wing demagogues who try to pervert the American Dream. That includes the one voiced at the Lincoln Memorial, not by some crazed Christian Reich boss, but by an Atlanta preacher in 1963 .
"Politics in America has become spectacle. It is another form of show business. The crowd in Washington, well trained by television, was conditioned to play its role before the cameras. The signs —'The Rant is Too Damn High,' 'Real Patriots Can Handle a Difference of Opinion' or 'I Masturbate and I Vote'—reflected the hollowness of current political discourse and television’s perverse epistemology.
The rally spoke exclusively in the impoverished iconography and language of television. It was filled with meaningless political pieties, music and jokes. It was like any television variety program. Personalities were being sold, not political platforms. And this is what the society of spectacle is about.
The modern spectacle, as the theorist Guy Debord pointed out, is a potent tool for pacification and depoliticization. It is a “permanent opium war” which stupefies its viewers and disconnects them from the forces that control their lives. The spectacle diverts anger toward phantoms and away from the perpetrators of exploitation and injustice. It manufactures feelings of euphoria. It allows participants to confuse the spectacle itself with political action.
The celebrities from Comedy Central and the trash talk show hosts on Fox are in the same business. They are entertainers. They provide the empty, emotionally laden material that propels endless chatter back and forth on supposed left- and right-wing television programs. It is a national Punch and Judy show. But don’t be fooled. It is not politics. It is entertainment. It is spectacle.
His points, however, are well-taken and many quite valid. The grand corporate octopus has itself wrapped neatly around all of us in just about the same iron grip as a hundred years ago. It's just that the stranglehold is so much more subtle, thanks to the sophistication of high tech thought control---ahhmm, I mean mass media.
