Would You Like Some Socialized Medicine With Your Teabag? Conservatives Use Healthcare as Fear Factor for July 4th Tea Party

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

Grab your coat, pick up your gun
Take up the battle cry
Be ready for the coming war
And keep your powder dry
^{-- from a poem posted by protest organizer Brad Marston on BostonTeaParty.com}

Got any plans for the Fourth of July? Boy, do I have a party for you! How about 5,000 (give or take) of your closest friends getting together to hyperventilate over an imaginary danger?

Yes, the teabaggers are back, and this time they're coming to ruin a holiday you actually enjoy (unlike their attempt to ruin Tax Day this past April 15).

The tea party protest planned in Boston, MA, is billed in this press release as a "non-partisan event." Yet it is organized by Brad Marston, executive director of Foundation for Conservative Solutions, whose MeetUp.com page lists the following group memberships: Boston Conservatives' Meetup Group, Boston Republican Meetup Group, Boston Tea Party, Boston Young Republicans Meetup Group and John McCain for United States Senate.

Perhaps sensing that without the specter of the Internal Revenue Service the tea parties might ring more hollow than usual, the Boston organizers have chosen Jason Healey, organizer of Operation JellyBeans, to be a featured speaker invited to talk about his online petition at StopUniversalHealthcare.org.

My first reaction was "Operation JellyBeans? And they want people to take this tea party thing seriously?"

What sounds like the latest Disney/Pixar movie is actually a social networking site for conservatives who believe Obama is a socialist. While I'm not sure what the threshold is for how many people it takes to qualify as a "social networking" site, let me just say that I became the 55th member of Operation JellyBeans this morning.

(Anyone who wants to get past the homepage of Operation JellyBeans pretty much has to sign up, which is why I did. I assume this is because the site itself is pretty bare of content and users. According to WhoIs.com, the domain name search engine, OperationJellyBeans.org has only existed since April 26, 2009. Amusingly, the sign-up form requested both my political affiliation and the name of the candidate I voted for in the 2008 election.)

The philosophy of the site seems to be built on the fetishization of President Ronald Reagan, who was an ardent lover of the humble jelly bean. While insisting that Operation JellyBeans is "not a partisan movement," Healey writes that members are "united in opposition of the Obama Administration's attempts to move our country economically into Socialism, weakening our protection from those who want to do harm to us and government spending that will mortgage America's future from under it. In order to protect us from these dangers, we need to restore the only legitimate opposition party that's [sic] core principles are against these government measures, the Republican Party."

Healey tries to tie the whole electoral issue into the jelly bean metaphor, saying conservatives need to "find candidates who pick out the same jellybeans as we do and remove current politicians who do not."

Healey says he's not a "Have" or a "Have-Not" but identifies himself as "part of the 80% of Americans called the 'Have some, Want More.'" He describes himself as "frustrated, scared and unhappy with the direction our country is going." But he says he's also "powerless to do anything about it." Maybe he feels powerless because he doesn't generally even utilize his right to vote. He seems proud of his self-imposed exile from the democratic process, admitting that he got all riled up about politics after being forced to watch 10 weeks of election coverage on Fox News (emphasis mine):

Now, I have never had much interest in politics... I have gone many election years without even voting... in November of 2007, I was in a bad car accident and needed a spinal fusion to save me from becoming a quadriplegic. Surgery was successful, my recovery was long and I was pretty much bed ridden [sic] for 10 weeks. Those ten weeks were excruciatingly boring and the only thing on TV was the various primaries and Cable News. Watching the biased media coverage for Obama by all news outlets, even FOX because they thought Hillary would be a tougher foe drove me nuts. Obama was spouting far, far, far left rhetoric like Universal Healthcare, taxing the "rich" to the Stone Age and how we should be ashamed for being hawkish with terrorists. The more and more I heard Obama speak, the more and more, he scared the shit out of me. I remember I would express my concerns with my Obama Kool-aide [sic] drinking friends and they thought I was Chicken Little with the sky falling or worst [sic], a racist. Then, they would say Obama is just pandering to the MoveOn.orgs of the Democratic Party and he was going to be like Bill Clinton; center-left. Wow!!! Were they so wrong!

Well! As a progressive, it is comforting to hear that Obama has not abandoned his Democratic roots and swung to the center. How Healey reconciles the fact that universal healthcare (proposed by Bill Clinton; not Obama) is "far, far left" while Clinton was "center-left" is beyond me. In fact, the more I tried to grasp Healey's position on healthcare, the more his concerns seemed to be a temporary talking point rather than actual political conviction.

The Operation JellyBeans "10 Commandments" are what you might expect from a teabagging rally: a little drill baby, drill; a little fear-mongering over socialism, activist judges and federal regulation; the flat tax; etc. However, none of the commandments addresses what Healey has been hired to speak about on July 4, "his grassroots nationwide petition, www.StopUniversalHealthCare.org, that's been virally making its way around the Internet and the messages citizens around the Country have left Congress & President Obama," according to his tea party press release.

If you take a look at his Twitter account, Healey seems obsessed with healthcare, but only since May 12 -- five days before registering the domain name StopUniversalHealthcare.org. Yes, before that it was all Bill Ayers and waterboarding.

But the absence of anything on his Operation JellyBeans site about healthcare leads me to believe that Healey is just against anything the Obama Administration is doing at any given time. To be fair, such a short political attention span makes sense if you were attracted to politics by being brainwashed by Fox "News."

Not that Healey doesn't have a sense of history; it's just reminiscent of Glenn Beck's version of history. In this Operation JellyBeans forum question, Healey clearly aligns the Democratic Party with George Orwell's Big Brother, Nazis and Stalinist Russia, asking "Why do people create artificial enemies?"

Enemies are to be feared, disliked and a protector is needed to save us from them. In Orwell's 1984, the enemy was Emmanuel Goldstein. In Stalin's Russia, they had the Kulaks or counter-revolutionists. Hitler and the Nazi's [sic] had the Jews. The Democrats have created their artificial enemy: the Far Right. Do you see a common interest between these groups even though they are all so very different? I will let you dwell on that.

Seems to me Healey's freak-out about universal healthcare is nothing more than his own creation of an artificial enemy. Even the most progressive politicians have backed away from universal healthcare and single-payer. They're telling us we'll be lucky to get a public option at all. The idea that Americans should be afraid of "socialized medicine" is a joke. But then, so are the teabaggers, so I guess it all works out in the end.

The July 4 Boston Tea Party is being billed as a "Revolution Reborn," coming on the heels of the "highly successful Tax Day Tea Party held in Boston" which drew a whopping "few hundred" people, according to the Associated Press. Still, Healey's tea party press release promises "over 5,000 protesters will be on the Boston Common on the 4th of July to express their outrage" (to be fair, organizer Marston estimates 2,000 attendees in his press release). As of this morning, 132 people had signed up at the official Boston Tea Party Web site.

While digging up a few hundred (probably retired or unemployed) people in the middle of the week in April was doable, I'm not sure how many revelers will want to give up a Saturday of grilling and fireworks for an angry anti-government protest. I -- for one -- will be out of town, enjoying the out-of-doors.

I am impressed by other peoples' willingness to give up fun and games to express their displeasure with the federal government. But after years of ignoring the political process entirely, I could understand if the idea of reenacting a historical protest has some pull for people in Healey's situation.

I just happen to get my kicks in the ballot box. My interest in politics came from years of debating policy at the dinner table and writing letters to the editor, not from ten weeks of being forced to watch cable news during a presidential election year.

But wonky debate is painfully boring, and adds little to protests and rallies. Apparently there are 5,000 Bostonians who would rather listen to Healey and his 53 jelly beaners talk about the oppression of taxation with representation than go out and celebrate the independence from tyranny they already enjoy.

Well, they're certainly within their rights. Me? I think I'll take a hike.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS