Tea Partiers Aren’t Independents — They’re Republicans

This post was originally published on No More Mister Nice Blog.

From an NPR story this morning about a rally against the health care bill at the Ohio office of an Ohio congresswoman (my transcript; audio only):

Nearby, 60-year-old Steve Krempasky says he’s been unemployed for two years. He’s a truck driver, but his wife works, so he’s got health insurance. He’s wearing a shirt that mimics that iconic silkscreened image of Barack Obama from the campaign, except this shirt features George W. Bush and the phrase “Miss Me Yet?”

Krempasky says he does miss the former president.

“Right now it appears that the government, especially the president, is not listening to what the people have to say.”

Yeah, this is just one guy. But if the teabaggers really hated Bush the way Frank Rich and others think they do, wearing that shirt would be as much of an outrage to his compatriots as wearing a REELECT LBJ button to an SDS meeting in 1967.

I assume this is the T-shirt he was wearing, though there are quite a few others.

Look, it’s simple. Teabaggers are Republicans. “Independent” teabaggers are Republican-leaning independents. Nearly all of these people deeply admired George W. Bush as a steely-eyed rocket man fighting terr’ists and Democrats, and most of them never really stopped admiring him.