Tina Dupuy

It seems everybody gets their own pet conspiracy these days: Birthers, Birchers, Deathers, Truthers and whatever you call the people who won’t get their kids inoculated. According to the theories, nothing is as it seems and everyone is in on it. Following this reasonable assumption, I’ve come up with my own. Here it is: former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, RNC Chairman Michael Steele and Congressman Paul Ryan from Wisconsin are all Democratic plants.

It’s true. I have proof. The signs are everywhere. It’s so painfully obvious:

Who has been a bigger boon to the Democratic Party than Sarah Palin? There’s no way that’s for real. Come on, no one had ever heard of her and then suddenly she’s tanking the GOP’s presidential bid? That’s not suspicious? The press called her behavior “going rogue,” I call it taking orders from the opposition. So you’re going to run for Vice President and you’re not going to read up on the issues? Putin rearing his head? Wear a quarter of a million dollar donated wardrobe while giving speeches about fiscal conservatism? Use the catch-phrase “palling around with terrorists” while you’re schtuping a secessionist? It’s plain to see: she was working with David Axelrod and David Plouffe to get Obama into the White House.

Then with her help, Obama won (of course) by a huge margin. No one figured out that she was a double agent after losing the election? Then just to make the greenhorn Democrats seem more steady at the wheel she quit her job as a governor during one of the worst economic times since the Great Depression. Now she’s out to sabotage the Tea Parties by speaking on their behalf while taking six figure speaking fees from them. How was she not pretending she couldn’t remember a thing like “lift American’s spirits.” It’s insultingly clear! She even stumped for Senator John McCain last week in Tucson and said “some may claim that John was there at that first Tea Party.” Jokes about McCain being old? Really? Doesn’t that sound like something a Democrat would say about him? Yes. Yes it does.

And RNC Chairman Michael Steele, are we really supposed to believe in this phony “Bizarro Obama” act? POLITICO stated he’s spending twice as much as his predecessors on private planes, limos and flowers while trying to co-opt populist outrage. And now there are reports the FEC is investigating nearly two grand of RNC donor money being spent at a bondage theme club last February in West Hollywood. The same club Lindsay Lohan frequents just before she checks back into rehab. So far Steele is claiming it wasn’t him, although it still accomplishes his goal as a Trojan Horse. How much more does he need to spell it out for us: he’s in cahoots with the Democrats. He’s been working hard at it too, “honest Injun.” It’s not like he’s working on the shattered party – he’s writing books and taking speaking fees while chairman. Who is going to come out against empathy when the economy is in freefall besides someone trying to make the DNC look better? “Crazy nonsense empathetic. I’ll give you empathy. Empathize right on your behind. Craziness,” said Steele during the Sonia Sotomayor hearings. I wonder which of Obama’s speechwriters gave him that gem.

Do I need to draw a map for you people? Where’s my chalkboard? I don’t want any of you to freak out since my conspiracy has nothing to do with Nazis or Chairman Mao. Of course, that’s what they’d want you to think.

I brought up Congressman Ryan because he outed himself as an Obama plant last week. After health care reform was signed into law, he penned (allegedly) an op/ed in the New York Times. The title of the piece was “Fix Health Reform, Then Repeal It.” Why would you need to fix something if you’re just going to repeal it? Wasn’t that the unbelievable plotline for the movie Wolverine?! It doesn’t make any sense unless you’re really in the tank for Obamacare. Clean up the house, demolish it, and then listen to us about government waste. He’s clearly trying to make a mockery of Republicans.

Oh yes, we’re through the looking glass here people.

The most pivotal scene in our nation’s recent civil rights history was not as some would assume, electing the more qualified, younger and dynamic presidential candidate (of a different party than George W. Bush) who also happened to be half African, – but it was, in fact, the self-proclaimed Tea Party protesters hurling racial epithets at members of Congress.

Let me explain: Congressman John Lewis of Georgia was a Freedom Rider in 1961. He was beaten bloody by police on several occasions. Those doing the beating likely used epithets to add some insult to injury. As a then speaker and representative of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he was just an uppity young black male and the cops were just the establishment shielded by 100 years of the rest of the county looking the other way. Civil Rights was not as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently described “the most radical social experiment in modern times.” It was a bloody war with years of carnage to battle crippling institutionalized racism. A time when the law was segregation; blacks were “equal” just separate.

Plus, with all this talk of the biblical (meaning ancient) definitions of marriage, people of mixed races couldn’t legally get married in some states in this country until the aptly named Loving Decision was handed down by “activist judges” on the Supreme Court in 1967. They ruled unanimously in favor of a Virginia couple whose bedroom had been intruded in on by police who then arrested them for violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act. Their sentences were commuted on the condition they leave the state. As many have pointed out President Barack Obama was born in 1961 and if his parents happened to live in one of the several anti-miscegenation states they could not have been legally be married at the time.

And of course women were not allowed to vote nationally until the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. And as much as homosexuals are discriminated against today, up until 2003 sodomy laws in some states criminalized homosexuality. “Created equal” didn’t just happen once the Declaration of Independence was approved.

So after a year of rigorous debate over health care reform, a year of sound bites and selling points and hysteria, at last the whip count was in and there was going to be a final vote in the House. A small group of irate protesters were at the Capital. En route to hear the President’s speech on Saturday at the Longworth House office building, the aforementioned civil rights champion now Congressman Lewis was called “nigger,” as was Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina. Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, an out gay man was called “faggot” by the crowd. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was degraded on signs (to less outrage mind you).

What it pointed out wasn’t that progress is stagnant, because those words exist and are still in use, what it pointed out was how far we’ve come: Those who used to be the victims of legalized racism, homophobia and sexism are now lawmakers. The words once used against the powerless by the authorities are now the desperate yaps of the outer perimeter.

The Tea Partiers’ smears are like a war wound that doesn’t cause disability just aches every so often to remember the fight. But most importantly, those middle-aged puffy white people screaming insults at members of Congress are a specter of the past. They’re the civil disobedience equivalent of a telegram. Their vocabulary is clearly analog.

The battle cry for the Tea Parties has been that members of Congress need to listen to the American people. But to an observer of the people walking past jeers, members of Congress are now more than ever, the American people.

Congressman Eric Massa’s abrupt retirement and his ensuing talk show blitz consumed the media with tawdry details of his career’s implosion. The first and only term now former US Representative from New York went on Glenn Beck’s Fox News program with the promise of naming names and exposing the corruption of those who Beck suspects of nefarious deeds (i.e. social justice). He said that all Americans needed to hear Massa. “This is the moment that will decide the course of this nation possibly.” Beck told his audience as a teaser to the epic hour-long interview with the Democratic Congressman with an axe to grind. He continued, “This is the guy we’ve been looking for!”

The Massa interview on Beck’s show was a mess-a. He admitted to groping a male staffer, happily. He talked about his aggressive birthday-induced tickling and something about how that’s just a thing guys do in the Navy. The sentence “It looks like an orgy in Caligula,” was uttered. Then just to make it weird, he meandered around general Democratic talking points about getting involved and reforming campaign finance. It was yet another sensible claim Beck promised his audience that has yet to come true. Nazi communism, anyone?

But then Massa went on CNN’s Larry King Live revealing even more of his escapades. Stories have surfaced about the Catholic former Republican former Naval Officer and the term “snorkeling” was forced into the public discourse. It all seems pretty salacious. Very tabloid-esque. Very Hollywood drunken diva-like. Something you’d see right before a publicist announces their client has been checked into secluded non-specific rehab for “exhaustion. “

Has Hollywood corrupted the way we see our politicians?

Worshiping actors as idols is a relatively new practice. During the Dark Ages, before anyone figured out it was rats spreading the plague it was blamed on traveling actors, which were held in similar esteem. People who made their living acting onstage during the Victorian era were akin to how we view strippers today. Yes, people went to go see them…but ya know. Acting was a subculture of a lowly form for nearly all of its history. It wasn’t until Hollywood made stars out of celluloid and media made them alluring did we care about actors in a broad sense. Now we’re mindful about their opinions on everything from energy policy to which lip gloss is the glossiest. When they say stupid things it’s a scandal. When they do stupid things it’s a story. When they are stupid things it’s an obsession.

When actors were seen as vermin, the object of our affections and repugnance were people with actual power: politicians. They were the Lindsay Lohans of the early part of this country. Think of the Burr-Hamilton Duel between then former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and sitting Vice President Aaron Burr as the E! True Hollywood Story of the 19^th century. There were no sports figures at the time. No recording artists. No mothers of multiples. The only icons were politicians, tycoons and criminals. Or Wyatt Earp who was really a bit of all three. And of those it was politicians were the most subjected to outrage for immoral behavior.  They were the tabloid stars of the 19^th century. Between the published rumors of President Thomas Jefferson fathering children with his slave Sally Hemmings to bachelor President Grover Cleveland paying child support, if you could read in the first-half part of this country’s history, politicians were going wild.

Then by the turn of the 20^th century, starlets came along and usurped political figures from the lone wrath of public spectacle. Now because of reality shows and 24-hour news they have to share the limelight with a zillion other kids of notables. But Congressman Massa, impugning the conduct of the military and the House of Representatives in one non-denial denial brush stroke is a throwback to a better time. The good old days. The pre-cotton gin days.

Politicians in garish sex scandals like Eric Massa, former Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and Nevada Senator John Ensign are just taking back their country from Hollywood.

Buddhism