To be clear . . .

I don't necessarily agree with everything I'm posting here nor is it necessarily going to become part of the final paper on fanatical rhetoric.  Right now (a lot of the time) I'm just dumping articles related to Tea Party fanacticism that I haven't had time to completely read or fact check or think/comment about yet.

It was a long time coming, but the media and pundits and blogosphere have begun to acknowledge and discuss the fanactism at play here.   As the Tea Party pushes the country to the brink of default in a manaical holy quest to defeat their devil Obama(care), it's kinda hard to ignore, right?

(And hey, it only took them 3+ years to get where we started).

So there's a lot to sift through and think about this week.  I'll write more later. . .


From Rhetoric Goat - February, 2010

This demonization rhetoric characteristic of True Believer movements intensified throughout the spring, reaching it's first peak and public organization with the Tea Party protests on April 15th [2009], once again prompting a "perspective by incongruity" from Jon Stewart on "Tea Party Tyranny". 

To make the President of the United States and the US Government into an Un-American rhetorical devil like this is the hallmark of True Believers and Mass Movements, ala Eric Hoffer. And it was this rhetoric - this increasingly vehement, vitriolic, vengeful and intensely political action - toward our constitutionally elected leaders in the spring of 2009 - that made me throw out the vogue but bland course syllabus and start seriously discussing rhetorical current events with my students again. We voted to scrap the group projects and read Eric Hoffer and take a closer, academic look at this rising mass movement against the POTUS and US Government as our real time rhetorical criticism for the remainder of the semester.