Teabagger hate splinters GOP

As has been well-chronicled here and elsewhere, last April in Pensacola I witnessed the Tea Party (or "teabagger") movement firsthand, up close and personal. Although it was clear that the teabaggers' denials of opposition to President Obama and their insistence that they were "nonpartisan" were utter bullshit, I never really experienced "hatred," at least beyond a few boos once the mouth-breathers figured out what I was up to.

That's beginning to change, though, and more and more, teabaggers are revealing their true colors: hate, anger, racism, and lies. Nowhere has this been more evident than in Chicago last month, where Midge and Dan Hough sought to tell Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.) the tragic story of their daughter-in-law, Jenny.

Jenny was a healthy 24-year-old pregnant mother this summer. Now she was dead, along with her unborn child, both symbols of the failure of our country's healthcare system.

But when Midge told the story to the people gathered at the town hall meeting, she was jeered, mocked and laughed at. They didn't believe her, or didn't care. Midge still told Jenny's story, and her bravery shines in a YouTube video of the event, which now clocks in at well over 100,000 views and functions as a symbol of what the tea party movement has become.

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The organizer of a splinter group called the Chicago Tea Party Patriots, Catherina Wojtowicz, insisted that the story was a fake, calling the couple "Obama operatives" in an e-mail. Even after a local paper verified Jenny's story, she hounded the Houghs with hateful e-mails and insisted that their story was an "isolated incident" that shouldn't have any bearing on the healthcare debate.

Midge said she "tried to appeal to her in those ugly, ugly e-mails."

"Could she understand that we were grieving?" Midge recalled asking in one e-mail exchange with Wojtowicz. "She laughed in the e-mail. She said she didn't think they were hard enough on me" at the Lipinski town hall meeting.

After Keith Olbermann featured Catherina Wojtowicz as his "Worst Person" in a regular segment of his show Countdown, the segment showed up on the Tea Party Patriots' Web site under the headline "Catherina Wojtowicz Earns Title."

"That actually sickens my stomach," Midge said when she heard about the promotion of the video. In her next breath, however, she said she wasn't exactly surprised.

"I've never seen so much hate in one room in my whole life," she said. Wistfully, she added, "I wish that they had Jenny's memorial video up there."

Though these fringe tea party activists are using Jenny's story to promote themselves, it doesn't make the Houghs second-guess their decision to bring attention to them. They say they're glad that they can show "people on the fence" about healthcare just how "radical" and "unhinged" the tea party groups can be.

"If my hurting accomplishes that, I'm OK with it," Midge said.

Though the Internet has brought threatening e-mails, angry comments and viewers flagging their videos about Jenny as "fake" on YouTube, it has also rallied support for the Houghs. Along with the education and advocacy efforts of the Illinois Campaign for Better Health Care and publicity for Jenny's story provided by Women's International News, Midge spoke of the "angels on Twitter" who have helped connect them to others active in the healthcare reform effort.

Furthermore, the same anonymity that allows hateful comments to spew forth more easily also provided the Houghs with their own silent partner. Someone anonymously created a Web site at CatherinaWojtowicz.com that highlights how the Tea Party Patriots' spokesperson has attacked the Houghs and others who don't share her view of reality. The site has no proprietary information, except that the owner is offering the URL up for auction, with the proceeds of the URL sale destined for the National Association of Free Clinics.

Not only do the teabaggers apparently feel no compassion or remorse (making them, I'm forced to point out, something less than human), they even think the Republican Party has abandoned them -- even though the GOP has flung itself farther to the right than any sensible observer could have imagined. More often than not, teabaggers are putting up their own candidates from the fringe right to challenge mainstream GOP nominees -- where, in a clear indication that the electorate sees right through the charade, the teabaggers are suffering ignominious defeats. But they go on defiantly: indeed, right here in Florida, the teabaggers actually have registered their own political party, bastardizing the Declaration of Independence in the process. (At least the forked tongue on its logo, above right, is appropriate.)

No one is (or should be) denying that these people have a right to air their opinions. But when their positions rival those of neo-Nazis and avowed racists in their vile hatred, one has to question the societal value, or even relevance, of those positions. But the silver lining, if there is one, must be that they're going to immolate themselves in their extremist values, and likely take the Republican Party as we know it (or knew it) with them.