高频词，一定要记住哦！
表明，宣称；
要说的话；
过去分词：
现在分词：
第三人称单数：
大家都在背：
1. All this, needless to say, had been culled second-hand from radio reports.
不用说，所有这些都是从电台报道中采集来的二手材料。
来自柯林斯例句
2. The deal seems so attractive it would be ridiculous to say no.
这笔交易看上去太诱人了，要是拒绝它简直是笑话。
来自柯林斯例句
3. People always think I'm a fool, and I dare say they're right.
人们总认为我是个傻瓜，想必他们是对的。
来自柯林斯例句
4. He won his first Derby on the aptly named "Never Say Die".
他驾驭着这匹名副其实的“永不言败”夺得了他的第一个德比马赛冠军。
来自柯林斯例句
5. Politicians say it could lead to a dissolution of parliament.
政客们说这可能会导致议会解散。
来自柯林斯例句
1. 显然，不用说
it goes without saying that lay appointees must be selected with care.
不用说，必须谨慎选择非业内的受托人。
have something to say for oneself
1. 参与对话；参与讨论
a dull girl with little to say for herself.
几乎找不到话说的迟钝女孩。
how say you?
1. (律)法官询问陪审团裁决时问］诸位有何高见
I (或 he, she 等) cannot (或 could not) say
1. 我（他、她等）说不上
1. 用于发话之前引起注意
I say, do you have the time?
我说，你有时间吗?
2. 用作表示惊讶、高兴或沮丧的惊叹词
that is to say
1. 换句话说
to say nothing of
1. 更不用说：没必要提及。用来暗指证明某种想法或理由是正确的事情
The yard is a mess, to say nothing of the house.
院子里已经是一团糟，更不用说房子了
you can say that again【俚语】
1. 没错：用来表示完全同意前面说过的话
1. “权;权力”释义下的同义词
1. “说,讲;声称”释义下的同义词
其他释义下的同义词
： 最普通常用词，指用语言表达思想，着重所说的内容。
： 侧重于说话动作的本身，着重说话的能力而不在内容，可以是长篇大论的演讲，也可以是三言两语的交谈，甚至指简单的开口发声说话。
： 较正式用词，通常指用明确的语言或文字着重地叙述事实，既强调内容又注重语气。
： 普通用词，侧重指与人交谈时的连续说话，可指单方面较长谈话，和speak一样，着重说活动作而不侧重内容。
： 普通用词，指把某事告诉或讲述给某人听，口语或书面语均可用。
： 着重说话的行为，常指声音的使用，突出用噪子发声。
说;讲 When you say something, you speak words.&
【语法信息】：V with quote
【语法信息】：V that
【语法信息】：be V-ed to-inf
【语法信息】：V n to n
【语法信息】：V n
【语法信息】：V wh
【语法信息】：V so
【语法信息】：Also V to-inf
'I'm sorry,' he said...
“对不起，”他说。
She said they were very impressed...
她说他们被深深打动了。
Forty-one people are said to have been seriously hurt...
据说 41 人身负重伤。
(表达观点或陈述事实，否定用法表示婉转暗示某事并非事实)说，表示 You use say in expressions such as I would just like to say to introduce what you are actually saying, or to indicate that you are expressing an opinion or admitting a fact. If you state that you can't say something or you wouldn't say something, you are indicating in a polite or indirect way that it is not the case.&
【语法信息】：V that
I would just like to say that this is the most hypocritical thing I have ever heard in my life...
我只想说这是我这辈子听说过的最虚伪的事情。
I have to say I didn't even know Fox Lane Police Station existed till about four or five years ago...
我必须承认直到四五年前我才知道有福克斯巷警察局 。
I must say that rather shocked me, too...
我得说那也让我相当震惊。
告知;宣称;表明 You can mention the contents of a piece of writing by mentioning what it says or what someone says in it.&
【语法信息】：V that
【语法信息】：V with quote
【语法信息】：it V with quote
【语法信息】：V so
The report says there is widespread and routine torture of political prisoners in the country...
这份报告称该国一直普遍存在折磨政治犯的现象。
Auntie Winnie wrote back saying Mam wasn't well enough to write...
温妮姨妈回信说妈妈身体尚未康复，无法写信。
You can't have one without the other, as the song says...
就像歌里唱的那样，两者密不可分，不能只取其一。
(自己)想，琢磨;自忖 If you say something to yourself, you think it.&
【语法信息】：V to pron-refl with quote
Perhaps I'm still dreaming, I said to myself...
也许我还在做梦，我心里想。
'Keep your temper,' he said to himself.
“别生气，”他暗暗告诉自己。
发言权;决定权 If you have a say in something, you have the right to give your opinion and influence decisions relating to it.&
【搭配模式】：usu a N
You can get married at sixteen, and yet you haven't got a say in the running of the country...
你 16 岁时可以结婚，但还无权参与国家政事。
The students wanted more say in the government of the university.
学生们想更多地参与大学的管理。
(钟、刻度盘、地图等)表明，指向，显示 You indicate the information given by something such as a clock, dial, or map by mentioning what it says .&
【语法信息】：V n
【语法信息】：V that
The clock said four minutes past eleven...
钟显示时间是 11 点 4 分。
The map says there's six of them.
地图上显示共有六处。
说明;表明;表示 If something says something about a person, situation, or thing, it gives important information about them.&
【语法信息】：V amount about n
【语法信息】：V pron about n
I think that says a lot about how well Seles is playing...
我认为那很能说明塞勒斯表现得有多出色。
The appearance of the place and the building says something about the importance of the project.
从周边环境和这幢大楼的外观可以看出这个项目的举足轻重。
说明，表示(…有很多优点) If something says a lot for a person or thing, it shows that this person or thing is very good or has a lot of good qualities.&
【语法信息】：V amount for n
【语法信息】：it V amount for n that
It says a lot for him that he has raised his game to the level required...
他将比赛技能提至所要求的水平，这说明他颇有能耐。
It says much for Brookner's skill that the book is sad, but never depressing.
这本书笔调忧伤，却并不令人沮丧，这很能说明布鲁克纳超群的写作技巧。
(通常表示说话者认为某人优点不多)我会这样形容他们/你可以这样形容他们 You use say in expressions such as I'll say that for them and you can say this for them after or before you mention a good quality that someone has, usually when you think they do not have many good qualities.&
【语法信息】：V pron for n
【语法信息】：V pron
He's usually smartly-dressed, I'll say that for him...
我能说的是，至少他通常穿着入时。
At the very least, he is devastatingly sure of himself, you can say that.
至少还可以说，他对自己是深信不疑的。
假定;假设 You can use say when you want to discuss something that might possibly happen or be true.&
【语法信息】：V that
【搭配模式】：only imper
Say you could change anything about the world we live in, what would it be?
假定你能对我们所生活的这个世界作出任意改变，你会改变什么呢？
比如说;比方说 You can use say or let's say when you mention something as an example.&
To see the problem here more clearly, let's look at a different biological system, say, an acorn...
为更清晰地理解此处的问题，我们来看一种不同的生物系统，比如说，橡子。
Someone with, say, between 300 and 500 acres could be losing thousands of pounds a year.
比方说，拥有 300 到 500 英亩地的人，可能每年会损失几千英镑。
(用以唤起注意或表示惊讶、高兴、崇敬)嘿，喂，哎呀，啊 Say is used to attract someone's attention or to express surprise, pleasure, or admiration.&
【语域标签】：AM 美
【语域标签】：INFORMAL 非正式
Say, Leo, how would you like to have dinner one night, just you and me?
哎，利奥，找个晚上一起吃顿饭如何，就你和我？
Usage Note
Note that, with the verb say, if you want to mention the person who is being addressed, you should use the preposition to. 'What did she say you?' is wrong. 'What did she say to you?' is correct. The verb tell, however, is usually followed by a direct object indicating the person who is being addressed. He told Alison he was suffering from leukaemia... What did she tell you? 'What did she tell to you?' is wrong. Say is the most general verb for reporting the words that someone speaks. Tell is used to report information that is given to someone. The manufacturer told me that the product did not contain corn. Tell can also be used with a 'to' infinitive to report an order or instruction. My mother told me to shut up and eat my dinner.
注意，如果要在动词 say 后提及说话的对象，应用介词 to。What did she say you 是错误说法，What did she say to you 是正确的。但是，动词 tell 后通常直接跟表示说话对象的直接宾语。例如：He told Alison he was suffering from leukaemia (他告诉艾利森他得了白血病)，What did she tell you (她告诉你什么了)。What did she tell to you 是错误说法。say 是引述某人所说话的最常用动词。tell 用于传达提供给某人的信息：The manufacturer told me that the product did not contain corn (厂家告诉我该产品不含谷物)。tell 也可和带 to 的动词不定式连用表示引述命令或指示：My mother told me to shut up and eat my dinner (妈妈让我别说话好好吃饭)。
清楚说明事实;明确表达(…的)感觉 If you say that something says it all, you mean that it shows you very clearly the truth about a situation or someone's feelings.&
【搭配模式】：V inflects
This is my third visit in a week, which says it all.
这是我一周内第3次拜访，这说明了一切。
CONVENTION
(表示吃惊)不会吧;(亦常表示事实上并不吃惊)我一点也不觉得奇怪，用不着你说也知道 You can use 'You don't say' to express surprise at what someone has told you. People often use this expression to indicate that in fact they are not surprised.&
【语用信息】：feelings
'I'm a writer.' — 'You don't say. What kind of book are you writing?'
“我是作家。”——“不会吧。你写哪方面的书？”
值得称道之处;优点 If you say there is a lot to be said for something, you mean you think it has a lot of good qualities or aspects.&
【搭配模式】：amount PHR
There's a lot to be said for being based in the country.
把总部设在该国有很多优势。
寡言少语;不爱说话 If you say that someone doesn't have much to say for himself or herself, you mean that they are not speaking very much during a conversation.&
【语域标签】：INFORMAL 非正式
He's never got much to say for himself.
他向来寡言少语。
你有什么好说的;你有什么要辩解的 If someone asks what you have to say for yourself, they are asking what excuse you have for what you have done.&
'Well,' she said eventually, 'what have you to say for yourself?'
“那么”，她最后说，“你有什么好说的？”
显而易见;不言而喻;不用说 If something goes without saying, it is obvious.&
【搭配模式】：oft it PHR that
It goes without saying that if someone has lung problems they should not smoke.
不用说，有肺病的人不应吸烟。
发表意见;阐述观点 When one of the people or groups involved in a discussion has their say, they give their opinion.&
【搭配模式】：V inflects
The Football Association have had their say.
足协已经发表了意见。
(用于对很多人不喜欢的人或事物表示赞赏时)随你怎么说,不管你怎么认为 You use 'Say what you like about someone or something' when you are about to mention one good thing about a person or thing that many people do not like.&
【搭配模式】：PHR cl
Say what you like about them, but they did love their Mum.
随你怎么说，但他们确实爱自己的妈妈。
CONVENTION
(尤指乐于接受他人刚刚提出要给予自己的东西)我不反对，我没意见，好哇 You use 'I wouldn't say no' to indicate that you would like something, especially something that has just been offered to you.&
【语用信息】：formulae
【语域标签】：INFORMAL 非正式
I wouldn't say no to a drink.
我倒想喝一杯。
(引出语气更重或更极端的描述)即使不说是…,虽不能说… You can use not to say when adding a stronger or more extreme description than the one you have just used.&
【搭配模式】：usu PHR adj
To those who've never received million dollar royalty cheques, this sounded a little odd, not to say offensive.
对于那些从没有收到过上百万美元版权费的人来说，这听起来就算不令人反感，至少也让人觉得有点儿怪。
更不用说;何况 You use to say nothing of when you mention an additional thing which gives even more strength to the point you are making.&
【搭配模式】：PHR n
Unemployment leads to a sense of uselessness, to say nothing of financial problems.
失业会让人觉得自己一无是处，更何况还会带来经济问题。
(用于提醒别人所说话可能会具有冒犯性或令人震惊)可以说 You use shall I say and shall we say in order to warn someone that what you are about to say may cause offence or be surprising.&
【搭配模式】：PHR with cl/group
...whereas when you get older you're rather set in your ways, shall I say...
然而随着年纪渐长，可以说，你的大局已定了。
My involvement has not been altogether, shall we say, ethical.
可以说，我的参与还不是完全合乎道德。
亦即;也就是说;换句话说 You use that is to say or that's to say to indicate that you are about to express the same idea more clearly or precisely.&
【搭配模式】：PHR with cl/group
【语域标签】：FORMAL 正式
...territories that were occupied in 1967, that is to say, in the West Bank and Gaza.
1967年被占的领土，也就是约旦河西岸和加沙地带的被占领土
CONVENTION
让你说对了;一点没错;我同意;说得太对了 You can use 'You can say that again' to express strong agreement with what someone has just said.&
【语用信息】：emphasis
【语域标签】：INFORMAL 非正式
'Must have been a fiddly job.' — 'You can say that again.'
“那一定是件精细活。”——“说得太对了。”
to say the least→see:
needless to say→see:
You may well say so.
你完全可以这么说。
He glared angrily at her but did not say a word.
他怒视着她, 却一言不发。
He said that he had never been to Tokyo.
他说他从来没去过东京。
1. 说明; 表明; 宣称; 书面材料或可见的东西提供信息; 指示
What do these figures say?
这些数字说明了什么?
I will say how to use it.
我将说明如何使用它。
2. 比方说; 假定说
It is said that there has been a big flood.
据说, 那里遭受了一场大洪水的袭击。
3. 念；朗诵；背诵
4. 表达，表述（见解）
5. 表明，显示，表达（思想、感情）
6. 把…说确切，确定
It's hard to say what is wrong.
很难说出了什么毛病。
7. 断言，断定，主张
I say her plan is the better one.
我认为她的计划是个好主意。
8. 估摸着说，约莫，估计
I'd say he'll come at 9 o'clock.
我估计他将在九点钟回来。
9. 报道，声称；预告
1. 决定权, 发言权
He wasn't allowed much say in choosing his holiday.
在选择假期的问题上不让他有很多发言权。
2. 说话，讲话
3. 要说的话；所说的话
4. 说话(或发言)的次序
5. 说话的机会
7. [the say]决定权
1. （表示惊讶或兴奋）嘿，啧啧
1. （提请别人注意、提出建议或作出评论）喂，我说
1. 说话；宣布
2. 表达观点
I'll not want to say in front of the reporters.
我不愿在记者面前谈论我的观点。
It's, say, 45 inches.
高约45英寸。
2. 比如说，例如
any books, say, magazines
什么书都行，比如说杂志
"let him have his say"
"He said that he wanted to marry her"
"tell me what is bothering you"
"state your opinion"
"state your name"
"He alleged that he was the victim of a crime"
"He said it was too late to intervene in the war"
"The registrar says that I owe the school money"
"Let us say that he did not tell the truth"
"Let's say you had a lot of money--what would you do?"
4. have or contain a cer
"The passage reads as follows"
"What does the law say?"
5. state as one's
"I say let's forget this whole business"
"She said `Hello' to everyone in the office"
7. give instructions to or direct somebody to do some
"I said to him to go home"
"She ordered him to do the shopping"
"The mother told the child to get dressed"
8. speak, pronounce, or ut
"She pronounces French words in a funny way"
"I cannot say `zip wire'"
"Can the child sound out this complicated word?"
9. recite or
"Say grace"
"She said her `Hail Mary'"
10. communicate or
"What does this painting say?"
"Did his face say anything about how he felt?"
"The clock says noon"
Say的全称：
未分类的(1)
热带草原，南美稀树草原
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单词信息 单词：say [sei] say的过去式said /sed/，过去分词said /sed/，第三人称says /sez/ 释义 vt. 1. 说； 讲 What you say is true in a sense. 你所说的在某种意义上讲是真实的。 1. 说明； 表明； 宣称； 书面材料或可见的东西提供信息； 指示 Please specify what you really want to say. 请具体说明你的真实想法。 2. 比方说； 假定说，假设，例如 Suppose your father saw you now, what would you say? 假设你父亲现
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方便的话，请您留下一种联系方式，便于问题的解决：The Truth About the Tea Party | Rolling Stone
Matt Taibbi takes down the far-right monster and the corporate insiders who created it
September 28, 2010
Illustration by Victor Juhasz
It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin & who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate & is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.
This article appears in the
issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the .
"We're shaking up the good ol' boys," Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. "Buck up," she says, "or stay in the truck."
Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?
Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression & "Government's not the solution! Government's the problem!" & the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.
"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."
A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it.
After Palin wraps up, I race to the parking lot in search of departing Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. I come upon an elderly couple, Janice and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views.
"I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."
"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"
"Me?" he says proudly. "Oh, I'm a property appraiser. Have been my whole life."
I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"
Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!
"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"
"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."
"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"
"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much." Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending & only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending & with the exception of the money spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement is all about & and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of conservative icons like Palin.
Early in his campaign, Dr. Paul, the son of the uncompromising libertarian hero Ron Paul, denounced Medicare as "socialized medicine." But this spring, when confronted with the idea of reducing Medicare payments to doctors like himself & half of his patients are on Medicare & he balked. This candidate, a man ostensibly so against government power in all its forms that he wants to gut the Americans With Disabilities Act and abolish the departments of Education and Energy, was unwilling to reduce his own government compensation, for a very logical reason. "Physicians," he said, "should be allowed to make a comfortable living."
Those of us who might have expected Paul's purist followers to abandon him in droves ha Paul is now the clear favorite to win in November. Ha, ha, you thought we actually gave a shit about spending, joke's on you. That's because the Tea Party doesn't really care about issues & it's about something deep down and psychological, something that can't be answered by political compromise or fundamental changes in policy. At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing. They know who they are, and they know who we are ("radical leftists" is the term they prefer), and they're coming for us on Election Day, no matter what we do & and, it would seem, no matter what their own leaders like Rand Paul do.
In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.
The rest of it & the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade & will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives. It's all on display here in Kentucky, the unofficial capital of the Tea Party movement, where, ha, ha, the joke turns out to be on them: Rand Paul, their hero, is a fake.
The original Tea Party was launched by a real opponent of the political establishment & Rand Paul's father, Ron, whose grass-roots rallies for his 2008 presidential run were called by that name. The elder Paul will object to this characterization, but what he represents is something of a sacred role in American culture: the principled crackpot. He's a libertarian, but he means it. Sure, he takes typical, if exaggerated, Republican stances against taxes and regulation, but he also opposes federal drug laws ("The War on Drugs is totally out of control" and "All drugs should be decriminalized"), Bush's interventionist wars in the Middle East ("We cannot spread our greatness and our goodness through the barrel of a gun") and the Patriot A he even called for legalized prostitution and online gambling.
Paul had a surprisingly good showing as a fringe candidate in 2008, and he may run again, but he'll never get any further than the million primary votes he got last time for one simple reason, which happens to be the same reason many campaign-trail reporters like me liked him: He's honest. An anti- war, pro-legalization Republican won't ever play in Peoria, which is why in 2008 Paul's supporters were literally outside the tent at most GOP events, their candidate pissed on by a party hierarchy that preferred Wall Street-friendly phonies like Mitt Romney and John McCain. Paul returned the favor, blasting both parties as indistinguishable "Republicrats" in his presciently titled book, The Revolution. The pre-Obama "Tea Parties" were therefore peopled by young anti-war types and libertarian intellectuals who were as turned off by George W. Bush and Karl Rove as they were by liberals and Democrats.
The failure of the Republican Party to invite the elder Paul into the tent of power did not mean, however, that it didn't see the utility of borrowing his insurgent rhetoric and parts of his platform for Tea Party 2.0. This second-generation Tea Party came into being a month after Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office, when CNBC windbag Rick Santelli went on the air to denounce one of Obama's bailout programs and called for "tea parties" to protest. The impetus for Santelli's rant wasn't the billions in taxpayer money being spent to prop up the bad mortgage debts and unsecured derivatives losses of irresponsible investors like Goldman Sachs and AIG & massive government bailouts supported, incidentally, by Sarah Palin and many other prominent Republicans. No, what had Santelli all worked up was Obama's "Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan," a $75&billion program less than a hundredth the size of all the bank bailouts. This was one of the few bailout programs designed to directly benefit individual victims of
the money went to homeowners, many of whom were minorities, who were close to foreclosure. While the big bank bailouts may have been incomprehensible to ordinary voters, here was something that Middle America had no problem grasping: The financial crisis was caused by those lazy minorities next door who bought houses they couldn't afford & and now the government was going to bail them out.
"How many of you people want to pay your neighbor's mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise your hand!" Santelli roared in a broadcast from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. Why, he later asked, doesn't America reward people who "carry the water instead of drink the water?"
Suddenly, tens of thousands of Republicans who had been conspicuously silent during George Bush's gargantuan spending on behalf of defense contractors and hedge-fund gazillionaires showed up at Tea Party rallies across the nation, declaring themselves fed up with wasteful government spending. From the outset, the events were organized and financed by the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which was quietly working to co-opt the new movement and deploy it to the GOP's advantage. Taking the lead was former House majority leader Dick Armey, who as chair of a group called FreedomWorks helped coordinate Tea Party rallies across the country. A succession of Republican Party insiders and money guys make up the guts of FreedomWorks: Its key members include billionaire turd Steve Forbes and former Republican National Committee senior economist Matt Kibbe.
Prior to the Tea Party phenomenon, FreedomWorks was basically just an AstroTurfing-lobbying outfit whose earlier work included taking money from Verizon to oppose telecommunications regulation. Now the organization's sights were set much higher: In the wake of a monstrous economic crash caused by grotesque abuses in unregulated areas of the financial-services industry, FreedomWorks & which took money from companies like mortgage lender MetLife & had the opportunity to persuade millions of ordinary Americans to take up arms against, among other things, Wall Street reform.
Joining them in the fight was another group, Americans for Prosperity, which was funded in part by the billionaire David Koch, whose Koch Industries is the second-largest privately held company in America. In addition to dealing in plastics, chemicals and petroleum, Koch has direct interests in commodities trading and financial services. He also has a major stake in pushing for deregulation, as his companies have been fined multiple times by the government, including a 1999 case in which Koch Industries was held to have stolen oil from federal lands, lying about oil purchases some 24,000 times.
So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul "Tea Parties," but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey "unconstitutional" orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It's a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement & which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.
The individuals in the Tea Party may come from very different walks of life, but most of them have a few things in common. After nearly a year of talking with Tea Party members from Nevada to New Jersey, I can count on one hand the key elements I expect to hear in nearly every interview. One: Every single one of them was that exceptional Republican who did protest the spending in the Bush years, and not one of them is the hypocrite who only took to the streets when a black Democratic president launched an emergency stimulus program. ("Not me & I was protesting!" is a common exclamation.) Two: Each and every one of them is the only person in America who has ever read the Constitution or watched Schoolhouse Rock. (Here they have guidance from Armey, who explains that the problem with "people who do not cherish America the way we do" is that "they did not read the Federalist Papers.") Three: They are all furious at the implication that race is a factor in their political views & despite the fact that they blame the financial crisis on poor black homeowners, spend months on end engrossed by reports about how the New Black Panthers want to kill "cracker babies," support politicians who think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power, tried to enact South African-style immigration laws in Arizona and obsess over Charlie Rangel, ACORN and Barack Obama's birth certificate. Four: In fact, some of their best friends are black! (Reporters in Kentucky invented a game called "White Male Liberty Patriot Bingo," checking off a box every time a Tea Partier mentions a black friend.) And five: Everyone who disagrees with them is a radical leftist who hates America.
It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog & and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.
It's not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It's just that they're shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid. I hear this theme over and over & as I do on a recent trip to northern Kentucky, where I decide to stick on a Rand Paul button and sit in on a Tea Party event at a local amusement park. Before long, a group of about a half-dozen Tea Partiers begin speculating about how Obamacare will force emergency-room doctors to consult "death panels" that will evaluate your worth as a human being before deciding to treat you."They're going to look at your age, your vocation in life, your health, your income.&.&.&." says a guy active in the Northern Kentucky Tea Party.
"Your race?" I ask.
"Probably," he says.
"White males need not apply," says another Tea Partier.
"Like everything else, the best thing you can do is be an illegal alien," says a third. "Then they won't ask you any questions."
An amazing number of Tea Partiers actually believe this stuff, and in the past year or so a host of little-known politicians have scored electoral upsets riding this kind of yahoo paranoia. Some are career Republican politicians like Sharron Angle, the former Nevada assemblywoman who seized on the Tea Party to win the GOP nomination to challenge Harry Reid this fall. Others are opportunistic incumbents like Jan Brewer, the Arizona governor who reversed a dip in the polls by greenlighting laws to allow police to stop anyone in a Cypress Hill T-shirt. And a few are newcomers like Joe Miller, the Alaska lawyer and Sarah Palin favorite who whipped Republican lifer Lisa Murkowski in the state's Senate primary. But the champion of champions has always been Rand Paul, who as the son of the movement's would-be ideological founder was poised to become the George W. Bush figure in the Tea Party narrative, the inheritor of the divine calling.
Since Paul won the GOP Primary in Kentucky, the Tea Party has entered a whole new phase of self-deception. Now that a few of these so-called "outsider" politicians have ridden voter anger to victories over entrenched incumbents, they are being courted and turned by the very party insiders they once campaigned against. It hasn't happened everywhere yet, and in some states it m a few rogue politicians, like Christine O'Donnell in Delaware, might still squeak into office over the protests of the Republican establishment. But in Kentucky, home of the Chosen One, the sellout came fast and hard.
Paul was transformed from insurgent outsider to establishment stooge in the space of almost exactly one year, making a journey that with eerie cinematic precision began and ended in the same place: The Rachel Maddow Show. When he first appeared on the air with the MSNBC leading lady and noted Bible Belt Antichrist to announce his Senate candidacy in May 2009, Paul came out blazing with an inclusive narrative that seemingly offered a realistic alternative for political malcontents on both sides of the aisle. He talked with pride about how his father's anti-war stance attracted young voters (mentioning one Paul supporter in New Hampshire who had "long hair and a lip ring"). Even the choice of Maddow as a forum was clearly intended to signal that his campaign was an anti-establishment, crossover effort. "Bringing our message to those who do not yet align themselves as Republicans is precisely how we grow as a party," Paul said, explaining the choice.
In the early days of his campaign, by virtually all accounts, Paul was the real thing & expansive, willing to talk openly to anyone and everyone, and totally unapologetic about his political views, which ranged from bold and nuanced to flat-out batshit crazy. But he wasn't going to change for anyone: For young Dr. Paul, as for his father, this was more about
actually winning wasn't even on his radar. "He used to talk about how he'd be lucky if he got 10 percent," recalls Josh Koch, a former campaign volunteer for Paul who has broken with the candidate.
Before he entered the campaign, Paul had an extensive record of loony comments, often made at his father's rallies, which, to put it generously, were a haven for people gifted at the art of mining the Internet for alternate theories of reality. In a faint echo of the racially charged anti-immigrant paranoia that has become a trademark of the Tea Party, both Paul and his father preached about the apocalyptic arrival of a "10-lane colossus" NAFTA superhighway between the U.S. and Mexico, which the elder Paul said would be the width of several football fields and come complete with fiber-optic cable, railroads, and oil and gas pipelines, all with the goal of forging a single American-Mexican state. Young Paul stood with Dad on that one & after all, he had seen Mexico's former president on YouTube talking about the Amero, a proposed North American currency. "I guarantee you," he warned, "it's one of their long-term goals to have one sort of borderless, mass continent." And Paul's anti-interventionist, anti-war stance was so far out, it made MoveOn look like a detachment of the Third Marines. "Our national security," he declared in 2007, "is not threatened by Iran having one nuclear weapon."
With views like these, Paul spent the early days of his campaign looking for publicity anywhere he could get it. One of his early appearances was on the online talk show of noted 9/11 Truth buffoon and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. The two men spent the broadcast exchanging lunatic fantasies about shadowy government forces, with Paul at one point insisting that should Obama's climate bill pass, "we will have an army of armed EPA agents & thousands of them" who would raid private homes to enforce energy-efficiency standards. Paul presented himself as an ally to Jones in the fringe crusade against establishment forces at the top of society, saying the leaders of the two parties "don't believe in anything" and "get pushed around by the New World Order types."
Unsurprisingly, the GOP froze Paul out, attempting to exclude him from key party gatherings in Kentucky like the Fayette County Republican Party Picnic and the Boone County Republican Party Christmas Gala. "We had the entire Republican establishment of the state and the nation against us," says David Adams, who mobilized the first Tea Party meetings in Kentucky before serving as Paul's campaign manager during the primaries.
The state's Republican establishment, it must be said, is among the most odious in the nation. Its two senators & party kingmaker and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and mentally disappearing ex-jock Jim Bunning & collectively represent everything that most sane people despise about the modern GOP. McConnell is the ultimate D.C. insider, the kind of Republican even Republicans should wonder about, a man who ranks among the top 10 senators when it comes to loading up on pork spending. With his needle nose, pursed lips and prim reading glasses, he's a proud wearer of the "I'm an intellectual, but I'm also a narrow-minded prick" look made famous by George W politically his great passion is whoring for Wall Street, his most recent triumph coming when he convinced Republican voters that a proposed $50&billion fund to be collected from big banks was actually a bailout of those same banks. Bunning, meanwhile, goes with the "dumb and unashamed" in more than a decade of service, his sole newsworthy accomplishment came when he said his Italian-American opponent looked like one of Saddam's sons.
Paul's animus toward the state's Republican overlords never seemed greater than in August 2009, when McConnell decided to throw a fancy fundraiser in Washington for the national GOP's preferred candidate, Trey Grayson. Attended by 17 Republican senators who voted for the TARP bailout, the event was dubbed the "Bailout Ball" by Paul's people. Paul went a step further, pledging not to accept contributions from any senator who voted to hand taxpayer money over to Wall Street. "A primary focus of my campaign is that we need Republicans in office who will have the courage to say no to federal bailouts of big business," he declared.
The anti-establishment rhetoric was a big hit. Excluded from local campaign events by the GOP, Paul took his act to the airwaves, doing national TV appearances that sent his campaign soaring with Tea Party voters. "We were being shut out of a lot of opportunities in the state, so you go with what is available to you," says Adams. "And what was available was television."
In the primary almost a year later, Paul stomped Grayson, sending shock waves through the national party. The Republican candidate backed by the party's Senate minority leader had just received an ass-whipping by a Tea Party kook, a man who tried to excuse BP's greed-crazed fuck-up in the Gulf on the grounds that "sometimes accidents happen." Paul celebrated his big win by going back to where he'd begun his campaign, The Rachel Maddow Show, where he made a big show of joyously tearing off his pseudolibertarian underpants for the whole world to see & and that's where everything changed for him.In their first interview, Maddow had softballed Paul and played nice, treating him like what he was at the time & an interesting fringe candidate with the potential to put a burr in Mitch McConnell's ass. But now, Paul was a real threat to seize a seat in the U.S. Senate, so Maddow took the gloves off and forced him to explain some of his nuttier positions. Most memorably, she hounded him about his belief that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an overreach of government power. The money exchange:
Maddow: Do you think that a private business has the right to say we don't serve black people?
Paul: Yeah. I'm not in favor of any discrimination of any form. But what about freedom of speech? Should we limit speech from people we find abhorrent? Should we limit racists from speaking?
Paul was pilloried as a racist in the national press. Within a day he was completely reversing himself, telling CNN, "I think that there was an overriding problem in the South so big that it did require federal intervention in the Sixties." Meanwhile, he was sticking his foot in his mouth on other issues, blasting the Americans With Disabilities Act and denouncing Barack Obama's criticism of British disaster merchant BP as "un-American."
Paul's libertarian coming-out party was such a catastrophe & the three gaffes came within days of each other & that he immediately jumped into the protective arms of Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party. "I think he's said quite enough for the time being in terms of national press coverage," McConnell said, explaining why Paul had been prevailed upon by the party to cancel an appearance on Meet the Press. Some news outlets reported that Paul canceled the appearance after a call from Karl Rove to Adams, who concedes that he did speak with Rove around that time.
Soon after, McConnell threw yet another "Bailout Ball" fundraiser in Washington & only this time it was for Rand Paul. The candidate who just a year before had pledged not to accept money from TARP supporters was now romping in bed with those same politicians. When pressed for an explanation of Paul's about-face on the bailouts, Adams offers an incredibly frank admission. "When he said he would not take money from people who voted for the bank bailout, he also said, in the same breath, that our first phone call after the primary would be to Senator Mitch McConnell," says Adams. "Making fun of the Bailout Ball was just for the primary."
With all the "just for the primary" stuff out of the way, Paul's platform began to rapidly "evolve." Previously opposed to erecting a fence on the Mexican border, Paul suddenly came out in favor of one. He had been flatly opposed t faced with having to win a general election in a state that receives more than $265&million a year in subsidies, Paul reversed himself and explained that he was only against subsidies to "dead farmers" and those earning more than $2&million. Paul also went on the air with Fox News reptile Sean Hannity and insisted that he differed significantly from the Libertarian Party, now speaking more favorably about, among other things, judicious troop deployments overseas.
Beyond that, Paul just flat-out stopped talking about his views & particularly the ones that don't jibe with right-wing and Christian crowds, like curtailing the federal prohibition on drugs. Who knows if that had anything to do with hawkish Christian icon Sarah Palin agreeing to headline fundraisers for Paul, but a huge chunk of the candidate's libertarian ideals have taken a long vacation.
"When he was pulling no punches, when he was reciting his best stuff, I felt like I knew him," says Koch, the former campaign volunteer who now works with the Libertarian Party in Kentucky. "But now, with Mitch McConnell and Karl Rove calling the shots, I feel like I don't know him anymore."
Hardcore young libertarians like Koch & the kind of people who were outside the tent during the elder Paul's presidential run in 2008 & cared enough about the issues to jump off the younger Paul's bandwagon when he cozied up to the Republican Party establishment. But it isn't young intellectuals like Koch who will usher Paul into the U.S. Senate in
it's those huge crowds of pissed-off old people who dig Sarah Palin and Fox News and call themselves Tea Partiers. And those people really don't pay attention to specifics too much. Like dogs, they listen to tone of voice and emotional attitude.
Outside the Palin rally in September, I ask an elderly Rand supporter named Blanche Phelps if she's concerned that her candidate is now sucking up to the same Republican Party hacks he once campaigned against. Is she bothered that he has changed his mind on bailouts and abortion and American interventionism and a host of other issues?
Blanche shrugs. "Maybe," she suggests helpfully, "he got saved."
Buried deep in the anus of the Bible Belt, in a little place called Petersburg, Kentucky, is one of the world's most extraordinary tourist attractions: the Creation Museum, a kind of natural-history museum for people who believe the Earth is 6,000 years old. When you visit this impressively massive monument to fundamentalist Christian thought, you get a mind-blowing glimpse into the modern conservative worldview. One exhibit depicts a half-naked Adam and Eve sitting in the bush, cheerfully keeping house next to dinosaurs & which, according to creationist myth, not only lived alongside humans but were peaceful vegetarians until Adam partook of the forbidden fruit. It's hard to imagine a more telling demonstration of this particular demographic's unmatched ability to believe just about anything.
Even more disturbing is an exhibit designed to show how the world has changed since the Scopes trial eradicated religion from popular culture. Visitors to the museum enter a darkened urban scene full of graffiti and garbage, and through a series of windows view video scenes of families in a state of collapse. A teenager, rolling a giant doobie as his God-fearing little brother looks on in horror, surfs porn on the Web instead of reading the Bible. ("A Wide World of Women!" the older brother chuckles.) A girl stares at her home pregnancy test and says into the telephone, "My parents are not going to know!" As you go farther into the exhibit, you find a wooden door, into which an eerie inscription has been carved: "The World's Not Safe Anymore."
Staff members tell me Rand Paul recently visited the museum after-hours. This means nothing in itself, of course, but it serves as an interesting metaphor to explain Paul's success in Kentucky. The Tea Party is many things at once, but one way or another, it almost always comes back to a campaign against that unsafe urban hellscape of godless liberalism we call our modern world. Paul's platform is ultimately about turning back the clock, returning America to the moment of her constitutional creation, when the federal bureaucracy was nonexistent and men were free to roam the Midwestern plains strip-mining coal and erecting office buildings without wheelchair access. Some people pick on Paul for his humorously extreme back-to-Hobbesian-nature platform (a Louisville teachers' union worker named Bill Allison follows Paul around in a "NeanderPaul" cave-man costume shouting things like "Abolish all laws!" and "BP just made mistakes!"), but it's clear when you talk to Paul supporters that what they dig most is his implicit promise to turn back time, an idea that in Kentucky has some fairly obvious implications.
At a Paul fundraiser in northern Kentucky, I strike up a conversation with one Lloyd Rogers, a retired judge in his 70s who is introducing the candidate at the event. The old man is dressed in a baseball cap and shirtsleeves. Personalitywise, he's what you one of the first things he says to me is that people are always telling him to keep his mouth shut, but he just can't. I ask him what he thinks about Paul's position on the Civil Rights Act.
"Well, hell, if it's your restaurant, you're putting up the money, you should be able to do what you want," says Rogers. "I tell you, every time he says something like that, in Kentucky he goes up 20 points in the polls. With Kentucky voters, it's not a problem."
In Lexington, I pose the same question to Mica Sims, a local Tea Party organizer. "You as a private-property owner have the right to refuse service for whatever reason you feel will better your business," she says, comparing the Civil Rights Act to onerous anti-smoking laws. "If you're for small government, you're for small government."
You look into the eyes of these people when you talk to them and they genuinely don't see what the problem is. It's no use explaining that while nobody likes the idea of having to get the government to tell restaurant owners how to act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the tool Americans were forced to use to end a monstrous system of apartheid that for 100 years was the shame of the entire Western world. But all that history is not real to Tea P what's real to them is the implication in your question that they're racists, and to them that is the outrage, and it's an outrage that binds them together. They want desperately to believe in the one-size-fits-all, no-government theology of Rand Paul because it's so easy to understand. At times, their desire to withdraw from the brutally complex global economic system that is an irrevocable fact of our modern life and get back to a simpler world that no longer exists is so intense, it breaks your heart.
At a restaurant in Lexington, I sit down with a Tea Party activist named Frank Harris, with the aim of asking him what he thinks of Wall Street reform. Harris is a bit of an unusual Tea P he's a pro-hemp, anti-war activist who supported Dennis Kucinich. Though he admits he doesn't know very much about the causes of the crash, he insists that financial reform isn't necessary because people like him can always choose not to use banks, take out mortgages, have pensions or even consume everyday products like gas and oil, whose prices are set by the market.
"Really?" I ask. "You can choose not to use gas and oil?" My awesomely fattening cheese-and-turkey dish called a "Hot Brown" is beginning to congeal.
"You can if you want to," Harris says. "And you don't have to take out loans. You can save money and pay for things in cash."
"So instead of regulating banks," I ask, "your solution is saving money in cash?"
He shrugs. "I'm trying to avoid banks at every turn."
My head is starting to hurt. Arguments with Tea Partiers always end up like football games in the year 1900 & everything on the ground, one yard at a time.
My problem, Frank explains, is that I think I can prevent crime by making things illegal. "You want a policeman standing over here so someone doesn't come in here and mug you?" he says. "Because you're going to have to pay for that policeman!"
"But," I say, confused, "we do pay for police."
"You're trying to make every situation 100 percent safe!" he shouts.
This, then, is the future of the Republican Party: Angry white voters hovering over their cash-stuffed mattresses with their kerosene lanterns, peering through the blinds at the oncoming hordes of suburban soccer moms they've mistaken for death-panel bureaucrats bent on exterminating anyone who isn't an illegal alien or a Kenyan anti-colonialist.
The world is changing all around the Tea Party. The country is becoming more black and more Hispanic by the day. The economy is becoming more and more complex, access to capital for ordinary individuals more and more remote, the ability to live simply and own a business without worrying about Chinese labor or the depreciating dollar vanished more or less for good. They want to pick up their ball and go home, but they can't; thus, the difficulties and the rancor with those of us who are resigned to life on this planet.
Of course, the fact that we're even sitting here two years after Bush talking about a GOP comeback is a profound testament to two things: One, the American voter's unmatched ability to forget what happened to him 10 seconds ago, and two, the Republican Party's incredible recuperative skill and bureaucratic ingenuity. This is a party that in 2008 was not just beaten but obliterated, with nearly every one of its recognizable leaders reduced to historical-footnote status and pinned with blame for some ghastly political catastrophe. There were literally no healthy bodies left on the bench, but the Republicans managed to get back in the game anyway by plucking an assortment of nativist freaks, village idiots and Internet Hitlers out of thin air and training them into a giant ball of incoherent resentment just in time for the 2010 midterms. They returned to prominence by outdoing Barack Obama at his own game: turning out masses of energized and disciplined supporters on the streets and overwhelming the ballot box with sheer enthusiasm.
The bad news is that the Tea Party's political outrage is being appropriated, with thanks, by the Goldmans and the BPs of the world. The good news, if you want to look at it that way, is that those interests mostly have us by the balls anyway, no matter who wins on Election Day. That' the rest of this is just noise. It's just that it's a lot of noise, and there's no telling when it's ever going to end.
From The Archives Issue 157: March 28, 1974
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