Tea Party Terrorism

You gotta hand it to the Tea Party. From their humble beginnings as an astroturf non-movement to engineering the first government shutdown in two decades, they've risen to become the most effective terrorists to ever hit the United States.

And I'm not the only one saying it. Their latest shenanigans are still being spun as politics as usual over at the New York Times and other bastions of the muddling mainstream, but a quick perusal of the comments reveals the majority have quite had it with this anti-government jihad. For every dead-ender promising to donate to the campaign of Osama bin Cruz, there's a dozen pulling their hair out and an increasing number dropping that good ol' "T" bomb like me.

Because the Tea Party just did what all serious terrorists do - hit hard without a care for self-preservation. Like all those spoiled Saudis who crashed planes into New York and DC twelve years ago, the Tea Party orchestrated the current government shutdown strictly for ideological reasons. The reaction of John Q. Public wasn't a factor 'cause when you're running on faith - whether it's Allah or Small Government - the opinions of others are beneath contempt. At best they're a distraction, mostly they're a heresy. Just ask the morality cops in Riyadh.

On second thought, don't...

But that would all just make the Tea Party just another bunch of ragheads. What they did - and I'm surprised no other global insurgents have tried this - was hit America where it really hurt... In the money.

How many people have been killed in terrorists attacks? A fair number but with rare exceptions like 9/11 they're people who are too poor or foreign to really count. And let's be honest, no one weeps over oil workers. And killing, while theatrical, just isn't how you make war on 300 million comfortable first worlders - especially if you don't have anything in the megaton range.

So what's a Tea Party jihadi to do... Why wreck the economy, of course! Conservative estimates place the cost of a government shutdown at about 1 billion dollars lost from the US economy per week. No, not "saved" because it started out as a Federal paycheck - just gone entirely. Since all those Federal employees won't have any pay to spend. Look for some shuttered Starbucks in Arlington!

But that's still small time, compared to what this is doing to the stock market. The financial press tried to downplay it this morning, claiming "cautious optimism" or something, but if you have an IRA like me you woke up to one hell of a drop. It's just gonna keep dropping the longer this shutdown lasts, which pleases the Tea Party jihadis right down to their secret keffiyahs!

"Green eggs and ham are haram! And so is healthcare!"

You can kill all the Americans you want and just get a shrug. George W. Bush killed over a thousand trying to turn Baghdad into a white collar suburb and still got re-elected. But taking our dollars, that hurts. It hurts deep and it hurts for a long long time. Those al Qaeda hicks with all their hollering and exploding are the Where Are They Now? of jihadis while the Tea Party managed to bring the mightiest empire in history to its knees. Not with suicide attacks or Ayn Rand madrassas or billions of Wahabbi cash on the sly, but by worming their way into elected office and then not doing a damn thing.

I tell ya, world class terrorists! All those yahoos in Syria and Pakistan could learn a thing or two from the Cruz crowd.

Trevor Kroger is the author of One Nation Under God, in which a similar crew of reactionary screwheads destroy America!