This Grass Has Plastic Roots

This is the bus supplied by Americans for Prosperity for the rally against health care yesterday in Winston-Salem. (Hat-tip: this and other pics gratefully found here.)

Grassroots, right? Yeah. Uncle Ted and Aunt Esther and some of their friends found themselves an old touring bus, and with some gallons of flat paint and a few camel-hair brushes, they painted that sucker to exercise their American right to disagree.

Well, no. This is "astroturf," so-called because it's fake grass(roots).

Americans for Prosperity started the tea-bagging movement. It's funded by corporations and other rich guys who've figgered out how to con the modestly salaried into screaming about taxes. Other than the outside agitators they bussed into Winston yesterday, they attracted local Republican activists, Paularoid remnants, birthers, the "Obama is the devil" crowd, and racists (but I repeat myself).

Madam Doctor Virginia Foxx was there and didn't say a word about the government putting old people to death. Instead, she harped on abortion, claiming that proposed health-reform was really a sneaky way to force teenaged girls to abort their babies.

Many in the crowd were clearly over 65 and therefore already on Medicare, that terrible, socialistic, government-run insurance program that they claim they're dead-set against. They are either willfully ignorant, or duped, or simply hateful, but all of them are serving the interests of big corporations who've labored all these years to take over our government and who have no intention of relinquishing their grip now.