It's 1860-61 all over again (or, why Rick Perry is our Craziest Republican of the Day)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I don't have much to say about yesterday's right-wing Fox News-promoted taxpayer "tea tantrums" that I, and many others, haven't said already.

For what I've written about them recently, see here and here. In brief, they are nothing more than expressions of corporate greed and ideological extremism. They're not expressions of some populist grassroots uprising, they're partisan political events supported by right-wing media outlets, think tanks, and other such organizations.

What's clear, too, is that they are platforms for all sorts of right-wing claptrap. Take, for example, what the neo-secessionist governor of Texas, Rick Perry, had to say:

Texas is a unique place. When we came into the Union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that.

We got a great Union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it, but if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that.

Perry is wrong about Texas (which could be divided into up to five states, not secede), but, more to the point, what he is actually saying here is that there is justification for the dissolution of the United States of America -- and that a neo-Confederacy, of sorts, may secede from the Union, with Obama as the new Lincoln, much like the 11 states of the Confederacy seceded in 1860-61. (Such a view is, among other things, both anti-American and anti-democratic, a clear rejection of the popular will given that Obama and the Democrats were elected by the American people.)

This is the sort of craziness that the tea partiers just can't get enough of. And perhaps it is fitting that Gov. Perry, wittingly or otherwise, connected their current anti-government revolt back to the slave-owning Confederacy of America's past.