Teabagging Alabama congressional wannabe Rick Barber created a stir with an ad in which he discussed impeachment of President Obama with actors playing several of the Founders ("Gather your armies," the greasepaint George Washington says in the ad). Now (via Oliver Willis and Zandar), I see Barber has a new online ad -- and it's crazy, but it's also oddly ... um, overstuffed.
Did you ever see the unedited version of Michael Jackson's "Black or White" video? It was made at the point in Jacko's career when he felt he just had to keep topping himself, so he made the video an incoherent salad of everything remotely Jacksonesque that was potentially mega-entertaining or controversial: the video had outer space special effects and Macaulay Culkin and international dancers and multiple stage sets and animals and the then-new technology of morphing and, at the end, Jacko crotch-grabbing and smashing car windows in a dark alley in what was supposed to be a menacing way. And some pyrotechics. And a panther.
Barber's new ad is sort of like that:
It's not enough that in this one he talks smack about taxes with actors playing George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. It's not enough that he gets Lincoln to compare the income tax to slavery. It's not enough that he gets in Nazi death camp imagery at about 33 seconds. He can't stop there, so midway through he throws in a reprise of a recent righty YouTube sensation -- an elderly former Marine singing the fourth verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner" (I believe that's the original Marine doing the singing again). But wait, there's more -- Glenn Beck shows up on TV, and then we see Barber watching Beck. Frankly, the only way this could have been more ungainly is if Barber leapt up on cars in a dark alley and started smashing their windows while grabbing his crotch.
I also love the first few seconds of Barber's ad because Barber's question to "George Washington" is what I'd call right-wing nerdcore:
Mr. President, some argue that you would have been in favor of this tyrannical health care bill because you enforced the Whiskey Act of 1791. But that was an excise tax, levied to service the military debt incurred by the Revolutionary War -- a legitimate function of government. Correct?
I guess by now this is casual chitchat among the wackier teabaggers and Beckistas -- half-baked speculation on the constitutional legitimacy of this or that tax provision or the Hayekian legitimacy of this or that function of government. (I suspect, on the right, that talk like this can occasionally substitute for foreplay.)
I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I envy the righties' political strength -- the noise machine has actually got large numbers of Americans thinking that that sitting around jawing about these questions is fun. On the other hand, the most powerful citizens' wing in our politics is an agglomeration of half-educated fringe theorists and conspiratorialists. The only question is whether they can largely dismantle the government before their moment passes.
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