Meghan McCain, not the sharpest tool in the shed, nevertheless has some clarity. She nails the teabaggeries.

It’s innate racism, and I think it’s why young people are turned off by this movement.

Now where would she get such an idea? Never mind the whole last year of “tax’ protests. Meghan made that comment after hearing a speech from inveterate racist Tom Tancredo, who left his seat in the House of Representatives, at the recent Tea Party convention.

People who would not even spell the word vote or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House … named Barack Hussein Obama.

For all the spitting and whining that they’re not the racist scumbags as portrayed in the media — gee, where’d the media ever get the idea? — isn’t it quite telling that there was no Tea Party before January 20, 2009?

Call me crazy, and I know some of you will, but methinks they doth protest too much.

I like, too, how they claim they are not Republicans, which as far as I can tell only means that they aren’t Republicans of the Abraham Lincoln variety. They fall right into the Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Jon Kyl, Eric Cantor variety, and seriously, do those guys even remotely compare with Lincoln? Blanche Lincoln maybe, but she calls herself a Democrat.

And then there’s Sarah Palin. Really, I’ve said enough about her, but her idea that Obama should declare war on Iran, well, that’s just stupid. But Republicans learned nothing from the run-up to the Iraq war, and, unfortunately, neither did some Democrats.

But while we’re at it, maybe we could declare war on North Korea, a country that actually has nuclear weapons. Or France. The Republicans don’t much care for the French either. Hell, just declare war on everybody and get it over with. Randy Newman, an incredible songwriter, has one he calls “Political Science” in which he says we should just “drop the big one, and see what happens.” Hey, it’d solve a lot of problems, including over population.

Palin did another ridiculous thing, and I’m not talking about the hand writing thing. No, I’m talking about the part where she claimed that Democrats were 0-3 in recent national elections. That’s actually true, but only if you count the three races Republicans won and not the five races Democrats won. It’s a little like a college with no football program claiming its team is undefeated.

On the home front, Republicans have demanded that Obama keep his promise to make health care negotiations an open book. So the president has called a meeting, to be televised — and the Republicans are threatening not to show.

They’d have to do that, you know. Otherwise they can’t keep saying they’ve been shut out of the process, which we all know is bullshit anyway. The current state of the health care bill is a direct result of Republican “participation,” watered down to virtually nothing with Republican “ideas,” and still they voted against it.

Now, that orange guy John Boehner says the Republicans won’t play unless Obama drops the current bills and starts from scratch. Guess nobody told him that bipartisanship doesn’t mean that Democrats do what the Republicans say. Although that is usually how it works. We’ll see.

Even with all the obvious nuttery going on, I have little to no faith in the American people, who seem far too caught up in American Idol and Tiger Woods sex life to actually pay attention to real world. That why they depend on Faux News to tell them what to think.

Seriously. Some guy in Wyoming has put up a GW billboard asking if we miss him yet. Those teabaggers probably do, at least some of ‘em, completely unaware that our unraveling was the end result of Reagan policies as fully enacted by our most recent Republican president. Policies the teabaggers and the Republicans, assuming they’re not the same, want us to bring back.

How is that even remotely possible, that one would want to return to the very policies that put us in the mess we’re in to begin with? Is it some kind of bizarre death wish? Some weird religious belief that we must be punished for our sins?

I can’t wrap my mind around that at all. Maybe some charts would help. Them, not me. My mind isn’t going to go around something so grounded in fantasy.  But maybe some pretty pictures, with colors and stuff. Here’s one. It shows the difference between the deficit projections (since Republicans and teabaggers are all about the deficit now) for the Bush years and what actually happened. Notice anything? Like, the downward trend? And don’t go all “but we went to war” on me. Yeah, we did. And who’s fault was that? Not Obama’s. And not even 19 hijackers or Osama bin Laden, who, incidentally, the Bush administration let get away despite all there “smoke ‘em out” rhetoric.

Here’s another good one. It’s about job loss, and it compares the previous administration with the current one. Notice anything? We’re still below the line, and that’s not good, but there’s a trend there, just like in the charts above.

And that trend? Well, let’s just say it’s utter nonsense to try to pin the crappy economy on the current president and ignore where it actually came from. And I’m not even going to pull out the charts to show where it really began, the ones that show a strange devolution in our economy for the past 30 years. This is enough for now, for what we’re talking about here.

And I got one more. This one’s about taxes. But not just any taxes — only the taxes on the very wealthiest of Americans. Take a look. Whatcha see? That we used to have a far worse tax rate than we do now? And that the difference between what Obama wants to do and what Bush did is minimal? And just goes back to where we were a decade ago? Yeah, I thought so.

These are some pretty pictures, and you sure won’t see ‘em on Faux News, so I doubt they’ll make any difference to the crowd in Nashville last weekend.

They may not even make any difference to Meghan McCain. But there you have it. The truth about taxes and deficits. And tea parties.