The tattered remnants of the conservative movement in the U.S. continue to embarrass themselves. Today is “Tax Day”, and all across the country a “grass-roots movement” (organized and promoted by wealthy right-wingers and promoted by Faux News1) is holding rallies to protest supposedly too-high taxes and too-high federal spending. Never mind that the taxes being paid by American citizens this year are determined by the laws put in place by the Bush regime; logical consistency is not very high among the attributes of hardcore conservatives.
These orchestrated protests are an affront to both common sense and to history, and as a native New Englander I take especial umbrage at this attempt to co-opt the historical memory associated with the Boston Tea Party for this exercise in right-wing outrage.
The colonial-era Tea Party was not merely a protest against taxation; it was a pointed message to King George III and his ministers about taxes being levied upon North American colonists without the colonists having a say in the matter. (You know, that tired old phrase we all learned in school, “No taxation without representation.”) What this modern protest is about has to do with hatred against taxation in general; many of the participants, and certainly most of the sponsors (for example, Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist), believe that taxation is nothing less than government-sponsored, militarily-enforced theft of the hard-earned dollars of virtuous capitalists. The participants can be summed up by the words on this sign, quoted from a Virginia rally on the Tax Day Tea Party’s own website: “I Will Keep My Freedom, My Guns, My Money. Keep Your Change,” and “I Want My Country Back.”
Yes, this is the mentality of the desperate conservatives: the Obama administration (and in effect the 66% of Americans who approve of it2) have taken, or are going to take, away their freedom, their guns, their money, and finally, their country. This display of histrionics in the face of the defeat of their failed ideology is enough to make most critically-minded people shake their heads in disgust; but to try to equate this billionaire-funded, media-backed, minor blip of libertarian-ish faux-populism with the somewhat more high-minded goals of Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty is an insult to the memory of our colonial ancestors.
I have been watching the reports come in from news organizations, and I can see that despite the mud truck rally-esque hype from Faux News, the tea party events are thinly attended and lacking in real energy. Which is understandable, when you have such intellectual luminaries as Neil Cavuto, Michelle Malkin, and “Joe the Plumber” as special guests. I wouldn’t miss a minute in my cubicle (if I still worked in one) to go see an event with any one of those *brilliant lights* of conservative thought.
Finally, could conservatives please stop referring to the really participants as “teabaggers”? It’s bad enough their philosophy is bankrupt and out of favor; but using common sexual euphemisms3 for their fake populism makes it even harder to take them seriously.
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1 Source: Think Progress
2 Source: CBS News
3 This has already made it into the Urban Dictionary:
Teabagger
1. n. A man that dips his scrotum and testicles into the mouth of another person. (as if dipping a tea bag into hot water)
Earl squatted down and teabagged Betty Lou by dipping his nutsack into her open mouth.
2. n. A conservative activist who is so ignorant that they protest against tax cuts (that benefit them) by throwing tea into a river.
Billy Ray cheered while he watched the teabaggers protest on FOX news.
2 comments:
Please stop calling these wackos conservatives. These are capitalistic republicans who believe that if it's good for corporate america it's good for america.
They call themselves conservative. I would have to agree with you, though, in that what they espouse is hardly "conservative" - actually, they're more radical, aren't they? Labels can be dangerous things - we can't help but to overgeneralize, sometimes, in our desire to categorize.
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