Tea Bagging (But Not the Good Kind)

For those of you living under a rock, there were Tax Day Tea Parties being conducted today throughout the United States in protest of the economic stimulus plan and the recently passed budget. The Tea Party protests in their current form started earlier this year after CNBC's Rick Santelli provided a ridiculous rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange regarding those economic packages. On February 27th, an estimated thirty thousand Americans took to the streets in more than forty cities in the first nationwide Tea Party protest. (Wow, thirty thousand in forty or so cities. That sure is impressive. That's an average of approximately 750 attendees per city. Did you get a chance to see the amount of people outside in Chicago on Election Night or in Washington, D.C. on Inauguration Day? Now that was impressive.)

"Inspired" by the Boston Tea Party in December 1773, these new Tea Parties have been coordinated by various conservative organizations to supposedly attract disgruntled taxpayers.
However, there a few things that you should keep in mind when trying to compare the two movements:

1. Labeling these new events as "tea parties" is erroneous by name alone. The Boston Tea Party wasn't a protest against big government. It was actually a protest against Great Britain's refusal to allow the U.S. to govern itself at all. And since the U.S. obviously has sovereignty and the ability to govern itself, a tea party protest at this point in time is logically incorrect.

NOTE: If they are so intent on associating their protests with the Boston Tea Party, I wonder if conservatives will be calling for President Obama to react the same way that Great Britain did with the passing of the Intolerable Acts. Will the right be prepared to, as those acts dictated, personally house military troops and quietly watch all ports of entry being closed?

2. The "no taxation without representation" argument was at the basis of the colonists' protest. The Republicans had representation on Election Day and they lost. Get over it!

3. Even though the movement is supposedly against the budget and economic stimulus plan, this year's protests also oddly demonstrate an approval of Mr. Bush's tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest five percent of Americans. (They also exhibit an opposition towards President Obama signing the largest middle class tax cut in history into law.) Because of the name they selected for their protests, Republicans have apparently forgotten that the Boston Tea Party was ultimately precipitated by a massive corporate tax cut. The only major multinational corporation at the time, the East India Company, was on the verge of bankruptcy. As a result, the British government passed the Tea Act in May 1773; this legislation almost entirely eliminated the tax on British tea exported by the East India Company to the American colonies.

The back story of this whole subject may be even more ludicrous than the actual Tea Parties themselves. On the day after Santelli's embarrassing outburst on national television, Robert Gibbs, the White House Press Secretary had this to say: "Now every day when I come out here, I spend a little time reading, studying on the issues, asking people who are smarter than I am questions about those issues. I would encourage [Santelli] to read the President's plan and understand that it will help millions of people, many of whom he knows. I'd be more than happy to have him come here and read it. I'd be happy to buy him a cup of coffee -- decaf." The next week on "The G. Gordon Liddy Show", Santelli astonishingly claimed that the White House was threatening him and that his kids were "nervous to go to school". Three days later on NBC's "The Today Show", Matt Lauer confronted Santelli about his remarks:

Lauer: "After you heard [Gibbs's] comments, you said that he was threatening you. Are you serious about that?"
Santelli: "Listen, let's put it this way. Matt, you're married, are you not?"
Lauer: "Yeah, I am."
Santelli: "OK. This is more about the feelings my wife had when she watched the body language and listened to what he was saying and I think you understand."

Actually, I don't. But new rule #1: Santelli's wife is not allowed to watch television from this point forward.