For starters, columnist Gail Collins asks:
How is it that the stars of the Republican austerity movement come from the states that suck up the most federal money? Taxpayers in New York send way more to Washington than they get back so more can go to places like Alaska and Louisiana. Which is fine, as long as we don’t have to hear their governors bragging about how the folks who elected them want to keep their tax money to themselves. Of course they do! That’s because they’re living off ours.
Indeed. By the same token, there’s something really performance-arty about a bunch of high-paid conservative pundits like Michelle Malkin organizing protests to defend the status quo which the popular vote rejected in an election just three months ago.
This is what happens when your party is completely devoid of ideas. All we hear from the right is the usual crying and moaning about taxes and government waste. Puh-leeze. President Bush lost $12 billion in Iraq, and not one of you assholes shed a tear. Cold, hard cash, shrink-wrapped in stacks of $100 bills, then flown into Iraq on C-130s, where they vanished. *Poof.*
$12 billion, gone. That's a lot of marsh mice.
So don’t cry to me about government waste, no one believes you give a damn.
Collins writes:
The waste argument is a perpetual winner because there will always be some.
Well, duh. It’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Of course there will always be waste, it’s how the universe rolls. But there’s entropy and then there’s, you know, incompetence.
It certainly hasn’t escaped my notice that the folks rallying to protest the President’s economic stimulus today are the same folks who were on the side of incompetence lo these many years. I see absolutely no reason why anyone should listen to them now.
Meanwhile, the new revolution has already hit a bumpy patch. The Pittsburgh event was cancelled because of rain, prompting one organizer to scold:
Look, maybe you are afraid of water. But just so you know, over 200 years ago when the real Tea Party happened, a bunch of really pale ethnically British colonists dressed up like Indians and threw the King’s tea into the harbor. They could have died.
A revolution that gets called on account of rain isn't much of a revolution.
