Great American Pity Party

In honor of today’s Great American Pity Tea Party, I thought now would be a good time to ask some questions.

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.

Revisionist History Alert

Hilarious. Tea Party Protests coming to a village near you.

Since it’s coming from Pajamas TV, let’s rephrase that: coming to a village idiot near you.

I guess these folks think the Boston Tea Party was some kind of populist uprising against the government.

It was not.

It was a populist uprising against a corporation. It was against the British East India Company, which enjoyed great influence with and access to the British Parliament--so much so, in fact, that they received a TAX CUT that effectively priced the colonists out of the tea market.

But, this being Pajamas TV, and this being wingnuts, they are clueless. How very sad ... and amusing.

I couldn’t say it better than this fella:

Thus, I’m saddened to reveal: most of us don’t know the real story of the Boston Tea Party. As it turns out, what’s really fundamental about being an American is not so much a hatred of taxes (though we don’t have to like them, either) as it is a hatred of corporatism, corporate cronyism in our government, and tax policies which benefit the rich and powerful over the Everyman, or the local American. Early American patriots were inspired toward their exceptional act of independence primarily in resistance to their lack of representation in contrast to the power of a big business lobby.

I’m not surprised that “the Pajamas TV team including Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, and Joe Wurzelbacher (aka Joe the Plumber)” would be too clueless to know their American history. Facts are stupid things, remember?

You people are tools.