If I were at all musically inclined, the title of this post would undoubtedly be the name of my garage band, however, it does accurately describe an event going on in Our Nation’s Capital right now!
Unlike the Boston Tea Party of yore, this gathering of tea baggers isn’t a spontaneous, broad-based movement of people fighting taxation without representation by a foreign power, but in fact, an Astro-turfed protest manipulated and driven by billionaires, like Steve Forbes, and high ranking GOPers. You know, the sort of people who might actually have to pay 3% more in taxes, which is still 10% less than they paid under Reagan.
I’ll bet the vast majority of the (overwhelmingly white) protesters won’t be in the “earning $250K and above” bracket, and therefore will actually benefit from President’s tax proposals, but then, when have the right wing ever let the truth get in the way of a really dumb movement? And if the comments on the Tea Party DC website are anything to go by, these people are not settling the intellectual world ablaze with their brains. Several protesters wanted to vandalize the Reflecting Pool by dumping the approximately 1 million donated tea bags into it. Indeed, the same people who would literally shit their pants if someone so much as sneezed on the Vietnam memorial, are suggesting polluting and defacing the Reflecting Pool, located right in front of both the Lincoln memorial and the World War II memorial.
“Sidney” wrote:
“Why hasn’t anyone considered making a real tea party out of this event and actually planned on dumping tea into the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument? Forget the implications of trespassing or vandalism. If any one else is as mad as I am they should be willing to take that risk. The symbolism of the act alone would outweigh the consequences.”
And while one of the organizers, Jo Ann Abbot, seemed to comment regularly, I did not see any admonitions to the potential vandals, just a few attempts to get fellow tea baggers to help her clean up afterwards.