Weak Tea
It's the summer protest season, those lazy hazy days when crazies can freely congregate in public places and turn complicated issues into reductionist chants and placard slogans. This weekend marked the public return of the Tea Party Movement, that plucky band of Fox News viewing Republican astroturfers who protest the current government's attempts to raise revenue off of people who make far, far more money than they do by mailing, throwing, and festooning themselves with tea bags, an activity they refer to, in blissful ignorance of the gay slang term for a scrotally based sex act, as "tea bagging." It is a movement that has warmed the desperate hearts of the Republican establishment, leading RNC chairman Michael "Da Man" Steele to declare "change comes in a tea bag."
Unfortunately for Steele and his ilk, what really comes in a tea bag is a small serving of the lowest possible grade of tea, a substance referred to by tea merchants as "dust," which is to leaf tea as meat by-products that make it into generic canned dog food is to beef tenderloin. It is the same relationship the Tea Baggers' views bear to informed commentary on tax policy.
The Baggers, of course, cite as their inspiration the Boston Tea Party of 1773, which, of course, they know next to nothing about. While taxation without representation was a major organizing issue of the American Revolution, the Boston Tea Party largely occurred for the benefit of tea smugglers whose business had been undercut by the Tea Act, which lowered-- that's right, kids, lowered-- the taxes on English tea, making it cheaper than the black market product smuggled from Holland.
This weekend's Tea Party protests were largely ill attended, scantly programmed, and featured the booing of Republican Senator John Cornyn(R-TX)(who was called a traitor), Texas Governor Rick Perry(R), and US Rep Gresham Barrett(R-SC)by the assembled, none of whom offered much more than said boos and grunts of "taxes bad."
In short, the Tea Party movement is laughably tone deaf, ahistorical, simplistic, and dying. All things considered, a perfect symbol for the Republican Party.
