Like Paul Revere riding his horse through moonlit Massachusetts towns to alert the sleeping citizenry that the British army has mobilized, today the local Boston press is sounding the alarm: Sarah Palin is coming! Sarah Palin is coming!
Yes, today in an op-ed piece in USA Today, Sarah Palin said a whole buncha things, including that on April 14 she will step foot in our stalwart Blue-State liberal stronghold (future President Scott Brown not withstanding) as one of several appearances in support of the Tea Party Movement. Palin is joining forces with the Teabaggers in order to propagate “a vision that promotes common sense solutions to out-of-control spending and an out-of-touch political establishment.” Isn’t it funny how Palin subtly warps the meaning of “common sense” to mean “vague notions with no basis in reality that sound good when spoken in a folksy accent?”
I guess it was only a matter of time before the Queen Bee conservative wingnut commandeered her hive. Going rogue, indeed!
I will not go into an in-depth analysis of the Tea Party movement, a once-fringe band of angry conservatives that is steadily gaining mainstream support. Although I disagree with most of their platitudes, and although it scares the bejesus out of me to think of all the gun-carrying lunatics who identify themselves as “a soldier in the cause” (to cull Palin’s term), I believe that public protest is a sacred American right, and I wish that mainstreams liberals had been half as demonstrative of their outrage during the Bush years.
Since Palin will be visiting Boston just in time for Patriot’s Day, I just wanted to take issue with the Tea Party movement’s name, which is obviously meant to conjure the Revolutionary-era event in which Bostonians dressed as Indians dumped tea into the Fort Point channel. The popular notion is that the colonists were protesting high taxes, but actually, they were protesting taxation without representation within the British parliament. And, Teabaggers, unless you’re a resident of Washington DC or one of our little pseudo-colonies, you do have representation. So if you’re unhappy with pork-spending stimulus socialist spending, vote for someone who agrees with you. And if that person loses the election, that’s called “democracy.” This is not a monarchy, a dictatorship, and it’s sure as hell not Nazi Germany. So stop promoting your anti-government agenda under the guise of “patriotic indignation” when it is, in fact, pure anger.
I might have to go and see Sarah Palin throw some tea in Boston, just to guage if the people coming out in support are really upstanding citizens who are sick of Washington’s ineptitude, or if it’s a bunch of New Hampshire hicks.
