My headline today is as much a statement of general fact as it is a reference to a current event. Bob Cesca over at Huffington Post wrote a great article today breaking down the sheer silliness of the “New Tea Party” movement.
After Rick Santelli’s now-famous rant on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange where he called for a new tea party, a small group of people with nothing better to do have taken the ball and are running with it. As Cesca points out, they’re running right into a brick wall.
Protesting the tyrannical Comrade Obama with his “flawed” stimulus and “pork-filled” budget, the new tea party crowd eschews giving the largest middle-class tax cut in history in exchange for allowing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to expire.
What they seemed to have missed in high school history is the fact that the Boston Tea Party was not a revolt against increased taxation, it was a revolt against a tax cut for the most notorious “too big to fail” multi-national corporation of the day, the East India Trading Company – favoring tax cuts for the rich deeply hurt the entrepeneurs and middle class Americans who couldn’t compete, so they displayed a little righteous anger.
The folks over at taxdayteaparty.com insist “Silent Majority No More!“ Let’s take a look at how the silent majority is doing with this new movement.
The blue line is the “Online HQ for the April 15th Nationwide Tax Day Tea Party Rallies.” The red line? That’s the largest white supremacist site, Stormfront.
And the yellow one; I can has cheezburger?
Congratulations to the “silent majority,” with 1/3rd of the cultural relevance of modern nazis, and 1/6th of LOLcats. Good luck on that tea party thing.
Want to not look like a total idiot? I suggest reading a few books now and again, perhaps Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States or Kenneth Davis’ Don’t Know Much About History.
Online, check out My History Can Beat Up Your Politics.
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http://icanhascheezburger.com/2009/03/20/funny-pictures-am-sorry/#comments
Posted on March 20th, 2009 at 10:39 am
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