Just in case anyone from the "Tea Party" is watching the news from Egypt, this is what an actual revolution looks like.
A quarter-million people randomly taking to the streets.
No one dressed up in funny costumes and hats. No tea bags worn.
Visceral, guttural, raw human outrage against one man's 29-year dictatorship while living under "emergency law" for 43 years.
No voters upset that they lost an election two years earlier.
Nobody angry that the government is trying to force national health care on them.
Not one poster of Adolf Hitler.
No professional lobbying organization putting together Official Protest Parties. BYOB.
No national TV network rallying its viewers with directions on where to meet and directions on how to get there.
Students and young people converging totally of their own accord, even as Internet accounts are turned off, even as phone service is turned off.
Middle-class, middle-aged people eventually joining in. Ultimately making it a national cause.
That's a revolution.
And watching it unfold lays bare the "Tea Party" for what it is and always has been. Frightened, middle-class, middle-aged people upset that they have to pay taxes, angry that they can't have life the way they alone want it, and disturbed that a Black man was elected president.
The spectacle of some reasonably-comfortable woman with tears filling her eyes, weeping mournfully that "I want my country back" looks even more utterly ludicrous while watching the nation of Egypt actually fighting to literally get their country back.
The display of some grown-up man in cruise wear sashaying about being a proud terrorist because he's willing to yell at his congressman over taxes looks buffoonish when seeing a mass of humanity in Cairo scrabbling in wrenching desperation to be given dignity, democracy, freedom.
Seeing torn people agonizingly putting their very lives on the line, getting beaten, crawling over one another to overthrow their nation after 43 years of "emergency law" and after 29 years of a one-man dictatorship makes it belly-achingly laughable to watch a coffee klatch in lawn chairs waving misspelled signs, screaming at their government for trying to give them all health care, and declaring themselves part of an actual "revolution" -- a "Tea Party Revolution!"
As global television is today demonstrating to the world in stark reality, the "Tea Party" is to revolution what a debutante cotillion is to the Vietnam War. What Bozo is to Shakespearean drama.
What we see daily in Egypt, that's a revolution. What we saw in America last November, that's democracy.
Democracy in all its glory.
"Throwing the bums" out isn't a revolution. It's what voters do. It happens. In fact, it happens a whole lot in elections whenever unemployment is high.
Billion dollar corporations paying to organize people so they'll complain about taxes also isn't a revolution. It's what billion dollar corporations do. They only pray they'll find customers gullible enough to not realize they're being used as pawns. But then, that's why God created marketing departments, to come up with a cute, endearing "Tea Party" brand name ("New! Improved! From the Makers of the John Birch Society!") and bamboozle otherwise mature people into dressing up. And flim-flam them into seriously believing that they're not only part of something, they're part of a "Revolution!"
All that's missing is the requirement to send in 10 box tops and getting a free decoder ring.
"The Tea Party Revolution." Taking back our country.
Turn on your TV. That's a revolution. That's taking back your country.
After seeing a real revolution in their living rooms, no doubt there will be some who'll start to back off a bit from looking too clownish, and now claim that, no, of course, it's not a "real" revolution, that it's just a metaphor.
Sort of like football players claiming that they're "warriors." Or Sarah Palin claiming that "Lock and Reload" is just about a surveyor's mark.
Just a metaphor.
I look forward to the "Tea Party" corporations trying to convince their pawns that what they're part of is a metaphor.
If supporters of the "Tea Party" corporations want to voice their displeasure at high taxes; want try to get rid of the Department of Education, National Public Radio, environmental protection, Social Security, Medicare, and national health care; and rail against every single word from the President of the United States solely because he's simply too different from them -- Godspeed. That's their right in America. It's the very soul of the nation. Indeed, while the creepiest among us call for Second Amendment Solutions, that's the noble First Amendment Solution. But at least now, today, we and everyone all over the world can see on our TVs what a real revolution is.
And it isn't the "Tea Party."
Pinkies up.
You didn't get mad when:
* SCOTUS stopped a legal recount and appointed a President
* Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate energy policy
* A covert CIA operative got outed
* The Patriot Act got passed
* We illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us
* We spent over 1 trillion(and counting) on on illegal war
* 10 billion dollars just disappeared in Iraq.
* You saw the Abu Grahib photos.
* You found out we were t.orturing people.
* The national debt doubled under the previous President from $5.674 Trillion to $10.024 Trillion.
* You saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.
* We let a major US city drown!
* The deficit hit the Trillion dollar mark.
You finally got mad when :
* The government decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick
* The government tried to create jobs ( and did! )
* The government tried to save the economy ( and especially when they did)
* The government tried to protect the consumer from banks and CC companies
* The government tried to give basic equality to ALL of it's citizens
* The governement tried to function for the people and not just rich white guys
* The government was being run by an intelligent and brillant BLACK leader (.) period
The Tea Party uses the American political system to make change. They encourage others to vote and support an agenda they deem is right and good. They donot use fear and intimidation and disobedience to involuntary action. It is because of people like those inthe Tea Party that we have never let things get as bad as they have it in Egypt.
This uprising in Egypt is in noway an example of how the people of the United States should inspire change!
The author of this article must have paid little attention to the Tea Party to write such inflammatory and inaccurate critiques. It is a weak and powerless argument that must resort to race and class war when describing the Tea Party. These twotopics automatically turn readers in to disgust toward the subject, even if the accusations are 100% untrue. A blatant lack of integrity on the part of the author.
This author would have the Tea Party feel shame for disagreeing with the administration's ideas and philosophies, for daring to disagree.
When the leaders of the country wander fromthe founding principles that created the country they love goes unheeded, then the people have a duty to 'take their country back'. We should be THANKFUL, that people like the Tea Party would never allow our country tofall under dictatorship such as that in Egypt.
It is a sick mind that wants a revolution such asthat.
LOL, right. Where was the "Tea Party" when Bush was arresting anti-war protesters or imprisoning Americans without trial? Please. You all waited until someone who was in office that would not arrest you, then you show up with assault weapons and Hitler signs screaming about "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants". The Tea Party are a bunch of clowns.
(BTW, twisting words is just another way of being disingenuous, ignoring facts and refusing to have a legitimate debate).
I find it interesting that you on the left support those in Egypt but show such disrespect for those in the Tea Party. I guess you just hate the Tea Party people because they are different from you, right?
Just seems suspicious, "Black Tea Patriots" aside, that the movement is 98.67% white. What other group, in this richly diverse county, is statistically as overwhelmingly monochromatic?
Thank you for a great editorial. You have brilliantly summed up the irrelevance of the Tea Party movement. It will be difficult to ever take them seriously.
They are talked about, most often, because they are so very bizarre.
If you think that was pansy behavior, then you certainly won't mind us making the same effort for 2012.
And? What are you suggesting?
________________
Ads by Google
Stop Liberals' Censorship
Stop Liberals from censoring con- servatives as done to Sarah Palin. www.TheTeaParty.net
________________
They really believe that 'liberals' are censoring Palin and conservatives!
The TPers are either profoundly intellectually challenged or off-the-wall insane... or both.
They think that they are some sort of revolution, and they think it's liberals' fault that Palin sounds so stupid.
I'm embarrassed for them.
That said, the article makes an excellent point. The nature and magnitude of the TP's rhetoric is grotesquely out of proportion to whatever -legitimate- complaints they may have, which is to say nothing of their sundry -il-legitimate complaints about imaginary strawmen and paranoid persecution fantasies.
I can imagine an Egyptian looking at a TP rally, shaking his head and saying to these people, You have -no- -idea- what tyranny is. You have -no- -idea- what it's like to be truly oppressed and persecuted. It's hard, even in light of what I wrote above, to look at the Egyptians, and then look at and listen to the TP and not ask, WTF are -you- complaining about?
When I consider keeping what I earn, you call it “selfishness”. When you consider confiscating what I earn, I call it “stealing”.
Dogma is defined as “a political, philosophical, or moral group holds to be true”. Calling me “selfish” and “cruel” is not only unfair to me as a free human being, but you fly in the face of nearly every founding principal of the COUNTRY in which you live – not the least of which are “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” For you to bloviate about “political, legal and economic principals” and insinuate that I’m not living by such a code, the obvious question becomes, “Who’s code”? Yours? Because the political, legal and economic principals you espouse couldn’t be further from the political, legal and economic principals clearly defined on our nation’s Founding Documents.
And this is the rub with the Progressive movement – all the way back to Woodrow Wilson…Your “society” is vastly different from mine, and vastly different from the founding principals. In my civil society, we don’t confiscate wealth from others and redistribute it as we see fit, and the Constitution prevents you from doing so. This is precisely why the Progressive movement needs judges like Brennan to reinterpret, and then re-reinterpret the constitution as they see fit.
As you may have noticed on November 2nd, we, the majority of this country, reject Progressivism and are going to continue doing so.
Get used to it.
I call it what we fought a revolution for . The right to elect a government to represent us and to tax ourselves through those we elected. Those are the founding principles of the country. Our forefothers dumped the tea not because they didn't want to be taxed, but because they wanted a say in how they were taxed. "No taxation without representation!" Remember that? They taught it in 4th grade.
It is amazing how little the Tea Party knows about the real tea party they named themselves after.