Endess Conservative Teabagging
I'm not going to make any jokes on that front, about how conservatives have swung so luddite they can't run a simple search on Urbandictionary.com to work out why everyone keeps snickering every time they talk about how badly they want to teabag Obama. The irony that a traditionally homophobic movement is inadvertently invoking homoerotic imagery is sufficiently delicious to let me forget for the moment that I hate my job and have no prospects for the future as a direct result of their own selfish greed. Ignorant shits. But I digress.
Instead, this is meant to be a brief history lesson. It seems fitting that Republicans should be in need of a history lesson as they have, again, traditionally, opposed funding public education, particularly since Reagan eviscerated civics and history classes on the grounds that the teachers, union members so they must be communists, were indoctrinating children in evil liberal ideas found in things like, say, the Constitution or, God help us, the Declaration of Independence. You'll see this meme trotted out today against "liberal" college professors.
In the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, conservatives are holding tea parties across the country, and Fox News will be there as everyone drink the Kool-Aid - er, tea and protests the Obama tax plan...the one that cut taxes for 95% of Americans. So they're all in a huff about taxes not getting cut for the richest 5%, which is, yet again, ironic, because the original Boston Tea Party was a protest against a tax cut for rich corporations, or rather, one rich corporation. Specifically, the East India Tea Company.
Way back when, most areas had their own mom and pop style tea shop. Larger areas might even have a couple of them. When you ran out of tea, you went down to the tea shop and bought more. Under the Tea Act of 1773, a tax was levied on all tea sold in the colonies. However, in an effort to help the East India Tea Company, the British gave them an exemption from the tax. Now the small tea sellers were doing a fair amount of business in non-British tea, be it grown in the colonies or imported by independent procurers (whom the British dubbed smugglers). This was due in part to anti-British sentiment already stirring in the colonies as well as the fact that the East India Company's tea was more expensive.
After they got this exemption, however, they were able to sell their tea at below market value, a move that threatened to drive all small producers and distributors out of business, much like what Wal-Mart does today. This engraged those colonists who took part in what became known as the Boston Tea Party. The participants who engaged in what was seen as an act of vandalism, by the both the Brittish and the company, swore an oath of secrecy. As such, there is only one written account of the events that took place, recorded by George Hewes many years later. The account he wrote and the resulting book has been out of print for some time, possibly because the title was the wholly unmarketable, A Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party, with a Memoir of George R. T. Hewes, A Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbor in 1773. However, someone has taken the time to digitize a copy, available for free via Google Books.
To all the teabaggers, have fun at your party. When you get home, read a book.
Instead, this is meant to be a brief history lesson. It seems fitting that Republicans should be in need of a history lesson as they have, again, traditionally, opposed funding public education, particularly since Reagan eviscerated civics and history classes on the grounds that the teachers, union members so they must be communists, were indoctrinating children in evil liberal ideas found in things like, say, the Constitution or, God help us, the Declaration of Independence. You'll see this meme trotted out today against "liberal" college professors.
In the spirit of the Boston Tea Party, conservatives are holding tea parties across the country, and Fox News will be there as everyone drink the Kool-Aid - er, tea and protests the Obama tax plan...the one that cut taxes for 95% of Americans. So they're all in a huff about taxes not getting cut for the richest 5%, which is, yet again, ironic, because the original Boston Tea Party was a protest against a tax cut for rich corporations, or rather, one rich corporation. Specifically, the East India Tea Company.
Way back when, most areas had their own mom and pop style tea shop. Larger areas might even have a couple of them. When you ran out of tea, you went down to the tea shop and bought more. Under the Tea Act of 1773, a tax was levied on all tea sold in the colonies. However, in an effort to help the East India Tea Company, the British gave them an exemption from the tax. Now the small tea sellers were doing a fair amount of business in non-British tea, be it grown in the colonies or imported by independent procurers (whom the British dubbed smugglers). This was due in part to anti-British sentiment already stirring in the colonies as well as the fact that the East India Company's tea was more expensive.
After they got this exemption, however, they were able to sell their tea at below market value, a move that threatened to drive all small producers and distributors out of business, much like what Wal-Mart does today. This engraged those colonists who took part in what became known as the Boston Tea Party. The participants who engaged in what was seen as an act of vandalism, by the both the Brittish and the company, swore an oath of secrecy. As such, there is only one written account of the events that took place, recorded by George Hewes many years later. The account he wrote and the resulting book has been out of print for some time, possibly because the title was the wholly unmarketable, A Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party, with a Memoir of George R. T. Hewes, A Survivor of the Little Band of Patriots who Drowned the Tea in Boston Harbor in 1773. However, someone has taken the time to digitize a copy, available for free via Google Books.
To all the teabaggers, have fun at your party. When you get home, read a book.