I keep thinking about this commercial. The question is whether Rick Barber, along with usual suspects Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, are deliberately misleading their people about history or if they genuinely don't understand.
In the case of Sarah Palin, I don't think she understands. As for the other two, who knows.
The fact remains that the tea party has entirely misappropriated the actual Boston Tea Party. It wasn't a protest against taxes, it was a protest against the Tea Act of 1773 which bailed out the East India Company by eliminating its importation duty, and, in a more general sense, taxation without representation in Parliament. Also, contrary to what Palin and others say, the Constitution had nothing to do with Christian dogma. And the founding fathers weren't anti-tax either. As Weigel mentioned yesterday, George Washington used military force to kill an anti-tax movement called the Whiskey Rebellion.
These misunderstandings, deliberate or not, are only the starting points of a very lengthy and ridiculous list of contradictions on policy and inaccuracies on history.
If the tea party wants smaller government, they ought to be prepared to cut everything. That means Social Security, Medicare, defense and so on. But they won't. If they want smaller government, they ought to shut their yaps about President Obama's response to the oil spill. And if they want smaller government, they had better stick to this position when a Republican president takes office. Short of these things, we can only assume, as I have been for a more than a year now, that the tea party is nothing more than a confused assembly of angry white people who don't like the notion of a non-white president and the beginnings of a non-white American majority.