The Great 2009 Tea Parties

I am going to fight every urge in my body and refrain from turning the subject of today's Tax Day Tea Parties into a verb. I'm not going to do it as it would be crude and puerile. I will, however, point out the ridiculousness and offensiveness of it all.

As of 3:00 pm MDT, KSL wins the award for most mind-numbing coverage in Utah. The story starts off on the right foot by stating, correctly, that as part of the stimulus the vast majority of Americans, 95%, got a tax cut. Then the proverbial train comes off the proverbial tracks:

Not everyone will be seeing those tax cuts though. People making more than
a quarter of a million dollars will be seeing a tax increase, and that is
leading to a number of protests across the country, including several here in
Utah.

Now, either KSL has completely lost its sanity, or the tea protesters have. People would really go out of their way to organize little tea parties all over the country to decry the tax increase for people making a quarter of a million dollars or more? I would be astonished if not every single one of those protesters got a tax cut. So the jist is: get a tax cut, protest against the one who gave you the tax cut. Brilliant. This simply is too good to be true for Democrats.

One such protest is happening in Salt Lake. It's just like the Boston Tea
Party more than 235 years ago. They're protesting taxes, but these people are
upset with the Obama administration.

It is so not like the Boston Tea Party 235 years ago. It is, in fact, diametrically opposed to the Boston Tea Party 235 years ago. The Boston Tea Party was a protest mainly against taxation without representation. The colonists believed it was their right to be taxed only by elected representatives, not the British Parliament which did not allow representation from America. Today tea partiers have no such qualms.

They just don't like President Obama. Which is fine, I didn't like Pres. Bush. They have every right to protest, that is the American way. In fact, we should encourage more peaceful protests to raise public awareness on certain important issues. But please don't insult us by equating today's highly organized, weak turn-out* protests with one of the most iconic patriotic acts in American history.

*I'm fully aware that the pathetic turn-out in Utah is at least partly due to the horrendous weather. I like to think it was a higher power crying over the lameness of the event, but it could just be dumb luck. But turn-out was weak all over the country, so maybe it was just a contrived idea that failed to meet impossibly high standards.