Er, tea party?

[highlyeccentric]

My bosses have got me reading Ragan.com's daily communicator blog things. Today there's a a rather incoherent opinion piece up. Apparently... someone made some kind of decision about taxes in the US? And people didn't like it so they poured tea into miscellaneous waterways?

I get the *reference* (Boston Tea party), but the opinion piece is more incoherent than Miranda Devine, so I can't actually tell what happened. The SMH isn't helping me. Any helpful American types on my flist got links to helpful American type papers?

Comments

[iremos.livejournal.com]

The whole thing is incoherent and stupid. As a friend put it in on Facebook,"good, the "tea bag" protests were epic fail. It's gladdening to see the crackpots of America come out of the woodwork for a day and voice their horribly confused, misinformed views and listen to the governor of Texas talk about secession. :]"

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

Yes but what WERE they?

.. Texas secession. I saw sarcastic comments about that but assumed they were entirely joke based.

[iremos.livejournal.com]

The gist of it is, Republicans and conservatives protesting the government continuing to tax people since so much money went for the bail-out, and they feel compelled to complain that their tax dollars are being used to prevent the economy from imploding. Total faulty historical parallelism. Mind you, the deadline to file taxes was April 15th.

[blackbuttoneyes.livejournal.com]

This will give you some idea of the hateful shit that it turned into:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/4/16/720847/-A-few-thousand-words-(picture-intensive)

The greatest part is that Fox News sponsored it and all of its dumbass republican pundits got behind it. And then-- oops! Hatefest. Now they got some splaining to do.

[cursor-mundi.livejournal.com]

Just to put my two cents in, what I found most hilarious about the whole situation was that the esteemed idiots were referring to the protests, in all innocence, as "teababging the White House." My reaction was a bit...different...than I think they'd anticipated? (Though I did have a moment where I thought, "at last! prudery has been put aside in politics!" Alas, no.) A friend of a friend had a highly amusing poll and comment series here (http://gmth.livejournal.com/340589.html).

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

Ahahah yes, my workmates and I had a good giggle over the idea of people "teabagging Obama" at dinner the other night. Although then I weirded them all out a little when my 'ahaha not a good image' was taken over by 'although, actually...'