Tea-Bag Hypocrisy

It's the day after the IRS filing deadline for most of us, and I suspect we all could use a little humor. With that in mind, I offer this photo of an idiot polluting the Severn River in Annapolis, Maryland with what is, presumably, a perfectly good box of tea:

For the record, the idiot in question is a Republican member of Maryland's House of Delegates, Donald H. Dwyer, Jr.. He was one of allegedly thousands of people who joined so-called "tea parties" yesterday to protest the so-called "socialistic" policies of the Obama Administration (and, in Maryland, the administration of Governor Martin O'Malley). Apart from losing last fall's election on merit, their principal grievances are the expansion of government and the increase in the public debt in the past several months, the blame for which they lay entirely at the feet of Democrats.

The idiocy of all this seems, at least to me, to be so obvious as to be totally beneath comment. But, in the (faint) hope of initiating a bipartisan dialogue, I'd like to throw out a few questions for these, my fellow citizens who participated and/or sympathized with these pseudo-events:

1. The Boston Tea Party (on which the events were supposedly modelled), like the so-called "Reagan Revolution", was designed to protest taxation without representation, not taxation of any sort. The sons and daughters of the American Revolution understood that government was a social contract, one that benefited everyone in society. Why have you confused that with your own short-term self interest?

2. Some of you claim to be unrepresented because your candidate didn't win the last election. Well, the vast majority of the candidates I have supported in more than thirty years of voting didn't win, but I didn't use that as an excuse to give up on democracy. What gives you a greater right to do so?

3. Above all, where the hell were you during the past eight years, when the expansion of government and the public debt were geometrically greater that anything President Obama has done or has promised to do? Aren't you guilty of hypocrisy? And isn't that a character issue?

I don't expect honest answers to any of these questions from this crowd. But the least they can do is stop pretending they have anything in common with the founders of this country. Every one of them, had they been alive at the time of the real Tea Party, would have been Tories whining about the destruction of valuable tea. They have no answers to our current problems except tax cuts (for which they are unwilling to pay with anything except yes, you guessed it, more public debt).

They ought to apologize for the mess their bankrupt policies have left America with, and not pollute it further by dumping tea.