Teabagging? That’s the best they can come up with?

By Jeff Hagedorn

Those wacky Republicans, conservatives and asylum escapees … they were out in force on April 15, otherwise known as Tax Day. Of course that’s really nothing new. There are always a few nutters out there on tax day protesting the confiscation of their hard-earned dollars by “Big Government” but this year was special since a whole new group of whack-jobs joined the protest.

The usual idiots are the ones that seem to believe there should be no taxation by our government. Of course those same folks drive to their protest on out government-provided and (occasionally) maintained roads. They are protected by our government-provided police, and they are largely the same folks that want our government to lock up anybody who breaks a law in our government-provided prisons, or execute them in our government-provided death chambers (which are a topic unto themselves). They also want our government-provided military to have all the newest gadgets so that we can blow up both real and imagined enemies.

Obviously they are fringe lunatics, as most people realize each year. They have their little protest and then slink back to their Mothers’ basements until next April.

But this year was indeed different. You see, this year we have a new President. A BLACK President that is popular with two thirds of the population. It doesn’t make any difference that this new President’s tax policies had no influence on the 2008 taxes due and payable in 2009, the new tax protesters weren’t really protesting taxes anyway. They were protesting what they’ve lost: control.


“Where’s Waldo? Find the non-Caucasian”

These new protesters, which included some Republican elected officials, were using tax day as a protest vehicle because they’ve got almost nothing left. They’re out of power, they’re extremely unpopular, they have no real ideas about how to get us out of the many messes that they got us into, and they’re hopping mad that their power ran off with a black guy, so they have no choice but to latch onto the nearest protest movement, no matter how goofy it may be. Irrelevance does that to a guy … or a mostly white, male political party.


“This is what it would look like if Barack Obama was a brown dog and the Republican Party was a grey cat”

And as an aside, while there were some unbelievably asinine things being said, Texas Governor (or is that Guverner?) Rick Perry actually said that Texas may have to secede from the Union if Barack Obama’s policy proposals are enacted into law. Secession? How’d that work out the last time the Southern States tried it? Actually, I’d gladly let Texas go if they decided to do it. In fact, I’d change my position on the border fence, and maybe even make an extra tax donation to fund it!

Probably the funniest thing about the teabaggers (yes, I’m going to type it as many times as I possibly can) is that the vast majority of them will see their taxes go down next year under the tax policies laid out by Barack Obama because it’s only the richest of the rich that will see real tax increases. You know the ones, the folks that got over 90% of the Bush tax cuts, the same ones that wrecked Wall Street like a drunken teenager on a joyride in Daddy’s pickup truck and then got a nice fat government bailout because the rest of us peons couldn’t afford to let their companies bring our entire economic system to ruin. And to add insult to injury, many of them got bonuses to reward them for their ineptitude. Pardon me for not feeling too bad about Daddy Warbucks paying an extra 3%.

And you know another funny thing about these newly-converted tax protesters? They didn’t let out a peep when some dumb, white redneck was President! They sat back and watched King George spend our country into oblivion with unnecessary wars, a so-called Medicaid prescription plan that was actually a gift to his insurance and pharmaceutical buddies, and irresponsible tax cuts for the Uber-wealthy. And any time a Democrat (or genuine Conservative) complained about any of that, they were shouted down as a traitor.


“Hmmmmmmmmmm?”

Here’s the fact of the matter. America is broken (and broke). The folks in power right now didn’t break it. The folks in power right now are trying to fix it. Their plans may work … or they may not. But doing nothing is not an answer. We’re headed off the cliff if we don’t change course. And if it takes some spending on top of the mountains of debt piled up by the people responsible for this train wreck, so be it. After all, if we’re gonna default on trillions of dollars of debt, what’s a few more on top of that spent with the goal of improving America for the tens of millions of people that got the shaft for most of the last decade?

And for those who disagree: