"Underestimation, mistrust and an attitude of superiority"

 

"I think these issues are simply too important to the future of the nation for us to operate as though those of us who disagree somehow shouldn't speak out and be heard," our Dick Cheney told Sean Hannity the other night. "I thought the Tea Parties were great, " he volunteered. "I think that when you get that kind of grassroots sentiment being expressed — thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people all across the country — that will have an impact on Capitol Hill. It will have an impact, I think, on the political process, and it's basically a healthy development." A refreshing contrast to WH adviser David Axelrod's nasty and unfounded insinuation that our perfectly lawful dissent "can mutate into something that's unhealthy."

"Get your history straight, cut down on the pretentious vocabulary and stop sounding so superior," writes commenter David Lott in a brilliant fisking of that intellectually bankrupt Harvard Crimson Tea Party editorial we flogged blogged here yesterday. For the tribes of history-challenged opinionators who don't seem to have the time or inclination to get their facts straight, Lott's concise history lesson should be a must-read:

The original Boston Tea Party wasn't about taxation without representation. It was about elimination of a tax, the tea duty, that had protected domestic merchants.

The original Tea Party wasn't spontaneous either …

The original tea party had a bit of excess rhetoric too, plus dressing as Indians and destroying British property. And the Royalist reaction of the British was not unlike the Crimson's in its underestimation, mistrust and attitude of superiority.

"The Royalist reaction." That's it! The Rahm-Emanuel-choreographed reaction of White House and media allies to the Tea Party phenomenon — like their earlier Alinskyesque jihad against Rush Limbaugh — is the modern-day equivalent of the reaction of American colonists loyal to Great Britain to the upstart Patriots: "Underestimation, mistrust and [an] attitude of superiority."

The 18th-Century Pats believed, as John Adams wrote, that "Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom." But in the wake of the 20th-Century Gramscian march through the institutions, promulgated through the insidious propagandizing of future teachers by "critical pedagogy" proselytizers like President Obama's old pal Bill Ayers, all too many children of the 21st-Century — even some of the best and the brightest who sit on the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson — don't seem to understand the fragility of this thing that is their birthright. In Ben Franklin's words, oft quoted here, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

Update: "It’s your must-read article of the day, so what are you waiting for?" blogs fellow Boston Tea Partier Stoutcat of Grand Rants:

Sissy weaves a wonderful web involving Dick Cheney, the recent round of Tea Parties, and the Harvard Crimson’s imitation of Thurston Howell III ["a stereotypical member of the Northeastern White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Yankee elite" in the Sixties sitcom Gilligan's Island] as they reported on the Tea Parties.

That Thurston Howell III reference is inspired!

Comments

[Gayle Miller]

Thanks for including a picture of the devastatingly gorgeous Dick Cheney with your post.

If for no other reason than keeping them distracted and off balance, we must keep up our tea party protests throughout the summer months. Perhaps the disorder will prevent the passage of some truly astoundingly horrid legislation!

[goomp]

It is interesting that understanding of our personal motives as well as those of other people is so absent in some people with very high IQs. If one doesn't understand human nature, almost any theory of how to conduct society can become a crusade. Let us hope the Tea Parties can cause them to reflect on what makes a productive society.

[Gayle Miller]

We don't take to the streets as often as do the Leftwingers - we have JOBS and responsibilities that we take seriously! And as to people with very high IQs, I fall into that category and generally speaking, I try to understand what drives the Left. But they're such children that it's hard for me to remember that far back!

[Stoutcat]

Oh Gayle, thank goodness! I really thought I was the only one who found Mr. Cheney immensely attractive.