Irksome, Tedious & Banal

Tax Bagging is tiresome & tiring. Let brad of Fire Megan McArdle show you. 

So let's be done w/ it. We lead w/ local Marc Cooper in the local Chicago-owned cage liner:

Whip out your Lipton and don your tinfoil hat and join the protest against ... against ... against what exactly? The original Boston Tea Party was caffeinated by a very simple injustice: American Colonists refused to be taxed by a government that lacked any popular representation. That was remedied a few years later in a heroic struggle that stretched from Concord to Yorktown. So, if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor, what's the beef behind today's protests? The Obama administration is cutting taxes for all except the very richest of Americans. Reduced withholding is already showing up in millions of paychecks.

Gee, who knows? Probably not the obvious. (61% of those polled recently by Gallup thought the taxes they paid were "fair," oddly enough.)

Perhaps speaking to participants can give us a better idea. From YAP:

"Frankly, I'm mad as hell," said businessman Doug Burnett at a rally at the Iowa Capitol, where many of the about 1,000 people wore red shirts declaring "revolution is brewing." Burnett added: "This country has been on a spending spree for decades, a spending spree we can't afford."

Decades, you say? What took you so long?

There were several small counter-protests, including one that drew about a dozen people at Fountain Square in Cincinnati. A counter-protester held a sign that read, "Where were you when Bush was spending billions a month 'liberating' Iraq?" The anti-tax demonstration there, meanwhile, drew about 4,000 people.

Turnout in cities was much lower than in the suburban/rural areas where the less educated & more-ignorant prefer to congregate.

What were they protesting again?

Other protesters also took direct aim at Obama. One sign in the crowd in Madison, Wis., compared him to the anti-Christ. At a rally in Montgomery, Ala., where Twisted Sister's "We're Not Gonna Take It" blared from loudspeakers, Jim Adams of Selma carried a sign that showed the president with Hitler-style hair and mustache and said, "Sieg Heil Herr Obama."

There's a bit of a clue, eh? They can't call him a "nigger," that'd be a little too obvious, & some might not approve, but Hitler/Stalin/You-Name-It comparisons are fair game. It's not really that the government is spending zillions of dollars (in order to stimulate the fucking economy, mind you) it's that a colored gentleman is doing it, & rather than corporate welfare, some of it might help people who work rather than invest for a living.

The Atlantic offers crowd estimates. Consensus? Not nearly as many, nation-wide, as for B. O.'s Grant Park victory speech last November. At night. 

Another Atlantean, Andrew Sullivan, asked a somewhat different question. As a big fan of The Bell Curve, he should know exactly what the answer is: Stop spending/wasting our tax dollars on "moochers & losers." Especially if they're of a different skin-tone than Xians like us.Let's be absolutely fair (we're kidding, don't worry) & just note a positive, uplifting report on a South Carolina Bag-Off, from 

The Sniper's Tower

Taking aim at the passing scene

The crowd was exactly what you might expect: defined overall by anti-Obama sentiment, featuring plenty of Fair Tax supporters, Glenn Beck’s “9/12 Project” members, Ron Paul folks, Christians, veterans, rich, poor, middle class and then some. [...] The crowd was a hodge-podge of the grassroots “Right” the Republican/talk radio echo chamber has created – complete with all their predictable catchphrases (whatever happened to “drill, baby, drill?”) - and independent-minded citizens who just genuinely seemed ticked off about massive spending.  [...] Senator Jim DeMint and Gov. Mark Sanford gave brief speeches, followed by numerous very short speeches from various individuals and organization representatives. While there was an emphasis on Obama-bashing, there was no praise for Republicans either, something I believed would be integral to the credibility of the event. Yes, FOX News jumped on board to provide massive coverage of the tea parties - after earlier tea parties showed promise - and Hannity, Heritage and others have tried to make this populist Right event fit nicely into their own neoconservative narratives.

Dig the code: "Defined overall by anti-Obama sentiment," "While there was an emphasis on Obama-bashing." I. e., the crowd was as pasty as in all the photos we're seen online & the broadcast telebision we've seen, network & local. DeMint & Sanford are a pair of winners too. 

The closing lines of this exercise in plagiarism come from Sullivan*, who calls today's events

fatuous pieces of theater, not constructive acts of politics.

And adds that

the right ... deserve to be dismissed as performance artists in a desperate search for coherence in an age that has left them bewilderingly behind.

Snap! *Skunks, Pissing Match Between: Andy & Ann go at each other. Reading crap like this is infinitely better than having a life.