Ridiculing Tea Parties is popular, but isn't working

Tom Blumer at Bizzy Blog had a post Friday with a terrific chart showing how the first six months of this fiscal year compares to the same period last year.

The revenue is down 16%, the expenditures are up 33% and the deficit is up 206%.

As Tom says:

"If spending continues at the rate seen during this year’s first six months, the government will exceed last year’s outlays on July 6.

There’s little reason to believe the spending spree will slow down."

Today's Blade editorial asks where was all the angst from Tax Day Tea Party attendees when the Bush administration was spending money? Apparently, they missed the fact that Democrats gained control specifically because conservatives became disillusioned with our 'leaders' spending habits.

The Tea Parties weren't the manifestation of a new, suddenly-found anger over spending - that anger and frustration with elected officials and their decisions has been growing for a long time, but with the Obama administration - and more specifically Congress - taking us over the deep end, citizens reached the tipping point.

Leftists are trying to ridicule and denigrate not only the sentiment of the Tea Parties, but the participants as well. And their own anger is rising because it's not working.

As Ann Coulter explained:

"I had no idea how important this week's nationwide anti-tax tea parties were until hearing liberals denounce them with such ferocity."

The Tea Parties are based upon principles - our country's and our citizen's. Just like when you attempt to make fun of a person's religious beliefs, trying to belittle the principles of life, liberty and property will not work. It will only make Tea Party protesters more resolute in their support of and admonition for those principles.

The Blade also gets it wrong in terms of the idea of 'taxation without representation.' Yes, that is the familiar phrase we all associate with the original Boston Tea Party - and the Blade tries to make the point that we have representation, even if we don't like the decisions such representatives are making on our behalf. Funny, I don't remember this logic being employed against the leftists who cried that 'Bush wasn't THEIR president.'

But Leslie Carbone has a more comprehensive explanation of that original event, explaining:

"The financial cost of the tax was not the issue inflaming the colonists. The true issue was the moral question of whether or not Britain had the right to tax the colonists at all without their consent.(emphasis added)
...
Americans today face similar tyranny. We made it crystal clear that we do not consent to the ersatz financial palliatives offerred in the form of the bank bail-out, the auto bail-out, and the so-called stimulus. Government made it clear that it doesn't care whether we consent or not, and blew billions of dollars on each of these outrages, billions that we don't have, meaning that the money has been borrowed from Americans yet unborn, the ultimate taxation without representation.

Just as it did in the middle of the 18th century, popular resistance to this kind of tyranny is building. And some of it is finding expression in "tea parties" across the nation."

And the fear of these protesters in light of Bizzy Blog's chart is well-founded.

So go ahead and laugh at us and call us names. You can ridicule us and say that we're not a socialist nation.

Our reply will be 'not yet - and we're going to do all we can to prevent us from getting to that point.'

And as parents say to their children when they've gotten out of line, "someday you'll thank us for this."

UPDATE: I strongly recommend this column from Lorie Byrd, especially the last several paragraphs about 'what we learned.'