teabagging

To all our teabagging friends, where the f*** was your fiscal conservative outrage over the past 8 years as the president and congress you elected and re-elected took us from a surplus of $128 billion to a deficit of $1.8 trillion? And if you’re from Georgia and just voted to re-elect one of the two senators who helped drive the budget off a cliff, sit down and shut up, especially with all of this talk about “no representation”. I’m the one without congressional representation (now that I’ve moved out to John Linder’s district).

And where was your fear that your freedoms were being taken away when Bush decided, backed up by Congress, that the president could declare anyone, including you, an unlawful enemy combatant and then imprison you for life without recourse? When he decided that the Fourth Amendment and the laws enacted by Congress in support thereof can be ignored? When he decided that your First Amendment right could be curtailed and confined to special Free Speech Zones? When he decided that the military could be used as a police force in the U.S. without any regard to any restrictions in the Bill of Rights?

If Bush were still president he could have sent the military to your tea parties, declared you all unlawful enemy combatants and sent you to Gitmo for the rest of your lives. Not any more though. Bush restored posse comitatus on his way out the door and Obama has dismissed the unlawful enemy combatant designation. True Obama has continued to fight to keep the illegal wiretapping and surveillance laws. But then that doesn’t seem to be why you’re protesting.

In fact, why are you protesting? Is it because you make over $150,000 and so haven’t just gotten a tax cut? Is it because you slept through the election day last November and so missed out on your chance to vote (and don’t realize that there is another federal election next year)? Is it because you didn’t think to contact your representatives and senators and the president with an alternative plan to deal with the economic crisis?

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A mostly unrelated addendum. Cries are starting to go out about how if defense spending goes down, we will be less safe. Apparently the only way to keep us safe is to throw money at the Pentagon. Whereas every year public education is told that they don’t need more money or even the same money as the previous year, they just need to spend a smaller amount of money better. Because if public education spending goes down it certainly won’t make us less smart.