Lifted from this guy’s twitter feed, on the beautiful coherence of the Teahadist movement:
It’s amusing that those guys use American independence mythology and imagery, yet use “anti-colonial” thinking as an insult?
Yeah, Obama’s supposed big sin is that he believes colonialism wasn’t so great. As opposed to our ersatz founding fathers in tri-corner hat drag who think colonialism was swell. Just like the real founding fathers!
Is there any doubt that these folks would have been the loyalists complaining about the liberals with their revolution talk way back when it counted?
Morans.
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September 17, 2010 at 8:41 am
No, see, “the true heirs of MLK’s mission” are pro-colonial because, um, something.
September 17, 2010 at 9:32 am
When they read American history, the only thing they can relate to is a ‘tory.’ You know, a conservative who likes a king, an interventionist military policy, slavery, and wealth.
September 17, 2010 at 10:04 am
Hmm. Why does that “salt of the earth, the common clay” quote from “Blazing Saddles” come to mind?
September 17, 2010 at 11:15 am
You’d think that with the Teabaggers’ obsession with personal freedom and supposed love of small, non-invasive government, that they’d be anticolonial as well but hell, cognitive dissonance isn’t something they’re comfortable addressing.
September 17, 2010 at 8:38 pm
Except the founding fathers (no apostrophe needed, why do people put apostrophes in plurals?) weren’t anticolonial. They were there, after all, because of colonizing by Britain. They simply felt they were as worthy and had as many rights as people in Mother England. Therefore, they had the right to self-determination. (“You’re not the boss of me.”)
“Anti-colonial” Americans had no problem occupying land seized or swindled from native American peoples, or with expanding their territory west. Revolutionary Thomas Jefferson had no problem as president with buying the Mississippi valley from Napoleon Bonaparte – both assuming that the French had a right to sell the territory.
The “sale” really was, of course, a gentleman’s agreement (I use “men” deliberately; no women consulted) among Anglo-Americans and European powers over who got to seize the land’s resources with no regard to the people already living there.
In short, the Tea Partiers’ cognitive dissonance is totally American, a mindset from the earliest days of the U.S.
September 18, 2010 at 3:22 am
no apostrophe needed, why do people put apostrophes in plurals?
For the same reason people mispell words: occasional carelessness.
September 18, 2010 at 6:39 am
How about the sign on a residence that says “The Smith’s”? Drives me crazy.
September 18, 2010 at 8:42 pm
Didn’t mean to pick on you about the apostrophe – it’s just that I see it everywhere and I can’t figure out where it comes from. I’ve also seen it on verbs like “run’s” for “runs.”
The nuns who taught me grammar must be rolling in their graves (or beds – some of those nuns live a very long time).
September 20, 2010 at 6:19 am
I see what you did there with “mispell.” Subtle.
September 18, 2010 at 8:16 am
Glad to hear someone make that point. The American Revolution was not anti-colonial; it was simultaneously pro-colonial and anti-monarchy.
September 20, 2010 at 10:12 am
Yeah Tom Paine was such a colonialist/repressive/slaveholding member of the kyriarchy.
September 21, 2010 at 9:13 pm
Not trying to make any point other than that the American Revolution was a revolution of colonists, not the colonized.
September 18, 2010 at 5:06 am
This amused me:
Thomas Jefferson:
“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”
Glen Urquhart, Republican nominee for the at-large House seat in Delaware:
“The exact phrase ‘separation of Church and State’ came out of Adolph Hitler’s mouth, that’s where it comes from. Next time your liberal friends talk about the separation of Church and State ask them why they’re Nazis.”
September 18, 2010 at 6:31 am
You know, these guys always imagine themselves on the winning side of the fight. It’s like people who think they had past lives — they’re always a hero or heroine, somebody amazing, never a chump, third extra from the left in the back of the movie.
If they’d been around for the Revolutionary War chances are just as good they’d have been a supply clerk who died of cholera than they’d have been General Washington.
A.
September 18, 2010 at 8:21 am
Or a Tory.
September 19, 2010 at 5:50 am
The teabaggers are perfectly consistent. Colonialism is bad when white people are oppressed by it. It is good when the dusky folk are benefitting from it. Conversely, anticolonialism by white people is good, because of freeance and peeance. Anticolonialism of the dusky is irrational–they don’t know what’s good for them.
(Yes, and I know one can make a serious argument that colonialism was a force for economic development in India. But the teabaggers don’t distinguish between India and the Belgian Congo, except maybe that some Indians are only lightly brown.)
September 19, 2010 at 2:48 pm
Some of those Loyalists might have been complaining about the slave-owning bastards who hijacked the movement. They may even be satisfied with how Canada turned out.
September 20, 2010 at 7:22 am
Other than the pleasure of jeering Special Olympics, I can’t figure why we pay these cretins any attention. They don’t pay attention to us.
September 21, 2010 at 3:35 pm
Must drive car. Must eat frozen prepared meal. Must make call on cell phone. Must obey cable news. Must obey pundits.