In Which the Washington Bureau Chief Tells You What the Founders Really Thought.

by Eileen McGuire-Mahony | 10:18 pm, April 16, 2009 | Comments Off

Jan Schakowsky, chosen Congressional avatar of the citizens of Illinois’ 9th District, is against tea parties.   Fine, Jan, we say:  don’t have one.

Instead, go have a bit more plastic surgery.  You look more and more like Speaker Mimi all the time.  Representing part of Cook County, she can afford to be mind-bogglingly left.  Which is just what she is going to do.  As one-time Chicago apparatchik Barack Obama is busy insulting allied heads of states and both Rahm and Michelle are being taught how to behave, someone has to take up the burden of being crass and insulting.  Way to go, Jan.

Her latest press release informs us all that tea party participants are ‘shameful’ and ‘despicable’.  There’s the usual drooling over Obama and the obligatory swipe at all job-creating profit-centered enterprises that don’t make regular donations to her.  Yet Jan is particularly irate that the tea party protesters dared to link their activism to the original Boston Tea Party.  As that event concerned rank-and-file citizens who, upset over a bloated government that ignored their wishes while endlessly creating new nickel-and-dime sin taxes to prop itself up, committed a symbolic act to draw attention to their plight, the good Representative feels today’s activists have nothing in common with them and so have no business calling their events ‘tea parties’.

How dare they, “attempt to cheapen a significant, honorable moment of American history with a shameful political stunt” laments the lady.   As Jan’s notable legislative victories include putting freshness dates on supermarket items and protecting America’s tots from ‘unsafe’ toys, we may just forgive her for being in the dark on copyright law.  Someone in her office, though, should have told her.

You cannot legally be the outright owner of an historical event.  Actually, we take back the dig at her office.  As they are all, presumably, registered Democrats, they may not know this.  And that would be the wider failing of a political movement that marches under the banner of every good thing that has ever been done, preferring to gain most of its patina from other people’s work.  Here though, suffice to say, Schakowsky is just the sort of person who likes to justify anything she wants to do on the grounds that the Founders would approve.

But wait, you say, to assume the mantle of being natural heir to the Revolutionary generation isn’t possible unless the Founders were all of one mind anyway and so spoke with one voice.

Good point.  How very astute you are.  Indeed, it does stagger the mind to think the Founders were all mellow fellows who agreed completely on each and every issue.  Now, while raging statists have a definite motive in assuring us that the Founders really did think this way, and that the Revolution worked because everyone was moving passively in the same direction, that America was at its best when people didn’t fight over politics, and that it would be best if we all were similarly obedient to the loudest voice in the room, none of that is true.

The truth of the matter is that the Founders disagreed so much on so many issues that it’s a miracle they didn’t wind up killing each other.  Er, wait…OK, it’s a miracle they didn’t kill each other more often.  Seriously, what kind of hackneyed historical mush is creating adults with the absurd notion that it was one big happy family back in 1776?  Oh, perhaps we should have mentioned a few lines back Jan’s dazzling resume.  She received her degree in elementary education.

Stressing that anyone who worries about an increasing tax burden is nuts, Jan reminds us that, per Barack’s sworn pinky-promise, “not a single American household or business will be taxed at a higher rate this year…”.   Naturally, Jan would be a bit mystified about all the outcry over taxation.  She knows plenty of ideas for handling large, frightening, tax bills.  Yes, they may sometimes be outside the purview of currently accepted practices, but, really, if progressivism isn’t about challenging the dominant order, then what does it mean?

Jan’s husband Robert, or Bob, as he’s known around the yard, served time for tax fraud, bank fraud, and check-kiting.  You may say, if the man was a high-powered lobbyist who often worked for then-Governor Rod Blagojevich and was married to a U.S. Congresswoman, yet he still couldn’t avoid a conviction and jail sentence in Chicago, how guilty was the son of a bitch?  Well, not at all.  Jan always insisted he was innocent.  And she would know better than anyone.  After all, she co-signed the fradulent tax returns and sat on the board of the group he was defrauding while the fraud was ongoing.

Anyway, Jan isn’t going to take these tea parties seriously  It is, after all, just a fringe group of radicals making noise.  It’s not what America wants.  But, you ask, haven’t fringe groups of radicals played parts in major political events before?  Events like the American Revolution?  Don’y be a silly goose, we say.  Jan knows what America wants.  The overwhelmingly liberal enclave she represents keeps voting for her and ultra-progressive interest groups keep giving her high ratings.  The Nation endorsed her.  She’s pals with Pelosi.  Really, how could she be out of touch?

Jan, of course, is right.  While the estimated quarter of a million poeple who took time to particpate on tea parties yesterday is an easily ignored stunt, the thing only vile right-wingers do, the fact that an entire day of canvassing garnered all of 700 supporters of Obama’s tax plan is proof that America wants socialism.  If you don’t think the numbers support that analysis, you just don’t understand Chicago style vote counting.  If you’re tempted to point out that the Boston Tea Party only involved a handful of people so it’s kind of hard to call that a hallowed moment once you’ve already declared it alright to ignore small groups, then just hush.  You’re obviously far too sensible to be talking to members of Congress.

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