Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Ltd.

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2009/04/16/garofalo-tea-partiers-are-all-racists-who-hate-black-president

I became aware of the above story while listening to Mark Levin’s radio show today; I haven’t decided if I like his show (although Liberty and Tyranny is an excellent read), mainly because he yells a little too much for my tastes.  Anyway, he played a clip on his April 17th show from Keith Olberman’s show on MSNBC, in which Olberman was interviewing Janeane Garafalo about the Tax Day Tea Parties.

Exactly why Garafalo was on the show I’m not sure, and it should be evident from the clip and transcript linked to above that she had no idea what she was talking about.  The main gist of her argument was that the Tea Parties were all about hating a black president.  While it may be true that some of the criticisms of the president often take a personal tone (I’m not a big fan of signs stating One Big-Ass Mistake America, for example), very little of that criticism reaches anywhere near the level of mean-spiritedness that was displayed by much of the Left during the Bush Administration.

What I found interesting is that in all the hours of footage MSNBC no doubt had of the tea-parties, at no point could they actually air an example of the kind of racism Garafalo denounced.  Surely if such footage existed, it would have been broadcast all over, but the closest they can come to it are people holding signs with a hammer and sickle in the blue field of the American flag.

Without any sort of actual proof, Garafalo’s statements must be interepreted thus: any criticism of President Obama must be racially motivated.  Whether Garafalo means this sincerely or not is not really important; if she does, she’s an idiot, and if she doesn’t, she’s a liar and an idiot.  I’ll let you decide which one you like better.  However, this is just the sort of mindless “Agree with us or else” mentality the Left is famous for, all the while accusing their opponents of the same thing.

In all of this, one of the most insulting things Garafalo said in this rant is that the Tea Party attendees had no concept of history, that they don’t understand what the Boston Tea Party was about.  Let’s examine that for a moment, however, and see what the Boston Tea Party was  about.

A quick perusal of the Wikipeida article on the Boston Tea Party gives us what we need.  There were two major issues that the Boston Tea Party was about.  The first and most well known is “Taxation without representation,” the famous slogan of the American Revolution.  Garafalo is correct that we do not (ostensibly) have “Taxation without representation” in the United States.  However, the second issue is the one that is most applicable today.  The protestors were also protesting that their taxes were going to subsidize the government-sponsored monopoly of the British East India Company.

The relevance of this should be obvious: government taxation going to a private company and the subversion the open market (“smuggling”).  The Boston Tea Party is a perfect example of a protest against government interferrence in the open market and unfair taxation.  Perhaps Garafalo should reexamine the history for herself.

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