It’s been months (she explains why at the top of her new post.) Favorite Daughter is all grown up now, seriously, an independent-thinking upper division university student in a liberal southern town, making her own decisions and commanding language including four-letter words and urban slang exactly as she sees fit, to self-satisfying effect.
Unschooling was never more empowering; free speech was never freer!
Any incoherent homeschool bloggers indulging in political rants absent similar command of critical thinking and language, will want to batten the hatches.
Teabagging John Adams, or a brief list of things about which I have recently become enraged
People just don’t think anymore. If they thought ever. Check out this woman, who I’ve written about before.
She’s the kind of American who made me want to tell foreigners I was Canadian during the Bush administration, and she’s the kind of homeschooling mom who (still) makes me want to tell people I was public-schooled.
I think she thinks it’s unfair that I mention her as often as I do, but that’s no way to look at it. Shouldn’t the criticism of an elitist intellectual pinko atheist draft-dodging book-reader like myself give her lots of street cred in the Ron Paul supporter bunker-living community? And after all, isn’t horrified fascination the sincerest form of flattery?
And now we reach the true poetic irony of this whole situation:
Oh, but they did research tea bagging. They searched Conservepedia and nothing came up
So you’re saying they couldn’t get it up . . .
You two!
Now, thanks to FavD, I am even more nervous about these teabaggers, though. Her link to crazy-homeschooler-land leads to a claim that all this teabagging started with a pro-militia group. And crazy-hsing-lady is proud of it!
The pro-militia group carefully states that they are for and, at the same time, against militias. It’s all very confusing.
“Committees of Safety Public Policy Statement and Disclaimer
“Committees of Safety is an organization dedicated to the individual and collective exercise of Americans’ freedoms of speech, association, and petition under the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, for the ultimate purpose of revitalizing “the Militia of the several States” under the Second Amendment and other provisions of the Constitution of the United States and the constitutions and laws of the several States. Committees of Safety is not now, and does not intend to become, any kind of “private militia”, “para-military group”, “firearms-training association”, “gun-rights organization”, or other entity of like nature or purpose.”
There’s more — http://www.committeesofsafety.org/
Nance
I think it couldn’t be clearer, nor much more chilling: They are dedicated to speech, association and petition. With guns.
There’s a Tommy Lee Jones line in the movie “Men in Black” to remember here. Will Smith argues that people are smart, and Jones retorts: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”
I thought of that reading FavD. Something remarkable to me is the degree to which the Founding Fathers worked together yet each thought for himself and didn’t exploit or pander to mobs. Is that why, perhaps, we fared better than France with our people’s revolution? Hmmm. . .
Right now I’m reading Steven Johnson’s book about their brilliant contemporary Joseph Priestley; maybe I should blog about him in this context.
Well, you know, I’m a teabagger.
And, I can pretty much guarantee that I am not anywhere close to being a follower. Plus, I wasn’t protesting taxes. I have no problem paying taxes. Besides which, I pretty much don’t pay them, anyway. Contrary to popular opinion, lower middle class and the poor don’t pay much in taxes. I’m not sure how that is fair. Since I have 3 children, we don’t pay ANY income taxes. Yet, we still make enough to own a 3600 sq ft house, two cars and an acre and a half in a very good neighborhood. I’m not sure why I need a reduction in taxes.
However, I don’t agree with what the government is using tax money for. I don’t agree with the government giving out so much money. So, THAT is what I am protesting.
But, I’m not here to argue that point. We won’t agree. What I am here to do is laugh. You see, Friday night, a friend of mine was talking about her 13 year old daughter. Her daughter had to give an oral report on an experiment she did for science. Her experiment included two balls. She was disgusted by what she called the “immature behavior of the boys.” Yet, that is what so many adults (across the spectrum- journalists, bloggers, senators, etc.) are doing with this whole teabagging thing.
Quite frankly, I think it is funny that people are attacking the teabag movement based on such sophmoric humor. So, thanks for the laugh!
Oh, and let me make clear, I am not offended by the sophmoric humor (although it seems that a lot of idiots are). That would be hypocritical of me when I am almost always sophomoric. And, the term doesn’t disgust me, although it isn’t my cup of tea.
I am finding it humorous how disgusted and offended people are getting over this.
Hi Kristina, refreshingly straight talk, as usual.
I know what you mean about sophomoric machismo from the boys (and girls who see the world through patria – lenses). Only funny when it remains bluster though, not when disturbed people take it to heart.
There’s SO many layers to all this that is sophomoric but not funny, to me! Secession over states rights for example is an economically violent threat, thus no joke. Reading Texas history as recently as 20 years ago, it’s gun-violent too.
Various hanging and burning signs picturing the president and other elected officials suffering and dying from various mob violence and/or committing violent crimes, wow. Not funny. A very fat white man in shades and a baseball cap held a large white sign at the Chicago tax revolt declaring:
“The American Taxpayers are the Jews for Obama’s Ovens.” Same dude had another sign or maybe it was the backside of the same one (ha! sophomoronic joke then, because he surely was showing his backside!) depicting Hitler with Obama’s head and the nasty little signature moustache, reading: “Barack Hussein Obama, the New Face of Hitler.”
Or look to Tampa where another doughy white good ol’ boy in shades, carries a red-white-and-blue patriotic poster of Uncle Sam’s throat being slit by a menacing, evil black Obama caricature sneaking up on us from behind, with his campaign word “CHANGE.” Or at the Arizona um, tax protest? — the truly sophomoric and urban sex equivalent to teabaggery, a “joke” cartoon of long-tongued Obama bent deep in front of a robed shiek, captioned: “Obama was not bowing. He was sucking Saudi jewels!”
Yep, I am a bit disgusted and offended by all that if these soft, white, overfed boys-to-men looking like Biggest Loser candidates are just joking around in some impotently sophomoric way. But I am REALLY disgusted and offended if they mean it, see it as a road to their own empowerment over the rest of us.
Guns and war and double-dog dares, tough-guy torture if necessary (did you hear about the also very white, soft, overfed Rush Limbaugh slapping himself in the face on air, to mock the torture memos and prove his own toughness?)
He’s fabulously, obscenely wealthy, overindulgent in every possible sense of the word — not from inventing or creating or contributing anything, nor from serving the public in any way, just from advertising revenue to spew his trademarked disaffection as if it were a basic public commodity — and yet he rails against taxes and government spending and environmental regulations with increasing incivility. I wasn’t laughing at him either. An Emmy-winning Esquire commentator wrote “The Conservatives’ Dangerous Game of Hate and Consequences” and that’s basically where I’ve been since last summer, when Sarah Palin first opened her lipsticked pitbull trash-talking faux-macho mouth, and started in on a well-disciplined man mentally, emotionally and even physically, whose diplomacy and statesmanship restrains him from taking their bait. Banking on Americans to follow his lead instead of theirs.
(Joe Scarborough is ranting on my tv this morning, that Obama looks dangerously “weak” by being pleasant and not rising to Hugo Chavez dissing America and calling our leaders devils. But Joe, that’s why he won in the first place, remember? — because he debated McCain with a smile on his face and didn’t fight back against sophomoric insults! His own supporters moaned, wailed and criticized him for looking weak, said he had to defend himself . . . they were wrong and Joe is wrong too. And pretty sophomoric!)
OTOH, this more intellectually defensible comment was in the NYT yesterday: