The FOX sponsored Tea Party: The kind of bloody waste that would make a vampire weep

(The Republican platform, anno 2009…)

First, this:

“Blood transfusions routinely carried out after heart surgery could be wasting vital blood supplies and putting patients at risk, researchers suggest. Cardiac surgery uses almost ten per cent of all donor blood in Britain.”

Now, you would have to agree that that is a tale to make a vampire weep. Still, today’s column is not about vampires, or heart surgery – though it has to do with bloody minded waste.

Now, I wonder how many people still know the full story behind the original Boston Tea Party. If you want, you can read a bit more about it HERE but, basically, it was a tax protest by American colonists against the British government - with ‘No taxation without representation’ as the T-shirt slogan du jour.

So, it won’t come as a big surprise to hear that FOX News had been lobbying for a new Boston Tea Party, for quite a long time.

I will leave it to others (well, Jon Stewart mostly) to point out the deep hypocrisy of the FOX crowd and the few surviving hardcore Republicans on their latter-day Raft of the Medusa.

As I said, today, I’m talking about waste – and this remake of the Boston Tea Party certainly was that. Though not a waste of tea, as it turned out:

“As a tea party, what happened in Lafayette Square across from the White House yesterday was a washout. Organizers of the conservative protest were told at the last minute that they didn’t have a permit to dump a million tea bags in the square, as they had planned.”

So, if not a waste of tea, then what?

Well, according to that article in the Washington Post, the protesters may have been forced to abandon their idea of a true tea party but they did come waving the usual placards and suspect objects. You know the kind of shit that goes on at the rabid fringes of these right wing dos.

There were “Obama bin Lyin” signs; there was a guy holding a Cabbage Patch doll by its hair; a sign reading “Napolitano — Obama’s Gestapo Queen” and the always popular “Hang ‘Em High Traitors.”

All under the all-seeing and all-approving eye of FOX news, who were quite happy to promote and deliver the same kind of message that they carried throughout the whole of the election season: That Obama was a secret (bin Lyin) Muslim who wanted to bring (Gestapo) tyranny to the US of A. With images of racism and the occasional lynching as cheap but highly appreciated extras.

Which brings us back to the promised theme of waste, since, all in all, this was not so much the reenactment of the Boston Tea Party, as a FOX sponsored dumping of toxic waste.

(Fair and balanced indeed: The house that FOX built…)