{"id":3462,"date":"2010-11-25T00:49:41","date_gmt":"2010-11-25T08:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=3462"},"modified":"2010-11-25T00:51:25","modified_gmt":"2010-11-25T08:51:25","slug":"lord-im-not-thankful-for-the-tea-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2010\/11\/25\/lord-im-not-thankful-for-the-tea-party\/","title":{"rendered":"Lord, I’m Not Thankful for the Tea Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Thanksgiving\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Lord, I\u2019m thankful for each new day, but I\u2019m not thankful for the Tea Party.\u00a0 I\u2019m thankful that I have a roof over my head, but I\u2019m not thankful for for the Tea Party.\u00a0 I\u2019m thankful that, though poor, I have enough food to share with those less fortunate than I, but I\u2019m not thankful for for the Tea Party.\u00a0 And I\u2019m thankful for the friends who read and comment here, but I\u2019m not thankful for for the Tea Party.\u00a0 Why?<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never seen a group of people so willing to believe the most outrageous lies without the slightest effort to fact check them, and continue to do believe them, even when confronted with proof.\u00a0 Here\u2019s an example fitting for today.<\/span><\/p>\n

Forget what you learned about the first Thanksgiving being a celebration of a bountiful harvest, or an expression of gratitude to the Indians who helped the Pilgrims through those harsh first months in an unfamiliar land. In the Tea Party view of the holiday, the first settlers were actually early socialists. They realized the error of their collectivist ways and embraced capitalism, producing a bumper year, upon which they decided that it was only right to celebrate the glory of the free market and private property. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Historians quibble with this interpretation. But the story, related by libertarians and conservatives for years, has taken on new life over the last year among Tea Party audiences, who revere early American history, and hunger for any argument against what they believe is the big-government takeover of the United States.<\/p>\n

It has made Thanksgiving another proxy in the debate over health care and entitlement spending, and placed it alongside the New Deal and the Constitution on the platter of historical items picked apart by competing narratives<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

There are other debates about Thanksgiving \u2014 whether the first was in Jamestown, Va., or Plymouth, Mass.; whether it was intended as a religious holiday or not. But broadly, the version passed on to generations of American schoolchildren holds that the settlers who had arrived in the New World on the Mayflower in 1620 were celebrating the next year\u2019s good harvest, sharing in the bounty with Squanto and their other Indian friends, who had taught them how to hunt and farm on new terrain\u2026 [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <NY Times<\/a>><\/p>\n

I quibble with the official version as well, because that initial harvest was not all that bountiful.\u00a0 The pilgrims were not sharing their bounty with poor savages as the official account portrays.\u00a0 The Native Americans went hunting and brought the meat to the feast.\u00a0 Inviting a guest to Thanksgiving dinner is not an act of charity when the guest brings the turkey.\u00a0 So Lord, I\u2019m thankful that Native Americans shared their bounty with the rest of us, but I\u2019m still not thankful for the Tea Party.<\/span><\/p>\n

Happy Thanksgiving to you all.<\/span><\/p>\n

Off topic: I may be sporadic for a couple days.\u00a0 See today\u2019s Open Thread.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lord, I\u2019m thankful for each new day, but I\u2019m not thankful for the Tea Party.\u00a0 I\u2019m thankful that I have a roof over my head, but I\u2019m not thankful for for the Tea Party.\u00a0 I\u2019m thankful that, though poor, I have enough food to share with those less fortunate than I, but I\u2019m not thankful […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,145,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","category-holiday","category-politics","category-19-id","category-145-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3462\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}