Tea Parties today

"Tea Party" events are being held across the country today. It's tax day, and the timing is not coincidental.

But it's also a work day - for me, and for much of the rest of the country. I am wondering if that timing is also not coincidental - if maybe there is an intent to reach out to the unemployed?

I would like to be able to go, though I don't know if I actually would even if I had the opportunity. My free time is limited, and I don't know if this would be the best use of it.

I would like to see for myself what sorts of ideologies are represented. Do people who are simply Anti-Obama dominate? How many "birthers", people who deny that Barack Obama was born in the United States and is therefore ineligible to be President, and who demand to be personally provided with his original birth certificate, and who reject as lies and fabrications any claims that yes, he really was born in the U.S. and yes, there really is a real birth certificate and no, you don't get to grab it just to satisfy your paranoid delusions...sorry, off on a tangent there. How many "Obama is a Muslim" types, and "Obama is a Socialist" types? How many cries of "TYRANNY!" at the notion that people who were previously denied health-care coverage will now be able to get it? How many of the bizarrely misspelled signs that have become de rigueur at these events, since apparently proper spelling and grammar are elitist concepts?

And how many people who really, sincerely believe in what they are promoting, and are not just trying to put lipstick on a far-right anti-Obama movement? While I'd be interested in getting photos of the other people, the loonies and fringers and fanatics, it's the level-headed true believers I might actually want to talk to.

And I might ask them some questions - most of them starting with the words "Where were you?" Where were you during the Bush administration? I was paying taxes back then, too, while we were getting saddled with an incredibly expensive war in Iraq based on what turned out to be false intelligence - a war that we will be paying for for generations to come? Where were you when closed-door deals on our energy future were being cut by Dick Cheney, and no-bid contracts were being awarded to well-connected firms? Where were you with cries of "TYRANNY!" when David Addington (who?) was undermining and outright violating the Constitution, redefining the powers of the President to be essentially without limits - which was all apparently OK as long as that President was George W. Bush and not Barack H. Obama?

Tea Partiers, where were you? And why did you choose to be silent?

Are you sure this isn't just about how much you hate Barack Obama?