Had enough of the Teabaggers yet? Spitting on congressmen, crashing their planes into IRS buildings, trying to shoot up the Pentagon, spewing racial and homophobic slurs, cutting propane lines, flashing Lyndon LaRoche posters of Obama as an African tribesman, and getting practically everything wrong about the Constitution, sometimes trying to rewrite it entirely. Sam Adams must be rolling over in his grave. The leader of the Sons of Liberty and the Boston Tea Party was protesting taxation without representation, not taxes period. Teabaggers have plenty of representation; the Republican party has chosen to spurn any taxes at all, a recipe for disaster.

First off, the Constitution would never have been ratified without The Federalist Papers, primarily written (with the help of James Madison and John Jay) by Alexander Hamilton, who also founded the first National Bank, which took on the debts of the colonies, furnished national currency, and opened up the borders of the colonies to trade without tariffs. Hamilton was a Federalist, so was George Washington (also a freemason who didn’t attend church all that much and didn’t kneel when he did). Federalists believed in a strong national government. Hamilton would sooner have had sex with his grandmother than associate with a modern tea bagger, and he would never agree that the First Amendment was intended to make America safe for Christianity. It hadn’t been that long since America had its own theocracy at Massachusetts Bay Colony, the so-called “City on the Hill.” Also, home to Salem, Massachusetts, of the famous witchcraft trials. The judges who hanged those women would later blame it on the devil.

Secondly, the Founding Fathers were progressives, forming a democratic Republic with a check and balance system that had never been seen before. Progressism is a dirty word for intellectually challenged conservative columnist, Glen Beck, who gleans his “research” from a Mormon John Bircher. Joe Liebermann gave Beck an opportunity to improve his mental acuity by arranging to get him into Yale. Beck couldn’t finish one class, and the class was about one of his favorite topics, religion. Must’ve been comparative religion. Conservatives at the time of the Revolution were Tories, loyal to the British. Conservatives hate change, although it’s inevitable. They’d rather choke on pollutants than agree to Cap and Trade or that we’re going through climate change. (How about those coral reefs, Limbaugh? BTW, when are you moving to Costa Rica?) Sorry, couldn’t resist. Shall we continue? Add insult to injury and we find that as many as one-third of the signers of The Declaration of Independence were Freemasons, and one of their primary tenets was separation of church and state. As I said, George Washington was a freemason. Conservatives may not like Hamilton much, but they would never have the guts to take on George Washington. Thomas Jefferson and possibility the greatest of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, were deists. Essentially they believed that God created the world and man, then left. He or she or it doesn’t care about abortion or whether man survived.

One of the main themes of George Orwell’s 1984 was the rewriting of history. Conservative right wingers must have been paying attention for a change. A telling quote from Barry Goldwater seems to be all the fashion these days: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Goldwater went on to support the rights of gays in the military and legalization of marijuana, and he hated Robertson and Falwell, so he wasn’t quite the conservative these people make him out to be.

If voters turn the democrats out in November in favor of these troglodytes, they’ll get what they deserve: The new Know-Nothing party.