First up among the suspiciously numerous teabaggers of the day was a gentleman with a thick outer-borough NY accent; let’s just call him Archie from Queens.  He was against taxes, all right, and everything from the tolls of the Port Authority to Social Security taxes for his employees were already nefariously conspiring, to his mind, to take 60% of his earnings.  Referring to the imagined cost of a public option on health care, he said, “What do dey want now,  80 puhcent?”  The sad thing, which must bring a smile to any Economic Royalist still capable of fogging a mirror, is that Archie had a point, albeit not the one he intended: the huge increase in payroll taxes pushed through under Reagan, coupled with the relatively higher tax rates everyone pays so that the rich aren’t “punished,” small business owners, particularly in places like New York, have taken an ever larger share of the load, and see no benefit from it, since the money is hurriedly pissed away on wars, more tax cuts for the rich, and crony capitalism for the largest corporations.  Archie sees government as the problem, which it now effectively is, unless you’re Halliburton.  Paul Krugman once referred to the strategy set forth by the Wall Street Journal a few years back; tax the little guys they disingenuously called the “Lucky Duckies,” more heavily, and they would soon be as virulently anti-tax as Steve Forbes and Rush Limbaugh, put together.  Mission Accomplished.

More disturbingly, but admittedly more comically, along came Karen from Michigan.  In a breathless, twangy diatribe that was equal parts Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, only preachier if such a thing were possible, she said “I don’t want my tax dollars going to pay for the murder of innocent babies….  Planned Parenthood makes millions of dollars off abortion…” and every other teabaggy thing a girl could free associate until the ordinarily quite civil Norm, who had clearly spotted her a mile away, finally interrupted to ask if she had supported the Iraq War, since she was so obviously against the slaughter of innocents.  Speaking more rapidly, angrily, and confidently than ever, she expectorated, “Yes I did because they attacked us first.”  So, she believes that a non-profit outfit like Planned Parenthood was “getting rich,” from government money, something Blackwater would never, ever do, natch, and Iraq had it coming because, well, just because.  Norm immediately pointed out that no one involved in the decision to invade Iraq, with the possible exception of Dick Cheney, still believed that, and basically tore her to shreds, pointing out that the government did a lot of things of which he did not approve, but paying taxes was not like ordering things from a Chinese menu, and finally in frustration saying, “Please, Karen.  Read a newspaper.”  But Karen no doubt hung up triumphant; being debunked by the liberal media is to her, like being awarded a Bush Medal of Freedom.  The more you’re told you’re wrong, the more right you must be.

Back when off-duty prostitute and White House correspondent Jeff Gannon (sic) was pumping up Bush for his imminent “triumph” to be paid for with the political capital (sic) from his 2004 landslide (sic), that is, handing Social Security over to the banksters, he plaintively asked Bush how he could deal with recalcitrant Democrats, who were so hopelessly “divorced from reality.”

How, indeed.