Tea Party patriot, indeed
Sen. Mike Lee wants to make sure you know that he and the Tea Partiers did not cause the S&P downgrade:
Last night on his Fox Business show, Judge Andrew Napolitano lit upon a truth. "Some people blame the S&P downgrade on the Tea Party," he explained, inviting his guest, freshman Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), to disagree. "Did you cause this downgrade, Senator Lee?" he asked, tongue-in-cheek. [...]
LEE: No, I certainly didn't. You know, I'm a little bit perplexed and slightly bemused by the fact that people are actually saying this. This is the most preposterous argument I've ever heard of. It's a little bit like blaming the fact that the British were coming on Paul Revere.
Well... hmm. Far be it from me to get into an argument with Republicans over Paul Revere (cough), but I think Lee's analogy is lacking something. Let's take his supposition that the Tea Party is like Paul Revere at face value, or hat value, since the hat seems to be the defining thing in any of these comparisons. That would make Wall Street the British, or perhaps just the credit ratings agencies are the British—it's not entirely clear, but close enough.
I suppose, then, that the debt ceiling situation could best be compared to the time when Paul Revere, hearing from his friends that the British were coming, holed himself up in a tavern with fifty hostages and swore he would shoot them all, then burn down the entire town and surrounding countryside unless he was paid off handsomely.
Oh, the colonists tried mightily to negotiate with that drunken silversmith, but he was so sloshed and his speech was so slurred that nobody could quite tell what his demands actually were. Something about the price of grain nowadays, and wanting to get the nation back on the ale standard, and there was also a long and confusing speech on how the damn free market should decide how many lanterns to hang, not some bureaucrat in an ivory church tower.
That was only part of the problem, though: it soon became apparent that the closer the British got, the more obstinate and belligerent the ostensible patriot became. With every reached agreement, he would move on to demanding something entirely different, and increasingly strange: that the laws of the colony be rewritten, or that the wealthy not be subject to certain tariffs when going freshwater boating, or some such nonsense. Each new demand was prefaced and suffixed by own drunken assertions of his extreme patriotism, which none of his hostages thought was in very good taste. (Ben Franklin went so far as to call him an affhole, which in colonial-speak, was quite the insult indeed.)
The standoff only ended when the colonists agreed to give Paul Revere literally everything he asked for, and a few other things besides. The tavern was renamed Paul Revere's Tavern, and city was renamed Reveretown, and the colony itself was renamed Reverachusetts, and a referendum was to be called on a series of other demands known as Revere's New Laws. The colonists even agreed that they would all come back in ten weeks time to be hostages again, because Revere even insisted on that, in the end. The deal finalized, the colonists all rushed out into the night, prepared to confront the British—but it was too late.
Yes, the troops had passed through unmolested, and with disastrous results for the American independence movement. The night had resulted in a total loss, but Revere had no regrets on any of it.
On the contrary, he appeared on Fox News (well, the equivalent of it, back in the day, which was a large heap of manure on the edge of town) and chided the rest of the colonists on how the British would not have made it through, had they just accepted all his various demands sooner, and how the entire thing was their fault because he tried to warn them of it. "The colonies are a hostage worth ransoming," he said plainly. It was hardly the end of it: ten weeks later, his hostages even returned to the same tavern, as promised—but that, dear aficionados of Tea Party history, is a story for another day.
I will admit, I never knew as much about Paul Revere as I have learned in only these last few months, after he became a beacon for lectures on everything from free market independence to second amendment rights, and from bell-ringing to outright extortion. As far as I had known, he was just a fellow from a poem, but the real Revere was apparently a far more colorful figure than we, as schoolchildren, had been led to believe. So kudos to the esteemed Senator for bringing Revere into the spotlight once more.