The Tea Party Loves Thomas Paine

Tea baggers like Glenn Beck, and others, like to give their simple-message-for-simple-minded-people, i.e., "common sense <fill in the blank>" an air of respectability by saying (and writing) that (certain) founding fathers would have embraced their nonsense.  That's BULLSHIT!!! 


One of their favorites is Thomas Paine, who published a pamphlet entitled, Common Sense, in 1776.  Glenn Beck likened himself to Paine by putting out a book that looks like, and has the same name as, Paine's Common Sense.

Beck has the audacity to claim the book was inspired by Thomas Paine.  Apparently not inspired enough to actually read anything Paine wrote.  Paine would have had a field day ripping apart Beck's Mormon pseudo-religion.  For one thing, it hadn't yet been invented in Paine's time.  (I have Beck's book but just can't seem to read more than half a page before I get distracted.)

Lately I've seen a banner on a Tea Party website for a book put out by some knuckleheads called "The American Civil Rights Union."  They're a bunch of religious kooks who hate Obama and the ACLU.  The book is called, These are the Times that Try Men's Souls, America - Then and Now In The Words of Tom Paine.

"What would Thomas Paine Say?"

He'd probably say, "FUCK OFF!!!"  What's funny is that Tea Partiers refer to people who are smarter than them, like Obama, as "elitists."  Obviously they hadn't thoroughly vetted Paine because, if they had, they would have known he was an elitist of the highest order.  Paine was involved with a group called the Society of Twelve, a local, élite intellectual group while living in England.  However, for now, Thomas Paine is their man.

"A new generation of American patriots — Tea Partiers, among many other ordinary citizens — will learn that their contemporary cause aspires to the same ideal as Paine’s: freedom. This book will become a classic in the literature of liberty.” - Colin A. Hanna, president, Let Freedom Ring

“Every Tea Partier and political candidate must read John Armor’s revival of Thomas Paine’s works to best understand what we’re
fighting for, and against, in 2010 and 2012." — Jed Babbin

Hey Tea Baggers...after you're done reading that, I've got some more shit you can read:

"The Christian system of religion is an outrage on common sense." - Thomas Paine

"Yet this is trash that the Church imposes upon the world as the Word of God; this is the collection of lies and contradictions called the Holy Bible! this is the rubbish called Revealed Religion!" - Thomas Paine

"What is it the Bible teaches us? - raping, cruelty, and murder. What is it the New Testament teaches us? - to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married, and the belief of this debauchery is called faith." - Thomas Paine

"All the tales of miracles, with which the Old and New Testament are filled, are fit only for imposters to preach and fools to believe."  - Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine Quotations

BTW, Jed Babbin, who is quoted up above, was not the guy on "The Beverly Hillbillies."  He was in the H. W. Bush Administration.  I found this on Wikipedia:

Babbin feels that the Zumwalt class destroyer is less expensive and more effective than the Arleigh Burke class destroyer, however Admiral Gary Roughead, the Chief of Naval Operations has said that the switch away from the Zumwalt was in response to emerging threats and it would be less expensive to build new Burkes than it would be to reconfigure the Zumwalt to match the Navy's needs.

 That's all it says!!!  WTF?  But I did find a funny quote by him on there:

"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. You just leave a lot of useless, noisy baggage behind!" - on Hardball, January 30, 2003

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