Have you heard the one about the CEO, the tea partier and the union guy?

They’re at a table with a dozen cookies piled on a plate. The CEO grabs eleven cookies, turns to the tea partier and whispers in his ear, “Watch out for that union guy. He wants part of your cookie.”

Here’s the rest of the story: After the tea party guy falls all over himself thanking the CEO for the one cookie left, the CEO pays for him to take a bus to to the Wisconsin state capital to whoop it up for Republican Scott Walker’s union-busting bill.

The tea party’s billionaire bankrollers want us to believe “just plain folks” make up the movement. But these plain folks love doing for rich people, who con them, usually with phony appeals to patriotism and religion (and snicker at them behind their backs for being such gullible souls).

History – the subject I teach — is filled with plenty of examples of regular folks doing for rich folks. While the tea partiers fancy themselves patriots in the mold of 1776 and all that, they remind me of those less-than-well-heeled American Tories who sided with old Mother Britain’s rich powers-that-be in the name of King and Country.

Anyway, my friend Jim Pence, who does The Hillbilly Report blogsite here in Kentucky, must have had the tea partiers at least partly in mind when he aptly observed: “Never before have so few with so much promised to take away so much from so many and then laugh their asses off as the so many with so little vote for the so few with so much.”

Berry Craig

AFT Local 1360