A Glassele Tay Party

This weekend the National Tea Party Convention is being held in Nashville, TN, just 25 miles from my home. I want to attend, but the $500+ admission fee is too steep. After giving most of our money to bail our Wall Street and Motown, I have no idea where these Tea Party folks are getting the cash to convene. So I can’t attend, but I want to be part of it anyway.

Let me admit up front that I am anti-tax, anti-health care, anti-war, and anti-government. Seriously, I don’t think we should pay any taxes at all. Everything should be on a pay-as-you-go policy. If you want education for your kids and are too lazy to teach them yourself at home, then hire people to do it. You don’t need a huge bureaucracy. Hire someone to teach your kids English, math, science, history, civics, and home economics (not just cooking, but really managing a home and a home-based entrepreneurial business). If you want to feel safe, hire body guards. Police are only good after a crime has been committed, but private security can shoot a mugger mid-mug. If you want healthcare hire a doctor. If you can’t afford healthcare then at least realize you are doing your species a service by dying young and ending a line of looser genes. Of course if would be best if people making less than $250,000 a year didn’t reproduce as well. While I am anti-government, if we are going to subsidize farmers to not grow crops, why not subsidize people making less than 250K a year to not reproduce?

I could go on, but you get the idea: the Tea Party is for me. But there is a problem: I’m Jewish. I’m not saying the Tea Party is anti-Semitic, but from what I can see the only use they have for Jews is either to blame living Jews for the financial meltdown or exploit dead Jews by linking healthcare to the Holocaust. So, sad to say, the Tea Party movement is more for poor white people and the rich white people who manipulate them, than it is for Jews. So what to do?

Growing up in Longmeadow, MA, we had a local country club that excluded Jews and African Americans. I don’t know what the latter did, but we Jews built a cooler club for ourselves; a place where we could exclude African Americans too, and thereby feel as American as those in the white club. Following this tradition, I plan to start my own Jewish Tea Party. No, I won’t exclude anyone, but I will focus on Jewish themes and concerns.

My movement is called the Glassele Tay Party (Yiddish for Glass of Tea; we Eastern European Jews drink tea out of glasses rather than mugs for some reason). Our platform is simple: If the government is for it, we are against it. This is even true if the government is for what we are for, and therefore is against itself. The Glassele Tay Party is flexible enough to be against what we used to be for if and when the government switches its position and is suddenly for what we used to be for. This will assure us perpetual rebel status, making us the darlings of MSNBC and Fox News depending upon which party is in power.

Our logo is a glass of tea with the tea bag in the glass and the string of the tea bag hanging out of the glass and the little paper on the end of the string bearing a Star of David and the words Glassele Tay Party in faux-Hebrew English letters.

Here are some of our slogans:

“There are lions in Africa, and Africans in Lyon.”

“End Socialized Medicine: Get Your Parents Off of Medicare.”

“End Socialism: Burn Your Social Security Card.”

“Take the US out the UN, and the UN out of Unafraid.”

“Drill Baby Drill—Eat Sugar and Support Your Local Dentist.”

“They THINK We’re Stupid. We KNOW We Are.”

“Fresh Underwear—Change We Can Understand.”

“Don’t Throw Barney Frank Under the Bus; End Public Transportation.”

“I will not grab my ankles. In fact I haven’t seen anything beneath my belly in years.”

“Say No to Pork. Say Yes to Brisket.”

“Moses, Jesus, Paul, Groucho, Lenny, and Jon—the most trusted names in Jews.”

Of course it takes money to get something like this off the ground, and you can consider this blog post a fund raising letter. If everyone who reads this blog would send me $10, I could get this party rolling. If everyone sent me $100 I could start the party, fold the party, and retire, but let’s not think too big.

And if you can’t send money, maybe you know someone who could at least design the logo and send it to me as a jpeg. And maybe they know somebody who can send me money. It doesn’t hurt to ask.