So the truly stupid among the Republican/conservative movement will be teabagging later today in a misaligned attempt to portray themselves as patriots. You know, like the folks at the Boston Tea Party back in the 18th century.

There are a few problems with that idea, mainly that the colonists in 1773 were protesting taxation without elected representation. Today’s teabaggers are protesting taxation, in particular taxation of the top 5 percent earners.

I know, it’s so horrible. I mean, that top 5 percent — their share of the national income grew only six percentage points between 1970 and 2006, from 15 to 21 percent. And their effective income tax rate? You know, how much they actually pay after all their loopholes and cheating? It went down, believe it or not. From 17.4 percent in 1970 to 16 percent in 2006. I just don’t see how they live.

No wonder they’re so terribly upset that the Obama administration wants to raise the actual income tax rate for those people from 35 percent to 39 percent or so — about 10 percentage points less than it was during the Reagan administration. My god, their effective rate could go up again, to 16.5 percent or something. It would be truly devastating.

And get this –federal taxes as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product will be at their lowest percentage since 1950 — 15.5 percent, somewhere in the middle of the world tax rates.

And despite the insistence of the teabaggers’ PR firm — Fox “News” — that the teabaggery is a reflection of widespread dislike of all this horrible taxation, Gallup says otherwise. In fact, the percentage of Americans who say their share of the tax burden is just about right hasn’t been higher since 1956 — nor has the percentage who say their share is too high been lower since 1961.

But see, that’s what happens when you have the illuminati of the Republican Party and their lobbyist buds put on a populist uprising for you. They miss the populist part.

On the other hand, there are the stupid people. The Rude Pundit put it thusly:

Because what is this but classic exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie? It’s a bunch of rich fucks, beginning with that tool Rick Santelli on CNBC and ending with the slavering profitmongers at Fox “news,” making the poor idiots, who are desperate from fear of or actual job loss and heath insurance loss and home loss, do their bidding. Look at the people attending. Bedraggled Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin wannabes, clinging to the image of those who create the illusion of the working class without the work or the class. Ignorance is such bliss, man.

This movement’s gonna die a horribly gruesome death. It really is just the last hideous gasps of a kind of right wing populism that’s got nothing to do with actual populism and everything to do with a desperate scrabbling to preserve the status quo for the wealthy. It’s ideological endgame, motherfuckers, and the checkmate ain’t gonna be pretty.

It really is quite sad.

And the teabagging parties that have already taken place have resembled nothing so much as a Sarah Palin rally from last summer — denunciations of evolution, claims that Barack Obama isn’t a citizen of the United States, claims that Obama is a socialist and that he is a secret Muslim. Today’s Tax Day repeats promise more of the same, although I’m guessing the PR firm’s cameras will avoid some of the more egregious of those debate points. They didn’t look so good leading up to November 4.

The Grand Old Party has really slipped a cog. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman points out that the party was about as crazy during the Clinton administration, and it didn’t keep them from taking control of both houses of Congress and then winning back the presidency in 2000, although we know how that happened. But the Republicans, Krugman says, show no signs of pulling out of their downward spiral.

Today’s G.O.P. is, after all, very much a minority party. It retains some limited ability to obstruct the Democrats, but has no ability to make or even significantly shape policy.

Beyond that, Republicans have become embarrassing to watch. And it doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people. Better, perhaps, to focus on the real policy debates, which are all among Democrats.

And the teabaggeries show the Republicans at their clueless worst — deliberately pulling the wool over the eyes of the very people they claim to speak for.

But eight years of George W. Bush have taken a toll, and no matter how much Mitch McConnell tries to pretend the ex-president was “an albatross” around the neck of “true conservatives,” it doesn’t change the well-documented fact that McConnell and the rest of the Republican party backed the guy they’re now trying to repudiate lock, stock and barrel.

And even though the Republicans have refused to grow up, a lot of formerly stupid people have put aside their blind allegiance to those who have so clearly led them down the wrong path. Their eyes are open now, and the cotton’s out of their ears. And in an economy that’s lying in tatters around their feet, courtesy of the “leaders” they trusted, they know that doing the same old thing will return nothing but the same old results.

And pretending to be the ideological descendants of the colonists who famously dumped taxed tea into Boston Harbor — because the colonists wouldn’t unload it and the governor of Massachusetts wouldn’t send it back to England — that’s not going to make a difference.

Especially when the ones in American Indian disguises are the very “leaders” who created the mess.

The sleeping giant has awakened. And it isn’t a teabagger.