Tea Party Group Cancels Plan To Burn Perriello And Pelosi In Effigy

Let me get this straight:

The teabaggers just wanted a private gathering -- no media, no attention -- of fellow nutcases in which they would burn something to reinforce a "historical lesson."

Does this remind anyone else of a certain type of gathering in which the participants wear white hoods?

I thought good Americans HUNG people in effigy. This whole burning thing tastes of Popery, does it not?

Coleman said he was upset that people had gotten the wrong idea about his plan.

A simulated act of extreme violence? What would be the 'right' idea about that plan?

What? You mean that burning lowercase T in the yard might not just stand for "trouble"? (h/t South Park)

I get why Pelosi would have had to stay above the fray. But if I'd been Perriello, I'd have offered to donate one of my own suits for the effigy to wear. ANYTHING to draw attention to it.

You know... "You sent me to Washington to fight for [insert issue here], and they burned me in effigy. I must be doing something right!" Hell, if he couldn't get re-elected on that line alone, WE should burn him in effigy!

I think the TP crowd must have realized that they'd only be helping him. Or was this one special spot of "property" the only place in the world that an effigy would burn properly?

Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit Of Happiness
Andrew Sullivan - Provincetown, Massachusetts
As heard on NPR’s Morning Edition, July 4, 2005

I believe in life. I believe in treasuring it as a mystery that will never be fully understood, as a sanctity that should never be destroyed, as an invitation to experience now what can only be remembered tomorrow. I believe in its indivisibility, in the intimate connection between the newest bud of spring and the flicker in the eye of a patient near death, between the athlete in his prime and the quadriplegic vet, between the fetus in the womb and the mother who bears another life in her own body.

I believe in liberty. I believe that within every soul lies the capacity to reach for its own good, that within every physical body there endures an unalienable right to be free from coercion. I believe in a system of government that places that liberty at the center of its concerns, that enforces the law solely to protect that freedom, that sides with the individual against the claims of family and tribe and church and nation, that sees innocence before guilt and dignity before stigma. I believe in the right to own property, to maintain it against the benign suffocation of a government that would tax more and more of it away. I believe in freedom of speech and of contract, the right to offend and blaspheme, as well as the right to convert and bear witness. I believe that these freedoms are connected — the freedom of the fundamentalist and the atheist, the female and the male, the black and the Asian, the gay and the straight.

I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.

And I believe in a country that enshrines each of these three things, a country that promises nothing but the promise of being more fully human, and never guarantees its success. In that constant failure to arrive — implied at the very beginning — lies the possibility of a permanently fresh start, an old newness, a way of revitalizing ourselves and our civilization in ways few foresaw and one day many will forget. But the point is now. And the place is America.