John Moltz

Dean's Right, RNC's Wrong

Dean Assails Bush and Republican Right.

Dean quipped that Bush was like King George, prompting the following comeback.

"The Boston Tea Party was also a revolt against higher taxes, which is exactly what we can expect from a Howard Dean presidency," said Christine Iverson, an RNC spokeswoman.

Not exactly. It was a revolt against taxation without representation. From Benson Bobrick's Angel in the Whirlwind:

British politicians considered the Americans' reaction irrational. In their view, the cornerstone of liberty, as protected by the British constitution, was the supremacy of Parliament, which, as the contemporary jurist William Blackstone put in his Laws of England, "hath sovereign and uncontrolable authority in making, confirming, enlarging, restraining, abrogating, repealing, reviving, and expounding of laws." Since the power to tax was "a necessary part of every supreme legislative authority," if Parliament "have not that power over America they have none, and then America is at once a kingdom of itself." Americans, on the other hand, believed that the legality of all parliamentary statutes was to be measured against the constitution; on that basis, being unrepresented in Parliament, they denied the right of that body to tax them directly according to the principles of constitutional law. As historian Daniel Boorstin has remarked, the United States "was born in an atmosphere of legal rather than philosophical debate."

Considering more people voted for the other guy in 2000, I think we have a case for taxation without representation against Bush. Dean's spot on.