In 1773, colonialists dumped British tea into Boston Harbor claiming the tax on the tea - which other US cities had rejected successfully violated their right to be taxed only by their own elected representatives. That was one of the first acts that would lead to the Revolutionary War, the war for independence from Great Britain’s government control.

Approximately a century later, from 1865 to 1877, as white northern Republican politicians came South to join with freedman and Southern Republicans to establish government control after the end of the Civil War, they arrived with that era’s version of suitcases, their travel carpetbags. Southerners saw them as opportunists intending to plunder the defeated South.

The term ‘carpetbagger’ defined them and now is used to describe politicians who run for office in areas they aren’t a native of who’ve moved in for a short time solely to seek office.

Travel forward another 132 years to today and a completely different marriage of these terms is at work that’s distorted the ethic and intent of one while using the intrusiveness of the other.

In the 23rd Congressional District of New York, an upstate, heavily rural region, conservatives who consider the already extremely conservative Republican Party staged a protest of their own. They chased the favored Republican out of the race by bringing in a carpetbagger with very extremist views.

The extremists leading this effort call themselves ‘teabaggers’ to link themselves to the rebels of 1773, but they have several glaring differences. They have risked nothing in their protests. Theirs is not a fight against taxation without representation but a complaint about representatives using federal funds to rescue the US economy from complete collapse. And what they lack in logic they make up for with a surplus of angry persistence.

As with any short term political phenomenon, charlatans and hustlers have come out of the woodwork to pick the pockets of the angry mob by posing themselves as the leaders. One of them, Dick Armey of Texas, is described in Wikipedia:

Armey was one of Congress’s fervent supporters of privatization of Social Security and phasing-out of farm subsidies. He is a strong supporter of replacing the progressive tax levels and a complex system of deductions with a simplified single rate known as a flat tax. Armey is very critical of a competing tax reform proposal that would replace the current system with a national sales tax, the FairTax.

and, after eighteen years as a Congressman from Texas:

In 2003, Armey became co-chairman of Citizens for A Sound Economy, which in 2004 merged with Empower America to become FreedomWorks. “FreedomWorks” is a common Armey saying and the organization is dedicated to advancing a “Freedom Agenda” of “lower taxes, less government, and more freedom.”

Except that now he works to kill health care reform that would provide affordable coverage to an estimated 37 million Americans, or 1 out of 8 Americans, while reining in costs for many more. The principal tax that would pay for the program would be levied on individuals making $500,000 and couples making a million dollars per year. Armey’s defending just 3/10ths of 1% of Americans, the wealthiest, hardly the stuff of the rebels of 1773.

Joining him in this quest is the newly-resigned Governor of Alaska - last year’s Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who’s simultaneously out hawking her new ghostwritten book of memoirs. Both of these political players fatten their own purses while claiming to be rebels for freedom.

And yesterday, those upstate New Yorkers responded, with its majority base of Republicans. Only they voted in the Democratic challenger to be the first Democratic Congressman to represent that district since the carpetbagger year of 1872, a period of 137 years.

To paraphrase Lincoln, you “can’t fool all the people all of the time.”

Despite this stinging historic defeat that added one more Democrat to the controlling Democratic majority in Congress, there’s likely to be several media outlets using yesterday loss of two Democratic governorships to claim President Obama has suffered a grievous political blow even though neither governor has a vote on any of the legislation that Obama promised to enact.

As with Armey and Palin, it’s perfectly reasonable to ask what kind of news oil those corporate media outlets are selling.

Utilizing threadbare claims and old lumpy political sloganeering that offer no rest to the poor and the ill travelers among us, hucksters like Armey and Palin ignore the reality of 30,000 to 40,000 deaths each year that health reform legislation would prevent. Though there’s a carpetbagger element to their efforts, they have nothing in common with the freedom fighting patriots of 1773.

I should think that a more apt description of their profiteering leadership of this extremist movement would define them as ‘Fleabaggers’ for the crummy accommodations they provide.

Complete Election results here.