The national teabagging movement will come to a head tonight when conservatives stage an anti-tax “Tea Party” at Westlake Park beginning around 6 p.m. The protesters, who held events today around the country, repeatedly called themselves teabaggers, harking back to the colonial Boston Tea Party patriots who tossed tea into the harbor to protest England's taxation without representation. Organizers expect 500 to 1000 teabaggers—possibly dressed in Boston-Tea-Party-era themed minute man hats and ruffled cuffs—to protest the federal government’s bank bailouts and stimulus plan. Never mind that stimulus money, unlike the taxes collected by mean ol' England, is used right here in America.

“One of our goals is to simply to raise the enthusiasm and awareness of people who describe themselves as fiscal conservatives or those who don’t think that expanding the role of the federal government will be effective in curbing the recession,” says Conor McNassar, spokesman for the event. It’s being organized by Keli Carender, McNassar's wife, who blogs under the name Liberty Belle for Redistributing Knowledge. They believe that Obama will inflate federal spending by pushing a second stimulus bill, bailing out more banks, and catapulting the national debt over $3 trillion.

But the “fiscal conservatives” seem unconcerned about that fact that (a) spending grew enormously under “fiscally conservative” presidents before Obama, (b) the Iraq war was a ginormous federal expenditure that has done diddly good for the economy, or (c) Obama’s been in office for less than three months and the bailouts began under Bush.

“I haven’t heard any definite denunciation of Iraq war spending,” says McNassar. “They are focused on powers not enumerated to the federal government by the Constitution—not social programs or buying stakes in banks.” He says that rather than fund a stimulus package (he argues the New Deal actually prolonged the Great Depression), the federal government should allow banks and businesses to fail.

So why protest federal spending when Obama is in power rather than Bush’s wasteful federal spending for the previous eight years?

“People always protest actions that don’t fit with their political ideology,” says McNassar. “By the same measure I’m sure folks wouldn’t have had war protests if there were a war to stop the genocide in Darfur.”

When asked if he understood what teabagging was, McNassar said, "I guess I don't understand the connotation of that." A few moments later, after an awkward pause, he said, "No, I got you. I think it’s hilarious."

Paul Constant are I on our way down to the Tea Party to witness the imminent forcible teabagging of bystanders in Westlake Park.