In "going rogue," today's so-called conservatives, in justification, compare themselves to facing the same exigencies our founders faced. Like the other week in the paper how someone compared the passage of health care reform, pending in Congress, to the passage of the Stamp Act of 1765, which was among the first in a series of parliamentary acts of taxation on the 13 colonies by Great Britain between then and 1775. In response to the colonies ever increasing number and intensity of protests, including the Boston Tea Party of 1773, over taxation without representation, Parliament, at the prodding of King George, encroached ever more onerously on the colonies, after more than a hundred years of "benign neglect."

The colonists' increasing sense of being disenfranchised of British citizenship culminated with the firing of the first shots at Lexington and Concord, effectively beginning the American Revolutionary War.

However, even after the shedding of blood, it wasn't for another year, until July of 1776, after desperate overtures to Great Britain to be treated as fully enfranchised British citizens, with the basic right of representation in Parliament especially when it came to taxation, that the colonies, with King George bearing down on them harder and harder with his troops, declared with great reluctance their independence.

One thing that today's rogue conservatives better get straight, the source of agitation of the colonies wasn't over following Great Britain's laws or paying their fair share of taxes, but, again, not being accorded the same rights, especially when it came to representation, as Brits in Britain. They weren't going to stand to be relegated to anything less as happened to the Irish in history. They felt themselves directly a part of the English tradition of freedom of rights and concessions gained and exacted from the king going back to the Magna Carta in 1215 through the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

I only point this out because if we should get health care reform legislation (and that's a big if), it's not as if it won't have been arduously debated and deliberated over by the representatives of the people in both houses of Congress. In fact, even at this late point it's all still up for grabs as the democratic process grinds on for anyone to be remotely comparing its problematic passage to the Stamp Act of our time.

How, in our self-righteous heads, we can distort things.

Seems the real hostility by today's rogue conservatives is over the loss of an election, over the possibility of a profound change of policy. What they really want, seems to me, is the dictatorship of the Republican Party, or the Conservative Party, or what ever party it is that represents their "let them eat cake" minority, reactionary view.

Some of today's so-called conservatives have become a little bit too brittle for the democratic process.

Anyway, they may fancy themselves to be latter-day Boston Tea Party types, but they are really reminiscent of the Whiskey Rebellion crew of 1794, who in western Pennsylvania revolted over a tax on whiskey to help pay for the expense of the Revolutionary War. George Washington as commander and chief with Alexander Hamilton, recommissioned as his general, got on their horses with a small contingent of forces and set forth to put down the rebellion. Washington thought it was important to draw the line that this was not a nation of men at liberty to go unto themselves rogue with their bugaboos. There was to be an indestructible unity in the contest of thought in the making of policy.

Need I bring up the election of 1860 and Abraham Lincoln?

Tim O'Leary is a longtime Homer resident and observer of the political scene.