Numerous men and women sprinkled throughout the Conservative/Libertarian movement have taken inspiration from the original Tea Partyites of December 1773 – the good Patriots of Boston who dumped 342 chests of British East India Company tea into Boston Harbor as symbolic resistance against imperial taxation. Politics is indeed theatrical. And what would otherwise have been an ordinary act of waterfront vandalism has been elevated to the lofty status of the quintessential American political protest.