A few related items: First Doug Ross has done some great investigative reporting on the alleged hurling of racial epithets mentioned in a previous post Agitprop. Doug has really fleshed out the timeline of the reporting to show how reports from a few members of the CBC were picked up and reprinted in the media within an amazingly short time frame. An interview with Lauren Victoria Burke, who is likely the first to spread the news via Twitter is quite revealing:
Q: As I see it, a lot of the Tea Party activists are worried about the encroachment of the very kind of authoritarian, centralized government that our country's founders broke away from. The federal government has become this omnipresent force, far beyond what the states that formed it had ever envisioned. I mean, the size of your toilet tank is now regulated by federal bureaucrats...Note to Lauren and others who seem to be willing to concede "teabaggers" may have valid issues you might want to skip calling them "teabaggers." Two recent polls find the teabaggers are pretty mainstream. In fact more identify with tea party principles then they do with Obama. Legal Insurrection isn't seriously worried about the suicide watch at DNC headquarters upon receipt of the news the tea party protesters aren't the extremists after all. Didn't they already commit suicide - at least politically - when they cast their votes for health care? Potluck and Pundette have more on this.
A: Yes, I would agree that most of the teabaggers [Ed: sic!] are focused most on taxes, on financial issues. I mean, the liberal stereotype was reinforced when the first thing Obama does when he took office is to spend $787 billion on a stimulus package!
And the latest bailout of people that have been foreclosed on, I totally disagree with. If you're dumb enough to spend too much on your house, my tax dollars should not be borrowed against for that.
I understand the Tea Party sentiment and also understand you can't control everything everyone says.
Donald Douglas at American Power had a great report on a NYT hatchet piece comparing the Tea Party to Bill Ayers violent radical group The Weatherman. Seriously, it gets stranger all the time doesn't it? Here is a bit of Donald's analysis:
The caption reads, “VARYING DEGREES OF RAGE: The Weathermen, including Bill Ayers, second from right, during the Days of Rage in 1969, and anti-health reform protesters in Washington on Sunday.”
No doubt the editors included that “varying degrees” qualifier will get them off the hook. But there’s no escaping the truly bankrupt moral equivalence NYT’s claiming between a genuine domestic terrorist organization and a grassroots movement of conservatives, middle-class anti-tax activists, and an army of frustrated geriatrics. In contrast to a year’s worth of tea parties and town halls, the Moscow-backed Weatherman launched a series of bombings starting in 1969, totalling 25 attacks in all, as part of its war against “Amerikkka.” To this day, unrepentant terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn are venerated as social justice messiahs while today’s citizen tea party activists wind up on DHS intelligence reports as “right wing extremists.”
Maybe some of the media should have considered investigating Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers instead of repeating the mantra "Obama was only 8 years old." I am only a week older than Obama so we were both roughly 8 years old when Ayers launched a string of attacks on America, so what? I never served on boards with him afterwards nor would I have been willing to have Ayers host a coffee to launch my political career no matter how desperate I was to get into politics. Now Obama is President, Ayers is probably writing another book somewhere and the quietly remarkable tea partiers amongst us are the villains. Go figure.
Donald has a round up of the coverage following his report here as well.
I love that they asked for “Public Defenders”, now they know about the undercover FBI agent. The simpleton Tea baggers keep missing the point. These are the same whiners that were crying when the McCain/Bailin ticket lost. Now they are crying again because their yelling (because they are haters not debaters) did not stop health care from passing. They think they can scare, intimidate and force others to go along with them by comments like “This time we came unarmed”, let me tell you something they are not the only ones that are armed and not all ex-military join the fringe militia crazies who don’t pay taxes and run around with face paint in the parks playing commando, the majority are mature and understand that the world is more complicated and grey then the black and white that these simpleton make it out to be and that my friend is the point. Do not cry when regular people openly laugh at your group when they see on TV that your leaders are Sarah Bailin, Orly Taitz, Victoria Jackson, Michele Bachmann and that turn coat Glenn Beck from the LDS. They do more to discredit you on TV (powerful) than any of my comments do in the blog sphere.
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