The Tea Parties Fail

I spent April 15th in class and work, so I didn't make it down to the Old Capitol here in Tallahassee, where the tea party was being held.  I did, however, view thousands of images from tea parties from all over the nation from a variety of sources.  I also have done everything I could to try and get speeches and pronouncements made at these gatherings.  I have come to a really bad conclusion about all this tea-bagging nonsense.  That is, when a corporation (one of the largest in the world at that) sponsors a "protest movement," it is most certainly NOT "grassroots."  

 

The Fox News Channel hyped these tea parties like crazy over the past two weeks or so.  In that time, they had numerous commercials advertising the tea parties.  Now, that would have been fine if they were advertising their _coverage_ of the event, but instead, they were actually encouraging people to attend.  FNC representatives like Sean Hannity took center stage at many of these events.  Indeed, on Hannity's program for about a week leading up to the protests, he repeatedly encouraged his viewers to attend.  

 

Secondly, they had absolutely no cohesive message.  There was some ranting about spending but a lot of the signs had either a racist or violent message.  There was the usual nonsense about Obama being a "secret Muslim" and a socialist, along with the birth certificate deniers, neo-Nazis and militiamen.  Now, some of this might have been overlooked, except for the fact that the attendees were almost exclusively white.  The only real theme seemed to be anti-Obama.  That may be understating it a bit, however, as there were most certainly those there who wished harm to the President.

 

I'll just give you a small taste of what I've been seeing.  Check out this link .

 

Conservatives over the past few days have had the balls to complain about the Department of Homeland Security report that warned of the growing influence of right-wing extremism.  Are they trying to be ironic?  Not to mention the fact that the Bush administration commissioned an almost identical report in 2001, before 9/11, that came to the exact same conclusion this report did.  They noted the declining influence of left-wing domestic terrorism and the rise of right-wing domestic terrorism.  The Department of Homeland Security also released another report alongside the current one.  It analyzed left-wing extremists and their utilization of hacking in their attacks against the federal government.  So, really, not only can you not complain about this, you really shouldn't mention it at all.  Why?  Because they just spent the last few weeks courting right-wing extremists for their tea parties.  Duh.

 

The last thing I'll mention is how kind of pathetic these protests were.  Despite the backing of a major 24-hour news network and the Republican Party, all they managed to do was show the country exactly how nuts the far-right fringe is.  They didn't expose any "populist outrage," aside from a few wingnuts.  It most certainly didn't seem to resonate too well with people, because only about 100,000 people total gathered at these tea parties.  Not only that, but now both Fox News and the Republican Party have allied themselves with white supremacists, militiamen, anti-federalists and every other fringe group.

 

So, good job guys.  Liberals really enjoyed tax day.  I hope we get to do this again sometime real soon.  =)

 

Oh, and when we protest millions show up.  Sorry.