Tea Parties: How The Other Side Sees It (tmi3rd)

So on the back end of the Tea Parties, and watching my former distant colleague Susan Roesgen beclown herself so utterly, we can already see a few effects of our Tea Partying on the Left, and how they're responding to it.

We can, of course, refer to the Left's infantile references to the Parties as "teabagging"... Rachel Maddow's 13 minutes of it were noted over at Hot Air, Anderson Cooper used that as his active verb, and so forth.

I did, however, see something that caught my attention that really summed it up for me nicely...

In chatting back and forth with one of my moderately sane liberal former colleagues (a general manager at a TV station), he posted this very interesting sum of things on his Facebook chat with me...

I also think yesterday's teabagging extravaganza is a perfect national example. All politics is local, it is said, and especially when envisioned, created, planned, marketed, promoted, coordinated, executed and covered from rightwing party central and deployed locally, so is stupidity. They should have issued clubs and torches in this case though, because some participants in the midst of their excitement forgot to bring their own to the big nationwide virtual meeting. BTW lest you think i'm just picking on the extreme right wing, I'm not. Their counterparts to the left can't even get two of their own loyalists to agree on who's in charge of the carpool to the environmental rally.

The two things that jump out at me about this are the following:

1) Most of the Left believes that the title of the protests was Teabagging, not Tea Parties.

2) The belief on the Left is that this was a centrally coordinated and executed set of protests from Right Wing Central.

Now, look, maybe I'm naive. Maybe there is something nefarious at play here, but I strongly doubt it. The belief exists that Fox, Clear Channel, Diebold, and so forth, paid for all of these people to show up. The usual and predictable hateful class warfare remarks- "it's all rich people who don't want to pay taxes", "it's all anti-government", "it's a white power party", and so forth- have been tossed about, and it sort of makes sense if you consider where most of the Left protests come from.

Rent-a-mobs have received a fair amount of publicity... used by MoveOn, ACORN, SEIU, and so forth. The bottom line is that for a fair number of lefties, this is standard operating procedure. Here's an example- and be warned, this is a link to Democrat Underground... sorry, for some reason, I can't get it to work for me with the controls.

http://tinyurl.com/dn7qfp

Again, the Left can't or won't believe that this popped up spontaneously. There's something to be learned from their cynicism, and one of the key things is that these protests were peaceful and orderly. I can only speak for the one in Southlake, Texas, which was a nice, laid-back, almost celebratory atmosphere, but I've heard similar stories from many of my friends around the country.

My question to you, morons, is how we continue the momentum through the elections? I've heard rumors of another Tea Party on the 4th of July... will this sort of thing be enough to draw principled folks to participate, either by joining political runs or making their own? And, above all, how do we make for damn sure that the nation sees these protests for what they are- professional, productive people voicing their displeasure in a non-destructive, friendly fashion?

Fire away!

posted by xgenghisx at 11:55 PM

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