(H/T: Instapundit) The first paragraph sets the mood:
Keli Carender has a pierced nose, performs improv on weekends and lives here in a neighborhood with more Mexican grocers than coffeehouses. You might mistake her for the kind of young person whose vote powered President Obama to the White House. You probably would not think of her as a Tea Party type.
…and the Old Grey Lady pretty clearly was not in it. They didn’t do a bad job of reporting this story, but very little of it fits their existing narrative of the Tea Party, and you can tell that the writer was somewhat aware of that.
You probably know Keli as Liberty Belle; you almost certainly know he as the woman who invited Rep Norm Dicks* (D, WA) to come and take a twenty from her personally if he was so hot to tax his constituents for health care.
She’s spent the last year developing an activist infrastructure in Washington, and is now engaged in the pleasant activity of working to pry Sen Patty Murray out of her seat. That probably alarms the NYT more than anything else. You get the feeling sometimes that the activist Left has generally assumed from their own experiences that creating and supporting a populist movement is hard; a large part of their hostility to the Tea Party movement is rooted in the latter’s ability to so rapidly generate a structure that is already making some local incumbent Democrats nervous about their re-election prospects.
What? The rest of their hostility? Oh, they just like hating things.
Moe Lane
*Cook rates his seat as Safely Democratic, but I have to wonder. D+5 is not inaccessible in this current political climate.
The truth of the matter is no seat is safe because the D’s have to actually get their +5 or +10 to actually come vote whilst the Republicans or the Conservative base of the GOP is FIRED UP and will be hitting the voting booth and while the National GOP is not getting the BIG MONEY the Conservative candidates such as Rubio, Toomey etc are getting the money they need from the base!
Thanks for highlighing this Moe. My boss gets the NYT at work, but she won’t let me read it anymore because I called it a left-wing rag.
I’ve said before that I really think whoever it was that came up with the “teabagger” slur did us a favor.
For the longest time conservatives have been content to wince at the insults and just go on. “Teabagger” was and is offensive enough to do the initial job of getting people out of that mindset, and the rest followed.
Regards,
Ric
Ric,
Good thought. Another example, being that this is Sunday, originally “Methodist” was a slur or insult, but now it is the name of a worldwide church.
Wait until BO gets his wish and rams Obamacare through the Congress. There will be no safe Democrat seats then.
Send the article to Olbie!
I get more a reaction as if they (the left) have been robbed. These public demonstrations and rallies were their turf and the Tea Party is stealing it
I love how Dicks won’t walk over to take a voluntary contribution but has no problem voting for appropriations and taxes that take money at gunpoint.