Tag: tea parties

#rsrh Today’s Fantasy/Reality.

I paraphrase.

Fantasy*: “Publicizing a liberal online plot to crash the Tea Parties will destroy the movement once and for all!”

Reality: “Publicizing a liberal online plot to crash the Tea Parties actually immunizes the protests tomorrow.  Yes, it’s annoying.  So are the side effects from a cowpox vaccine.”

Mind you, both Fantasy and Reality wildly over-estimate how many anti-Tea Partiers will be bothered to actually infiltrate and instigate something tomorrow.

Moe Lane

*TPM’s Fantasy, not Hot Air’s.  Hot Air is rolling its eyes at this, too.

#rsrh Not liking the analogy is not *my* problem.

Excuse me while I infuriate some lurkers by quoting this annoyed response to a NYT piece on Tea Partiers:

Ok, we get the point. Anyone mad at government is just acting like a spoiled hypocrite, ignorantly decrying the very thing that makes life worth living. Tea Party people are ungrateful wretches who will someday regret the effects of their protests. In the same spirit, we can imagine what the New York Times would be writing in the 1850s, reporting on new political movements in slave states.

When the middle-aged slave Jim developed a boil on his foot after a long day in the fields, he went crawling to the plantation to get it treated and bandaged. The master gladly obliged. Today Jim expresses a rising interest in the new abolitionist movement and is even demanding what he calls his freedom. This new freedom would mean an end to the amenities that are a mainstay of his life. He depends of plantation-provided food, housing, and medical care, but his living quarters are filled with pamphlets by William Lloyd Garrison and others agitating for a “new liberty.”

I imagine that it is… frustrating to some, the way that opponents to ballooning government interference adamantly refuse to just shut up and go die in fires.  The best ones are the ones that try to laugh it off…

Behold, the terrifying true nature of the Tea Party!

[UPDATE] Welcome, Instapundit readers.

Remember, this is the group that the President claims that “at their core” is all about opposition to and rejection of him (not that he wants to broad-brush, of course)*. Behold the Mob:


(Via Instapundit: more pictures from the Denver Tea Party here)

I have no idea whether the President would score the kid as part of the deluded crowd, or as one of the ones doing the deluding. Normally I’d say the former, but Obama seems to have weird ideas sometimes…

Moe Lane

*Since the President is so eager to bring this up: I agree that he’s a natural-born citizen, and so is thus the legitimate President of the United States.  My problem with the man is that he sucks at being both.

Crossposted to RedState.

Reid’s Nevadan stalking horse up on criminal charges.

Oops.

And so (I suspect) ends the sad, vaguely sordid, and rather bizarre tale of Scott Ashjian. You should have vetted your spoiler candidate better, Harry:

A Nevada asphalt contractor who faces a legal challenge to his Tea Party of Nevada candidacy for U.S. Senate was hit Friday with felony theft and bad check charges in Las Vegas that allege he bounced a $5,000 business check last year.

Scott Ashjian is one of a record 22 candidates, including 12 Republicans, running for the seat held by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who is seeking a fifth term.

Bernie Zadrowski, head of the Clark County district attorney’s office bad check unit, said he would seek an arrest warrant Monday in Las Vegas Justice Court. Ashjian could face up to 14 years in state prison if convicted.

Via Hot Air Headlines. The actual Tea Party folks have already been pretty adamant about pointing out that they don’t know this guy, but there’s nothing like a bad-check felony arrest to torpedo an election bid.  Which means that the major Republican candidates can get back to the happy task of determining who is the most conservative of all (and thus worthy of the honor of beating Harry Reid like a drum), and that Harry Reid can get back to creating the tradition that Democratic Senate Majority Leaders always end their terms by losing a re-election bid…

Moe Lane

PS: Of course, there’s always the possibility that the Ashjian thing was really a convoluted cry for help on Reid’s part.  You know, a subconscious wish to fail or something like that.  It’d explain the lack of vetting, at least.

Crossposted to RedState.

#rsrh TNR should just Embrace the Hate, already.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

So, The New Republic wants to post an article on the oh-so-beleaguered moderates in the Tea Party movement (translation: they’re trying to foment a schism in said movement, because otherwise next January they’re going to abruptly have a shortage of politicians who care about what The New Republic thinks about everything). Via Ann Althouse (H/T: Instapundit) comes the first picture that they associated with the article: a man putting two teabags in his mouth.

…and via me comes the second picture that they associated with said article: a pitchfork being used as a sign.

Yes. They went from ‘sex’ to ‘violence,’ but the message remains the same to The New Republic‘s readers: these people in the Tea Party are the Other.  Embrace the Democrat. Which is their privilege, but they shouldn’t pretend to be some sort of objective observer of the whole thing when what they actually want to do is protect the interests of the Democratic party.

Just saying.

Moe Lane

PS: Also, The New Republic should grow the heck up.

Five at the DC Coffee Party? How… quaint. #rsrh

God save me from the forces of reaction, and their false revolutionary consciousness.

I wouldn’t even bother with this, except that I ran into Alex Pappas of the Daily Caller earlier this week and he’s a good guy. So let me just correct the folks at the DC Coffee Party on something:

One participant, a younger man who brought along a college buddy with him, said the biggest difference between the Coffee Party and the Tea Party is that they believe the federal government is not something that should necessarily be demonized.

Moe Lane
PS: See also: St. Louis.

‘Organizing for America’ – Marin County style. #rsrh

They got two dozen people out to protest Sunday in favor of the Democrats’ health care rationing bill in Marin County, CA!  Impressive, isn’t it? – but then, as the article (and, implicitly, Instapundit) notes, Marin County is of course a strong Democratic stronghold.  So strong, in fact, that the Tea Party being held at the same time a couple blocks down generated a mere 600 people*.  I shudder at the implications.

I shudder.

Moe Lane

*At five bucks a head.  There were vendors.  And at least one candidate for Congress: Dana Walsh (CA-08, Nancy Pelosi’s seat).

‘Palin primaries.’ How very, very droll. #rsrh

(Via Hot Air) And it’s coming from the Congressional arm of the political party that has spent the last year informing the very people that they’re now trying to galvanize into action that being against the Democratic party’s insane amount of spending means that you actually like to put your testicles in other people’s mouths.

There is a certain disconnect, here.  Which is a polite way of saying “The Tea Partiers are mad at the GOP.  They bloody well despise the Democrats.”

Pitchforks, torches now acceptable for political demonstrations.

Please calibrate accordingly.

Admittedly, it looks a little, well, small by right-wing activist standards, but that’s a real, live Lefty protest against a business organization* using actual pitchforks and functional torches. Feel free to pass that around the next time somebody has the vapors about a Tea Party protest…

(Via Instapundit.)

Moe Lane

*The Connecticut Business and Industry Association; goodness only knows why they in particular half-aroused the ire of this particular bunch. Probably they were late on the vig.

The partisan hack agrees with the GOP shill agreeing with THAT WOMAN…

…third parties are a dead end.

…she quickly pivoted to the broader question of whether the Tea Party movement might successfully field its own candidates in national elections, and on that point she sounded far from convinced.

“Now the smart thing will be for independents who are such a part of this Tea Party movement to, I guess, kind of start picking a party,” [former Governor Sarah] Palin said. “Which party reflects how that smaller, smarter government steps to be taken? Which party will best fit you? And then because the Tea Party movement is not a party, and we have a two-party system, they’re going to have to pick a party and run one or the other: ‘R’ or ‘D’.”

Ace (the aforementioned, and self-described, GOP shill*), cut right to the chase when responding to both this, and the fairly obvious point that a functional third party = Democratic victory:

I’m not interested in “sending messages” when those messages come with the other, all-caps message: BARACK OBAMA AND HIS MOST STALWART LIBERAL ALLIES WIN, IN BLOW-OUTS, FOR AN ENTIRE GENERATION.

I’m not interested in a message like that, either.  Mind you, I’m not as worried about this as either Ace or Allahpundit is.  Third parties are often threatened, but are rarely a problem on the federal level.  Indeed, if the Democrats are really relying on and spending resources on the plan of encouraging a national third-party in time for November then it’s official: Congress will flip in the next election.  Both Houses.  You don’t make desperation plays like that unless you’re, well, desperate.

Besides, the RNC had a rush of oxygen to the brain.  I guess that we must have tried everything else, first**.

Moe Lane

*I’m the partisan hack, in case that wasn’t obvious.

**I didn’t say that I was a blindly partisan hack.

Crossposted to RedState.