The American Spectator

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You Shall Know Our Ignorance!

By J. Peter Freire on 4.14.09 @ 4:17PM

My sometime sparring partner, seated safely in his new timeslot, takes a long segment to discuss how the tea party "movement" was really started by Fox News, Dick Armey, and Newt Gingrich, and then uses these strawmen to criticize just how non-grassroots this stuff all is. To provide him with a bit of unbiased cover, he interviews a Huffington Post columnist who also clucks about the insidious nature of these "so-called" protests. Obviously.

Click here for the video which refuses to embed.

We hope you enjoyed the heavily-sophomoric and euphemism-laden script Shuster was working with. You see, the protesters are idiots for referring to a historically recognizable protest, because it could easily be mistaken for the Urban Dictionary no-no word describing a lewd sexual act. But when Shuster and his chums at HuffPo gurgle the word themselves, it's because they're being meta. In a race to the bottom, Shuster and Co are tunneling.

Well, as the lead organizer of the February 27th Washington tea party event, I'll happily tell you that I got no such support. None. Nada. Zilch. The support we got from Fox News? Does that mean coverage? I wasn't aware covering a nationwide event was a cardinal sin. My thinking was that when anyone in power does something controversial, you show the response. The response was thousands of protesters nationwide. Is Shuster suggesting that this not get covered? Where does that figure into the whole "speak truth to power" thing? And also, contrary to what David says, the protests aren't a Republican phenomenon. We certainly knocked GWB around during the Washington event -- quite a bit, and to boos and hisses at the mere mention of his name -- because the Republican Party was hardly principled when it came to letting the economy take care of itself.

Frankly, when you get a bunch of people to attend a protest who've never done that sort of thing before, it's fairly newsworthy. I don't even much care for protests -- which may be ironic, but I'm willing to bet that many of the attendees feel the same way. We have better things to do with our time.

At a time, however, when people are saying that those in favor of limited government are in shambles, these people are organizing. And they're doing it themselves. There was no grand conspiracy underlying a bunch of people on Twitter going, "Hey, how do you hold a protest where I am?" It was genuine. Some people were some-time activists but worked in the private sector. Others were conservatives with jobs at non-profits. Others were just people who wanted to be involved.

But if Shuster did the reporting he should have been doing, he would have spoken to the people in attendance and found regular small-business owners upset that their tax money is being used to bail out bad companies.

And by the way, just how literal-minded are these people that they're whining about how these protests aren't perfectly parallel to the Boston Tea Party? We should just reanimate the moccasined corpse of Samuel Adams himself. And if he happens to go on a brain-eating rampage, we'll all know to blame it on our own foul-language ridden, Fox News-supported, teabagging scam.