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.
