"Granny is not shovel ready"
"A village in Kenya is missing it's idiot"
Well, I’m back from Washington, D.C. and the Tea Party rally on April 15th was… tame. I never heard racial slurs, and I didn’t see homophobic, racist or bigoted signs. What I did see was a number of people out to protest “high taxes”, “socialist government” and Obama in general. Overall, it was a peaceful protest of people exercising their first amendment right of assembly. However, I would like to point out that while they have the right to protest, they are often protesting factually inaccurate information. For example, income taxes for the middle class are at one of the the lowest levels in the last 50 years. Protesters suggesting that 95% of Americans didn’t get a tax cut under Obama are dead wrong.
Obama Care is not a socialist takeover of health care as there are still many private insurers selling insurance and no single, all-encompassing government payer. There are no death panels so there’s no need to say “Granny is not shovel ready.”
Obama is not a citizen of Kenya nor was he born there. However, a” village in Kenya may well be missing it’s idiot” (sic). I have no way of telling and no contacts in the Kenyan government whom I could ask. Technically, this could be a true claim though I doubt my overly generous interpretation matches the sign’s intent. I also missed the chance to explain the difference between it’s and its to the sign’s holder and I apologize to this man for not providing educational assistance.
A true fact, however, is that the Tea Party is heavily aligned with the Republicans. According to a CBS News/ New York Times poll released last week, 18 percent of Americans say they view themselves as a member of the Tea Party; 54 percent are Republicans; and 89 percent are white.
I felt welcome at the Tea Party protest and never once did I see someone being discriminated against in the crowd. Protesting is a wonderful example of the rights we enjoy in America. But, as the pictures above demonstrate, just because you can go out and protest something doesn’t make you the least bit correct on the issues.
The more I see about the Tea Party, the more it becomes clear that this isn’t radical change taking form. It’s merely an effort by primarily Republican citizens to make their voices heard.
If I had to find a strong criticism of the Tea Party, it wouldn’t be claims of racism or violence as often seen in the media; rather, it would be their choice of brew. A nice cup of Earl Fact would do them well and help break the connection to Distortion Blend.
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3151&emailView=1
A few highlights from Ron Paul, Andrew Breitbart and Tucker Carlson:
Filed under: Politics, Travel | Tagged: D.C., Politics, protest, tea party, Washington |
The Voice of Reason 
Nice report, Brian!
By the way, I don’t understand how the recent polls of Tea Partiers being well-educated jives with the high percentage that think Obama is from Kenya.
Part of the answer, maybe, is that there seems to be a wide variety of what the Tea Party is: sometimes they are closely aligned with the GOP, sometimes they are more independently minded.
Besides the offensive signs, though, something that bothers me is that they tend to blame the current president on failures of the past president, particularly when related to Wall Street or the economy. There is some common ground with Democrats there, but instead we will most likely see the two groups work at cross-purposes.