Missed Out on the Tea Party Action? Here's Your BuzzFlash Teabagger Update

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

Hung over from too much tea? Yeah, after staying glued to The Huffington Post's "Big News" page dedicated to teabagger coverage all yesterday afternoon, I'm ready to throw out my tea bags, too.

Not that most of the protesters yesterday succeeded in even doing that. Many of the small crowds that gathered had neglected to get permits for teabag dumping, so that whole million teabag march that was supposed to happen in D.C. fizzled, and the plan to teabag the U.S. Treasury building was called off for the same reason. One ill-advised teabag dumping ended up closing down the protest in front of the White House, after some idiot thought it would be OK with the Secret Service if s/he threw a box of tea onto the White House lawn.

Organizers probably could have anticipated that failure, since the teabags they tried to send to the White House and Congress via snail mail were intercepted due to security concerns. Remember terrorists, people?

Instead, all the teabaggers really succeeded in doing was illustrating the co-opted nature of their events. Remember, just because the writing is terrible doesn't mean it's not scripted.

As Rachel Maddow pointed out recently, the Libertarians came up with this whole tea party idea in 2007 and now -- man, are they pissed at the GOP takeover. Yesterday's teabaggers enjoyed whining about being exploited by Republicans, but after the movement was taken from the Libertarians, any veneer of grassroots organization disappeared. Jane Hamsher took Michelle Malkin's own timeline and showed how the Tax Day protests were never really grassroots, with Corporate America, conservative think tanks, and Fox News there from the very beginning.

And Fox News did not do the movement any favors with their coverage. After weeks of promoting the tea parties, the "reporting" from various events was anything but "fair and balanced."

Particularly embarrassing was Fox Business reporter Cody Willard covering the Boston protest who encouraged combatting the government, saying "I think they're fighting both the Republican and Democrat fascist regimes. I can't tell the difference; most of the people I've been talking to can't either." In a later report, Willard referred to the stimulus itself as "fascist," urging people to "wake up and fight."

Fox's new golden boy, Glenn Beck, was in rare form. In an "interview" on Greta Van Susteren's show from a tea party held at The Alamo in San Antonio, TX, he began whipping the crowd into a frenzy. The funny thing about the interview is that both Van Susteren's and Beck's voices were pumped on loudspeakers throughout the Alamo, prompting the whole audience to cheer every time either Fox host mentioned anything mildly provocative (including secession, which Texans apparently pine for because they love America so darn much). It was more pep rally than news coverage, and reminded me of Beck's other PR flop, the 9/12 Project (hat tip to News Hounds for the video).

The unfortunate open-mic discussion Neil Cavuto has with producers about what kind of lie to tell viewers about turnout featured on The Political Carnival is true to its title: "Neil Cavuto makes an ass of himself." It's worth a watch.

However clumsy the Fox coverage was, I've got to hand it to the teabaggers -- they're pretty good at embarrassing themselves on their own.

The overall tenor was clearly anti-any-network-besides-Fox. Check out this video of a CNN reporter who seems to come close to being tarred and feathered by an angry mob.

One UPI video shows a man holding a dry erase board with the following scrawled upon it: "TAXATION WITHOUT RESPRESENTATION YOUR TAXES R BEING USED TO DESTROY FAMILY AND MARRIAGE [illegible] GOVERNMENT CORRUTION AND GREED"

The man told UPI, "I'm paying taxes to more or less to mess myself over and that don't sound right."

No, sir, that don't sound right.

There was plenty of drama at a tea party in Slidell, LA. One woman held up a sign there that said "AS OBAMA THRIVES DEMOCRACY DIES." In the same video, another teabagger holds a sign that says "DEMOBAMA PLAN = CULT KOOLAID = SOCIALIST TAXES = POISON FOR U.S.!" while speaking onstage about how lobbyists and special interests have nothing to do with this, and how fault lies clearly with the government only.

This video of teabaggers praying is also interesting, especially the part where the speaker insists that God is the reason they are there protesting. And, of course, the pro-lifers came out in full force. Not sure what that has to do with taxation, but oh well.

Rather than going into every manifestation of insanity, I compiled the following to help our readers identify and communicate with residual teabaggers (not that we're encouraging you to do such a thing):

Teabaggers are frustrated with Obama saying that we're not a Christian nation ("crucify him!") and Obama bowing to the Saudi king (when he should have been kissing him like Bush did?). They rail against imaginary Defense Department cuts, the Treasury, and the Fed. On the other hand, the teabaggers' likes include liberty, revolution/bloody uprising, Jesus (or people dressed up as Jesus), the Constitution, and insisting the president wasn't born here.

Rachel Maddow did a great tea party round up, including images of one popular T-shirt featuring "Chairman Maobama," and a sign calling for the hanging of congressmen such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Rep. John Conyers, and Sen. Edward Kennedy, among others.

Maddow also reported that teabaggers are continuing the troubling phenomenon that I reported on a couple of weeks ago of relating higher taxation to slavery and the holocaust. Maddow's slideshow included signs with sentiments linking protesters' tax status to slavery, and statements such as "Obama = Hitler," "Barack Hussein Obama: The New Face Of Hitler" (our pals at Democratic Underground got a close-up of this poster, and the CNN lady who was nearly taken out got a quick interview with the guy, who was pretty much only able to say "because he's a fascist" in defense of himself) and "The American Taxpayers Are The Jews For Obama's Ovens."

Maddow also made astute observations about turnout, noting that in Rockford IL, for example, over 30 times as many people showed up for a recent Mötley Crüe concert as did for the teabagging event held there yesterday.

Maddow's guest last night, Ana Marie Cox, said she saw "mildly racist signs" such as the one depicting the president of the United States as a "shoeshine boy." Cox also pointed out the hypocrisy of holding protests in parks (funded by taxpayers) with security provided by police, whose salaries are also paid by government revenues.

And that's the key here, people. Yes, it's all very fun to laugh at these people, especially when they fall on their faces so thoroughly. But in the end, their most basic facts are totally wrong.

One favorite line is that they're protesting taxation without representation. I wonder how many of these protesters know the plight of people in Washington D.C., or would support Republican efforts to deny Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton from getting a voting seat in Congress.

As my representative in the House, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, put it in a release yesterday, these tea parties "are an effort to mislead the public about the Obama economic plan that cuts taxes for 95 percent of Americans and creates 3.5 million jobs. It's despicable that right-wing Republicans would attempt to cheapen a significant, honorable moment of American history with a shameful political stunt. Not a single American household or business will be taxed at a higher rate this year."

Another person who really cut to the bone in her analysis of the situation is the insightfully entertaining Gail Collins, who wrote this in her The New York Times column today:

The president himself has proposed some really big-ticket savings from reforming things like agricultural subsidies, the college loan program and the private insurance end of Medicare. He wants to change tax laws that would end special treatment for people like oil drillers or hedge fund operators or multinational corporations.

The only problem is that Congress seems deeply unenthusiastic. Can we organize a tea party in favor of the Obama budget-balancers? Everybody who wants to stop giving subsidies to the banks for making college loans with federally backed default protection, send your senators some variation on the theme of caffeinated beverage.

For more on the facts of taxation in this country, check out this week's BuzzFlash interview with Chuck Collins, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and director of their "Program on Inequality and the Common Good."

Now that the dust has settled, let's hope that yesterday's protesters will listen to the facts and spend their tax refund checks on something other than teabaggery. 

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS