Archive for April 4, 2009

“Tea Parties”: a Minor Definitional Quibble

As the conservative media outlets continue to cover wimpy little protests styling themselves as “tea parties,” let’s be clear. This is a tea party:

You “throw” one in response to events like this:

This – an assembly of smiling white people, holding a hodgepodge of bizarre and tenuously related protest signs (“humans first”?!?), screaming about tax hikes that won’t affect them – is not a tea party, no matter how much Michelle Malkin wants it to be:

And regardless, you don’t “throw” one in response to events like this:

Something is deeply wrong with a political movement that feigns outrage over the budget deficits it helped create, while ignoring torture, forgiving the ex-President for starting a war on knowingly false premises, and shrugging off warrantless wiretapping. The time to protest was yesterday; we all missed it. The time for bipartisan, responsible, adult, informed democracy, sans-teabags, is today.