Fight For Your Right to Tea Party
Mark Hemingway
The Corner
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... but mostly it was just really, really wet. So it was with the Tax Day tea party in Washington, D.C. The turnout was still impressive given the incessant rain and lack of organization, and there was no shortage of media coverage. (Not to mention liberal trolling — Oliver Willis was there with a video camera and a note on his back that said "Kick me, I'm a liberal blogger." Oh, and to the young girl who asked Ana Marie Cox for a photograph of them together, please leave your VRWC membership card with the front desk on the way out.) Protests in front of the White House are normally the domain of the left, so I'll confess it was a bit odd to be in a crowd of protesters where most everyone appears to be gainfully employed and you overhear things like, "OH MY GOSH! That's Steve Moore. He writes for the Wall Street Journal."
There was a tent set up where anti-tax luminaries such as Grover Norquist addressed the crowd, but it was nearly impossible to hear or see the speaker from more than twenty feet away, due to the umbrellas blocking everyone's view and the anemic soundsystem. Still, there was no shortage of spectacle to be found in the crowd itself. If you were one of many that could be at the tea party only in spirit, here's what you would have seen:
Approaching the crowd, it was just a sea of umbrellas.
After that bike riding photo, I'm surprised the Obama-as-Urkel meme doesn't have more legs.
Like I said, there aren't many protests in front of the White House where those present can brag about how they contribute to the tax base.
While clearly trying to make a rhetorical point about government spending, I maintain a wheelbarrow full of free pork rinds would go over just as well at a lefty protest, given what THC does to blood sugar levels.
Naturally, these photos were forwarded on to DHS so that those in them can be properly identified.
Counterprotesters were awfully small in number, but I have a hunch that they'll show up in every major news report regardless. Further, mocking the tea parties — which are explicitly opposed to government bailouts — as a mechanism for defending the rich is about as bizarre as standing out in the rain in a cheap tuxedo under the impression anyone still cares about "Billionaires for Bush" and their egregiously lame street theater.
While there's no shortage of anti-Obama sentiment at the tea party, Congress certainly gets singled out for as much or more opprobrium.
Now if we could just find a respectable conservative candidate who was American or actually existed, the GOP would be all set.
Errant tea bags in the rain. Hopefully, they were cleaned up but someone at the Center for American Progress will no doubt complain about the littering. Still, if this were the final shot in a Bergman film, we'd all be talking about it's poetic resonance. Finis.
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