Tea Party Day: Brace For Crazy

[Joanne98]

We all know by now that tomorrow's tea parties are about as authentic an expression of popular outrage as the Brooks Brothers riot. Every pulled thread leads to right-wing front groups and corporate cash behind the scenes. But just because the conservative establishment is organizing the tea parties, that doesn't mean they're going to be able to control who shows up.

Because any time you try to whip conservative crowds into a populist, anti-librul frenzy, you're going to attract people who are off-message at best, and lunatics at worst.

I can understand the anti-union groups trying to piggyback on the tea parties to " the word against the Employee FORCED Choice Act" - they're the exact same people who hate upper-bracket taxes. And opposing EFCA is sort of populist, right? I mean, they're protecting the little guy from being intimidated into joining a union where he might be forced to make more money... so he has to pay more taxes!

But the anti-EFCA people are positively benign compared to the lunatic fringe that's planning to crash the parties. Check out the tea party YouTube at the top of this post, which is chock full of "birthers" who don't believe Obama was born in the U.S. - and therefore do not recognize him as the rightful President Of The United States.

Or how about the ALIPAC people who are planning to "support" the parties against the organizers' wishes? In case you've never heard of ALIPAC:

The says that ALIPAC... is “a xenophobic anti-immigrant group…publicly branding undocumented immigrants as murderous criminals and disease carriers".

Of course, no gathering of conservatives would be complete without full-on white supremacists, who seem to think the tea parties might be their version of The Rapture:

Ladies and gentlemen, I think every WN needs to not only attend the April 15th Tea Party nearest you... but then stay involved and help provide leadership to this movement.

I believe that this is the white revolution we’ve been waiting for.

It doesn’t look what we expected but this is it.

Needless to say, they're looking at the tea parties as a recruiting bonanza of disaffected white people pissed off at people who don't look like them.

And the best part of all? Liberal bloggers and journalists are going to be all over the tea parties with video cameras, capturing countless precious moments of OMG-I-can't-believe-they-just-said-that and holy-crap-what-is-wrong-with-these-people, and posting them on YouTube for all the world to see.

I predict Epic Messaging Fail tomorrow, as the conservative movement's innate extremism will be revealed in all its foamy-mouthed glory to once again terrify everyone who isn't crazy.

http://firedoglake.com/2009/04/14/tea-party-day-brace-for-crazy/