talkpolitics | Less guitar, more banjo.

I went down to the demonstration to get my fair share of abuse…

Some people make ‘em out to be crazy racists, others make ‘em out to be activist patriots. Everyone’s got their spin on the Tea Party Movement, making it almost impossible to see what they’re really like. So I went down to DC yesterday to try to take the most neutral, non-biased look I could at them. Of course, I failed miserably at neutrality, as all of the people who are about to comment will tell you. Anticipating that there is no way to be completely neutral or analytical, I also took a buttload of pictures. It is my hope that through a buttload of shots, you’ll be able to see a less filtered view of the Tea Party Protest.

One of the first things I noticed about the TP-Protest was that it looked a lot like the antiwar protests I’ve attended. People bring their homemade signs and mill about. There’s generally some light conversation between strangers. The overall vibe was about the same as any other Washington Mall protest.

The issues were different, of course. There were more references to God. The crowd was a bit older. The TP-protesters were mostly white, but then, most protest rallies I’ve been to have been predominantly white. (By the way – my apologies for the poorly framed pictures. The sun was beating down on my camera’s view screen, making every shot an educated guess)

Some of the slogans were even the same from the anti-Bush ones:

(shirt reads: If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention)

Some differences between this and other protests:

Less guitar. More banjo.
And flags. Lots more flags.

There were flags everywhere. Even more striking – there were flag sellers everywhere.

That was very notable. There were more flag, button and sticker salespeople there than I had ever seen at a protest rally. Only the DNC rivaled the amount of vendors that I saw at this event.

I didn’t see any of the grammatical nightmare signs that are featured all over the internet. This guy had the only misspelling that I noticed:

Oh, and this guy should have done a fact check:

Other than that, signs were about on par with other genres of protests.

(Bonus points for the Ayn Rand reference. Why do conservatives obsess over her so?)

(I’m fairly certain that I saw this Franklin quote at an Anti-Bush rally as well)

…and this guy wins the internet.

As a mad leftie, I feel that I should point out some of the more ridiculous central themes. Obama isn’t teaming up with Pelosi and Reed to be a dictator. The working model of a dictatorship is one guy in charge, with a bunch of underlings. Congress has been enough of a pain for Obama to dispel the claims of fascism. The claims of rampant socialism and taxation are gross exaggerations as well. But if the liberals had a true Fox News equivalent during the Bush days, there probably would have been a handful of ‘em out on the mall making equally wacky claims.

I didn’t see anything racist, and I’m not surprised. Lefty that I am, I’m at least able to distinguish a political movement from a racist one. A few people made it a point of announcing it isn’t about race:

I believe that liberals who call the TP movement racist are blinded by their hate for the group, and they project the most distasteful label they can give to it. It is exactly like how I was called anti-American when I took part in peace protests. There probably were a few people at those protests that had genuinely anti-American sentiments, and there are probably YouTube clips of them circulating somewhere. The pictures and the stories get circulated and turned into folklore. Just like the stories protesters who spat on the veterans returning from Viet Nam. It turns out that this probably never happened – or if it did, it was an isolated incident.

Similarly, there were probably some folks in the crowd that were racists. But if a racist plays football, that doesn’t make it a racist football game. Similarly, if there are some racists in an anti-tax movement, that doesn’t make the movement racist.

It’s easy to get the wrong impression at a protest, though. Because there are always crazy nutters who show up to protests.

Oh, and speaking of nutters, I didn’t see any of those incognito liberals that the internet has been so worried about. There were a few counter protesters, though.

…and here’s your liberal nutter. Sporting a “One Lord” hat and a Bob Marley T-Shirt, this guy decided to vent at the Tea Partiers and tell them what is wrong with their movement. And yes, he accused them of being afraid of a black president. A few Tea Partiers got in his face for a nice loud argument, which was undoubtedly the photo-op the swarming crowd of media was looking for. Especially when one of the TP’ers got into the fray while his eight year old son sat on his shoulders. But I’ll give the Tea Partiers credit for what happened next. Some cooler heads in the crowd realized that there was nothing good that could come from fighting with a crazy person, so they started chanting “walk away”. The crowd dispersed without further incident.

…much to the disappointment of NBC.
Most (if not all) of the other liberals there were more well behaved. They paraded around the vent with giant signs reminding that Obama really isn’t the Tax Miser that he was being made out to be. These signs didn’t have much of an effect on the protesters – you’d have better luck preaching abstinence at a go-go bar than you would have converting people to liking Obama at a Tea Party Rally – but they probably made for an nice photo-op for all the non-Fox networks.

Oh, and speaking of non-Fox networks, I spent some time following CNN’s John King while he was interviewing Dick Armey, trying to get a shot of both of them with an anti-CNN sign in the background. But the sun glare on my camera and Dick’s hat foiled that plan. The “CNN” was covered by the brim:

The silliest thing about the interview was when one of the Tea Partiers mistook John King for Anderson Cooper, and heckled him loudly. I wish I had a camcorder for that part. After the interview, Armey took on another reporter that obviously thought he could advance his journalistic career by dressing like Jimmy Olsen:

The protest turnout was decent. Fox will probably make it look like a mob scene, and other networks may take shots that diminish the crowd. Here’s about as accurate a picture as I could take at 5:30 as the rally officially started:

One last thing before I end this long, overly-pictured post. I had mentioned that the right wing labeled liberals as anti-American when they bitched and moaned about their government, what their government was doing, and things that they didn’t like in general. As I was walking through the crowds North of the Washington Monument, it struck me that here was a group of right wingers that were bitching about their government, what their government was doing, and things that they didn’t like in general. Yet the central themes of their movement – the colonial dress, the flags, even their movement’s name – are all screaming at the top of their lungs what great patriots they are. This dichotomy may just be what annoys me most about the Tea Party Patriots.