The Tax Day Tea Parties

I haven't had a chance to pay my two cents on the nationwide movement that is the Tax Day Tea Party. I was otherwise occupied in Malaysia, a country that was recently chastised by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as an "uncooperative tax haven." By uncooperative, I can only infer that the Malaysian government, as with the governments of Singapore and the Phillipines, is not cooperating with the political Left's view of what the proper level of taxation should be. But, I digress.

Coverage of the nationwide movement by the monolithic mainstream press appears to fall in two camps:

1) An attempt to mitigate or downplay the significance of the movement, trying to relegate the movement to fringe status. A mob that has been whipped by uber-Rightwing activists and those bloody capitalists. This, of course, can be contrasted with the supposed "anti-war" movement lead by Cindy Sheehan during the Crawford campout in the summer of 2005. I should add that this anti-war movement was, in fact, a fringe movement, as it was led by the part-time feminists at Code Pink and their ideological brethren (Rats, an anti-feminist faux pas). The media chose to "play up" this anti-war movement by saying it numbered in the hundreds of thousands nationwide when, at best, it numbered in the single digit thousands.

2) A sneering condescesion by the left-wing commentariat, who only recently decided to turn their mental sundials to "patriotic." Stephen Moore's post below captures this perfectly:

Million Taxpayer March

Today is tax protest day, with tea parties around the country. No one knows how many, but the latest estimate from taxdayteaparty.org is anywhere between 600 and 2,300. Organizers are predicting one million people will participate in towns as large as Chicago and as small as Steamboat Springs, Colorado.

I asked one of the lead organizers of the Washington D.C. tea party, Andrew Langer, president of the Institute for Liberty, how this all got started. "A lot of the anger dates back to the failures of the Republican Congress to control spending and earmarks," he says. "Voters evicted Republicans in 2006 and they got Nancy Pelosi, who has been even worse on taxpayer issues like controlling earmarks and balancing the budget. The endless bailouts and debt bills have intensified the rage. Certainly Rick Santelli's rant in February on CNBC tapped into citizen disgust."

What has been fascinating to watch is the left's elitist response to the Tea Party movement. On Monday night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow and her guests guffawed at the craziness of the protesters. The MSNBC talking heads were arrogant and condescending in their reaction to bus drivers, schoolteachers, plumbers, stay-at-home moms and construction workers who are waving banners and protesting out-of-control government. Never mind that the protesters are many of the same people who hoped that Barack Obama would bring "real change" to Washington. Ten trillion dollars of new debt wasn't exactly what they had in mind. Yet Paul Krugman ranted in the New York Times that the protestors are participants in a fake grassroots movement --"astroturf" was his term -- orchestrated by the conservative powers in Washington and the Republican Party.

He needs to get out more. I covered one of these tea parties a few weeks ago in Milwaukee and was struck by the impressive turnout, some 660 people, and their diverse backgrounds: seniors and teens, black and white, white collar and blue collar, wealthy and working class. They had as much disgust with Republicans as with Barack Obama and the Democrats. And they are infuriated by bailouts to homeowners, banks, auto companies, insurance firms and the like. "There is something going on out there across America," says Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. "The anger is palpable."

When I asked one participant why he took time on a rainy Saturday to attend a political rally, he fumed: "Because the government is now wasting $1 billion an hour." Many attendees described themselves as independent voters who said "a pox on both their houses." The mood feels a lot like the "throw the rascals out" election of 1994. For the past nine months, politicians at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue have turned a deaf ear to these voices. If they continue to do so, a lot of incumbents are going to lose in 2010. And that's change you can believe in.

-- Stephen Moore

But nowhere does the coverage of the Tea Party movement become more irresponsible than this editing hatchetjob by CNN. Take a look:

Is this reporter serious? A movement whipped up by the rightwingers and the capitalists at Fox News? Now CNN has decided to cover-up its journalistic fraud by forcing YouTube.Com to pull down this video I have embedded above. So rather than allowing the marketplace of ideas to function properly, CNN thinks its a better idea to stifle the free flow of information. I thought it was the Bush administration that set out to punish dissent with its shocktroops, no?

Steven Chapman has a great article via RealClearPolitcs.Com,

"...the message was one of great skepticism about the efficacy of the government's remedies and great apprehension about the expense (along with some of the extremist lunacy that accompanies any mass movement). The scale of the federal response to the crises has come as a frightening surprise to many Americans, who suspect the cure will be worse, and less transitory, than the disease."