Tea Party Watch
Hard at work again! Some of you may know that Tuesday was supposed to be the day the Tea Party re-emerged as a mighty force* in electoral politics. Here is a notice about the great day, from our old friend, Jim Hoft:**
I thought that it would be a good idea to check in on several of these events, to see how they did. So, here are some pictures, from various cities. Now, I know that it is generally impossible to get all of the attendees at a demonstration in a picture at one time, but still, these were all taken by Tea Partiers themselves, and presumably offer a pretty good clue of how big these national demonstrations really were:
Well, Green Eagle (apparently having nothing constructive to do this week) took each of these photos and counted the visible people in them. They're pretty low resolution, so I may be off by a little here, but where I couldn't tell whether something was a person, I gave the teabaggers the benefit of the doubt. Here's the count, from the first picture to the last: 51, 11, 59, 30, 26. That's an average of about 36 visible protesters per demonstration. Again, in fairness, I remind you that there were undoubtedly people at all of these demonstrations that weren't in the pictures, but so what? Suppose the average attendance was twice this (72) or three times (108)? That would still represent a horrible, embarrassing, humiliating turnout for a massively funded national movement.
Let me repeat something I realized when I first started going to these demonstrations and reporting on them, at the very beginning of the Tea Party movement: there is no there there. This is an entirely synthetic spectacle, in which people like the Koch brothers pay to turn out a minimal number of people- maybe a couple of buses full- and then count on the right wing noise machine to vastly overstate their attendance, and then berate the pathetic mainstream media, who apparently can't count up to 100 or so, into reporting that this miserable showing represents a real national movement.
The Tea Party does not exist, except as a figment in the very fevered imaginations of people who can look at pictures like this and think they represent any real American movement. Once again, the press has been sold a charade. But like the charade that claims global warming is a hoax, the charade that says the way to straighten out the economy is by making the poor pay when the rich gamble and lose, the charade that said that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States, the charade that government regulation is holding the economy back, instead of keeping it from disaster, the charade of the current Benghazi, IRS and AP pseudo-scandals, that's all the Republicans have. Luckily for them, they have so many willing buyers in the national press, or the pack of them would have been driven out of the country long ago.
*Not that it ever was, as regular readers of Green Eagle will be aware.
**The Dumbest Man on the Internet, in case you have forgotten. Although he has a lot of competition for that title.
I thought that it would be a good idea to check in on several of these events, to see how they did. So, here are some pictures, from various cities. Now, I know that it is generally impossible to get all of the attendees at a demonstration in a picture at one time, but still, these were all taken by Tea Partiers themselves, and presumably offer a pretty good clue of how big these national demonstrations really were:
Well, Green Eagle (apparently having nothing constructive to do this week) took each of these photos and counted the visible people in them. They're pretty low resolution, so I may be off by a little here, but where I couldn't tell whether something was a person, I gave the teabaggers the benefit of the doubt. Here's the count, from the first picture to the last: 51, 11, 59, 30, 26. That's an average of about 36 visible protesters per demonstration. Again, in fairness, I remind you that there were undoubtedly people at all of these demonstrations that weren't in the pictures, but so what? Suppose the average attendance was twice this (72) or three times (108)? That would still represent a horrible, embarrassing, humiliating turnout for a massively funded national movement.
Let me repeat something I realized when I first started going to these demonstrations and reporting on them, at the very beginning of the Tea Party movement: there is no there there. This is an entirely synthetic spectacle, in which people like the Koch brothers pay to turn out a minimal number of people- maybe a couple of buses full- and then count on the right wing noise machine to vastly overstate their attendance, and then berate the pathetic mainstream media, who apparently can't count up to 100 or so, into reporting that this miserable showing represents a real national movement.
The Tea Party does not exist, except as a figment in the very fevered imaginations of people who can look at pictures like this and think they represent any real American movement. Once again, the press has been sold a charade. But like the charade that claims global warming is a hoax, the charade that says the way to straighten out the economy is by making the poor pay when the rich gamble and lose, the charade that said that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States, the charade that government regulation is holding the economy back, instead of keeping it from disaster, the charade of the current Benghazi, IRS and AP pseudo-scandals, that's all the Republicans have. Luckily for them, they have so many willing buyers in the national press, or the pack of them would have been driven out of the country long ago.
*Not that it ever was, as regular readers of Green Eagle will be aware.
**The Dumbest Man on the Internet, in case you have forgotten. Although he has a lot of competition for that title.
Comments
“filled sidewalks in front of the federal building for about 30 minutes”
30 minutes. What? Did the burgers get cold?
“a handful of activists”
"hundreds-strong crowd, among the largest of the protests”
“in Washington, a few dozen people”
“a Chicago rally of some 100 people”
“dozens of lunch-hour protesters in Phoenix”
Now to rate the seriousness of all that...
Back where I just got home from, a thousand anti-nuclear activists have begun a THREE MONTH walk to Hiroshima.
Now that’s... a "lunch-hour”.