Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, How Does Your Research Go?
Mary Mancini at Liberadio! whined opined blogged today about how exclusive the Tea Party movement has become, wagging her nanny-statist finger at an organization that claims to be “of the people,” but which charges $1,000 for a convention ticket in this economy – and if you can’t afford it you can send “someone better than you” (a delegate, which – yes, Mary – the Democratic Party also does).
The problem is that a Google search returns no less than 4 formal organizations, each one claiming to represent the Tea Party movement – a movement which Mary Mancini (and Rachel Maddow, mind you) want you to believe is some grass-tops fabricated ranting mob. I wonder: which one of the organizations claiming to represent the movement was Mary talking about? Or was she really talking about the movement en masse?
Now, I wasn’t born yesterday, and living inside the Beltway brings one up-close and personal with lots of well-funded organizations on both sides of the ideological spectrum that organize people for protests (see Organizing For America or the SEIU). But to pretend that John Q. Taxpayer is showing up to Tea Party protests to collect his corporate conspiracy prize, or that the people planning the Tea Party convention in Nashville this spring aren’t doing so for their own political advancement – like every other campaign operative in every party in the history of American politics – is a grotesque and deliberate distortion of the facts. And, frankly, for Mary Mancini to refer to someone else’s protest efforts as a “rant” is a huge case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Hat tip to A. C. Kleinheider for the find.
