dippin

I'm sorry, but this whole "the tea party are not what the media portray them to be" is a bit silly, no? I mean, they are promoted and/or sponsored by Fox News and pajamas media (home of joe the plumber). As is this "they are fed up with both parties" claim. Their keynote speaker at the convention was Sarah Palin. The biggest sponsors for the convention are:
- the judicial watch (founded by former republican senate candidate Larry Klayman, funded mostly by Richard Melon Scaife, and which has a list of "top 10 corrupt" politicians that includes 9 democrats),
- the leadership institute (founded and presided by Morton Blackwell, member of the executive committee of the RNC),
- Vision America (hosts of the "war on Christians conference" about how the "gay agenda" and the "secularists" are driving Christ out of public life, and presided by Rick Scarborough, who, by his own accounts, is Tom Delay's "closest friend"),
- the Young Americans for Freedom (creators of the 'Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day' contest, 'Koran Desecration' contest, and responsible for posting "gays spread aids" fliers all over the michigan state campus)
- The voices of America (created by two members of Beck's 9-12 project)

Then, in the actual convention itself we had:
- Tom Tancredo, republican, as the opening speaker, where he lamented that the outlawing of literacy and English tests to vote, and that that allowed Obama to get elected
- Joseph Farah, "birther" and editor of World Net Daily, who used his speech at the convention to denounce Obama as an illegal alien
- Andrew Brietbart, creator of the documentary "Generation Zero," which argues that the recent financial crisis was engineered by 1960s radicals intent on destroying capitalism. Oh, and also the boss of that guy that was just arrested trying to wiretap Landrieu's phones.

Of course, you may argue that the convention is not representative of the entire movement.

But when we look at the states' tea parties, the majority are sponsored by Dick Armey's freedomworks. And the majority actually endorses the republican candidates quite consistently, from David Vitter in La., to Scott Brown in MA, to Michelle Bachmann.


Now, those may be extremists that are a minority in the tea party movement. But when this minority actually includes both the leadership and the sponsors of the movement, its hard to argue that they are not representative of the movement. At some other point in time the tea party might have been grassroots and not partisan. Not now.