Tea Parties & The Inconvenience of Truth

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Protest is the essence of America. It formed the nation. To say people attending these rallies are loons is to say the same of those who dumped tea into Boston Harbor to protest British taxes.

Yet to read or watch what remains of the mainline press, tea partiers at Tax Day rallies are nothing good -- racists, fascists, gun nuts, gay-bashers, militant separatists. They are described as generally hateful, ignorant, unhinged, and of course extreme.

Most are none of those things. Rather, they are largely independent voters angry at relentless Democratic leftism, frustrated by big-spending Republicanism (primarily under Bush II), and outraged by the hubris, pretension, shameless immoralism, and patronizing arrogance so widespread among the lofties in both political parties.

Are these people lopsidedly Christian? Yes indeed -- and so is the nation. Are they conservative? Yes again, and hence typical of how a large percentage of voters describe themselves (a percentage consistently twice that of voters describing themselves as liberals).

Are they loons swimming out of the mainstream? Here's NPR and Fox analyst Juan Williams:

A Pew poll in early March found 78 percent of Americans "dissatisfied with the way things are going in the country today." . . . A Fox poll in February found that 59 percent say they don't trust the federal government. A CNN poll the same month reported results that suggest 56 percent are well beyond mere mistrust: They agree that the federal government is "so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens..." [snip]

With all that, would it be too much to suggest the tea partiers are riding to the nation's rescue on the political/ideological inconvenience of the truth?

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