two views on the "tea parties"

A liberal view over at the Peking Duck:

Back in the motherland, I’ve been watching in amusement and amazement as the “tea party” nonsense titillates the right into paroxysms of ecstasy. All I’ll say is this: The tea parties are code. They have nothing to do with taxes. They are all about anti-Obama rage, racism, fundamentalism and the Limbaugh-Rove-Malkin axis-of-sleazels’ wet dream of imitating the Nuremberg rallies in America. The astroturfed, Fox-news-sponsored orgies of faux outrage are simply a continuation of the 2008 campaign’s insistence that Obama was a socialist Muslim terrorist born in Kenya and out to plunder the US treasury and turn the US of A into a Caliphate.

And as quoted on Instapundit:

“Democrats and other skeptics are desperate to dismiss the tea parties that popped up across the country today. . . . This eagerness to explain away this movement is telling, suggesting the skeptics see these gatherings as a real threat. Certainly the tea parties have an anti-Obama slant, but what we’re seeing is something outside the normal dynamics of Democrat-Republican tension. . . . It isn’t clear yet what the tea party movement is all about, but it can’t be dismissed as something that simply arose from shadowy GOP organizers.”

I'm not a fan of protests in general, no matter who's behind them. The loss of individuality and the reduction of calm, sophisticated debate to a small cluster of frothing, 10-word talking points are too much for me to take. While I concede the value such activities have in raising consciousness about issues, the activities themselves completely turn me off.


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