Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and so too is the nature of the people protesting you. A Tea Party email is going around today depicting the Tea Party as nothing more than a group of wonderful Americans who love their country who just feel gosh dog it that maybe we pay a bit more in taxes than we should.
On the other hand, there is what is now being described with great glee as “The Flea Party” – this is the branding being put forward about the Occupy Movement.
Let’s not forget that the Tea Party is the one who has the lovely bumper sticker with a noose and the line “Support Bush” and a number of other equally racist and pro-violence claims, “We Came Unarmed. This Time.”
We should also consider that Tea Party rallies are, compared to the current Occupy movement, few and far between and certainly don’t have hundreds or thousands of people camping out, in close quarters.
But this branding will work. We even see it in the coverage of the man who shot the automatic weapon at The White House; Fox News asking
Did White House Shooter Come From Occupy Movement?
This is the Right Wing Noise Machine World we live in. The people who carry the signs calling for concealed weapons, lynchings and telling people the President is a ‘nigga’, those are the patriots. The people who want health care for all Americans and want the banks to pay for their mistakes, well, they are anarchists.
Don’t be surprised if anarchists are not the new socialists, a favorite and wonderfully false claim on the Tea Partiers.
Final thought: ironically the Occupy Movement and the Tea Party share one very important trait, deep anger and uncertainty and resentment of where the country is. Both groups are saying enough is enough, it’s time to make changes. The two groups have far more in common than we might think.
