It is time to start giving progressive activists as much attention as we give the Teabaggers

Of course, there has always been a crazy left, too. The difference is that they never got the kind of media attention that these teabagging faux populists have. In fact, regular, not-crazy liberals still don't get this kind of attention. There were truly grassroots demonstrations against the Iraq invasion, involving not hundreds, but hundreds of thousands. But they never received even a hundredth of the press coverage these ridiculous tea parties did. In fact, they were ignored as much as possible, to the point of implausibility.

The highest estimate I’ve seen for tea party turnout, the one cited by Michelle Malkin and other conservative ideologues with an obvious desire to inflate the numbers as much as possible, is 250,000 nationwide, at 800 events. First of all, that makes for an average of 312 people per event. Second, 250,000 people is fewer than showed up at a single anti-war rally in DC before the Iraq invasion, which received nothing like the press coverage these ridiculous tea parties did. Guess how many people showed for the DC tea party? 3,000. Three fucking thousand. That’s your big scary tax revolt, after weeks of promotion on cable news.

I want to emphasize this point again. Even former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, whose FreedomWorks non-profit coordinated the tea parties, said on Meet the Press that there were “over 800 tea parties around the country, with attendance in the hundreds.” Get that? That’s hundreds. The largest congregation of teabaggers of all was in the largest southern capitol, Atlanta, numbering 15,000.

Folks, these numbers aren’t modest; they are completely pathetic. 15,000 white people isn’t a people’s movement; it’s a Rush concert. In other cities, the protests drew fewer people than a good street magician. There is no legitimate justification for the amount of coverage these tiny crowds received.

The hard right—-people who call guys like Beck, Limbaugh and Hannity “great Americans”—-find themselves suddenly marginalized, powerless, irrelevant. There is a natural radicalization that goes along with this kind of political alienation, and we saw some of this on the left during the Bush years. The difference is that the “loony left” and even the not-so-loony left was almost completely ignored by the press in those years. Even now, the equivalents of these “Obama=Hitler” nutjobs on the left, if there are any, aren’t paid any mind. However, this rapidly dwindling, obviously ignorant, increasingly manic fringe on the right is still somehow a major media focus point.

Why? Maybe it’s because their ostensible message about taxes is one shared by the extremely wealthy, the ones who actually stand to lose something (about 4% of their income) if Obama’s tax plan is implemented. Maybe it’s because the press has been swallowed up by giant conglomerates, which also stand to lose. Of course, it’s sad that there are always a few pawns willing to work on their behalf, but it’s also pretty encouraging just how few of them there are. Despite the best efforts of hugely popular media outlets to confuse the issues and demonize Obama as a fascist socialist America-hater, his approval rating is at 64%. And in an amazing development, the majority of Americans don’t even think their taxes are too high.

It seems that people may finally be wising up to the fraudulent economics of the GOP, despite the corporate press’ best efforts to fool them. Yes, we have a huge debt problem, but we all know whose fault that is. And the only way we will ever pay down that debt is to raise taxes. That’s not fascism; that’s reality.

But reality is the last thing on the teabaggers’ minds. In fact, reality is the enemy. What they want, what they appear to need, is something, anything, that will enable them to deny their own culpability in causing the truly horrific condition this country was in the day Obama was inaugurated and Bush flew away from a crowd of jeering people--a very, very big crowd.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/21614