In the midst of this fervor over teabagging, there have been any number of comparisons between the inefficacy of the "tea party" crowd and the inefficacy of the anti-Iraq War protests of the last 5+ years.
While I hesitate to dignify the teabaggers by putting up another post about them, I think it's important to clarify something that everyone seems to be forgetting. Namely, that the most substantial reason for protesting the war was to show division in the country on a scale large enough for the rest of the world to see. This larger purpose had a number of sub-goals: To free Americans traveling abroad from the stigma created by our last administration. To, in the words of a friend currently working in Israel and the West Bank, make room for ex-pats to be classed as "one of the good ones." Above all, to make it possible for an end of the war and a change in American foreign policy to be taken seriously by other countries.
In that respect, they served their purpose admirably. I'm not really sure if there's a comparable reason for these "Tea Parties." Particularly as they seem considerably crazier, more partisan (in the sense of irrational team loyalty) and less coordinated than the Left has been in recent years.
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Sadly they did accomplish one thing: With careful use of tight-angle photography and selective cropping of all footage they now enable Fox to claim that they're visible proof of widespread unhappiness with Obama.
ReplyDeleteThe numbers alone should dispel that, but somehow I don't think it'll help when they get to control the message to such a huge extent. As long as they can create a narrative for fox news viewers where obama is hugely unpopular (even more so than bush! i dont remember protests in every american city against bush, do you?! we report, you decide) then they've succeeded on some level.