Our tipsy medical administrative assistant in Chicago aside, it appears that tea party crashers simply aren’t showing up in the numbers that Democrats hoped for … or for that matter, showing up as anything resembling competent crashers at all.
The self-conscious and smug hipsters profiled earlier and their erratic, pimply allies in the “pea party” movement (singing, with tedious predictability, “give peas a chance”) hung around the fringes of yesterday’s gathering in Boston, but were by no means infiltrators. If anything, Boston has provided us with something of a poster child for the failure of the “Crash the Tea Party” initiative, a man PJTV tipster Rick Lippencott captured cavorting around in an Uncle Sam costume with a red ball rubber nose, holding up a toy gun, and mocking the Second Amendment.
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Instead of creating images of bigotry, they showed themselves to be clowns.
It wasn’t this pathetic everywhere, of course, and there was action outside of Boston and Chicago. Take Salt Lake City, for example.
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Jenni Dansie found this group of “No Tea, No Party” protesters off by themselves, apparently the victims of an overzealous black tee shirt salesman. Note the group’s body language as it focuses on a man in a blue button-down shirt who came over to talk to them, like gazelles frozen in front of an oxford-wearing Mormon leopard.
But the simple fact of the matter is that the “crash” never materialized in any meaningful way. The plot was a bust. The only thing approaching successful infiltration was a real tea party supporter in Lansing, MI, who posed as a member of the “Crash” movement expressly to mock them.
“LOOK MOM! EYE KRASHED DA TEE PARTIE!!” Indeed. Other than the odd handful of LaRouche supporters comparing The One to Adolf, this, too, was the kind of respectful, hopeful tea party turnout we’ve come to expect.
The closest thing to a real infiltration that has been reported thus far was this over-the-top attempt Mitch Devine spotted in Irvine, CA.
The couple was called out by organizers from the podium, and they beat a hasty retreat.
As noted, there have been some counterprotesters, such as a group of college-age kids in Hartford, CT, that marched into their local tea party protest with a sign equating tea party protesters to the Ku Klux Klan. Dave Drian was on hand to describe how the group was simply made to disappear:
The Hartford Tea Party was held from 2-4PM on the north lawn of the capitol. Quite a good crowd. Eight protesters showed up about 15 minutes into the event — three young men and five young women — probably college age. They had a tall sign that said “Tea Party = KKK.” The five women held reflective material in front of themselves for some reason — maybe to hold up when someone tried to take their picture. They all stayed out on the fringe of the crowd and said little. About five minutes after they showed up, fifteen beefy guys in motorcycle jackets from the Rat Pack Motorcycle Club of Waterbury CT strolled single file in front of the small protest group and quietly turned their backs on the group and hoisted American, Gadsden and POW-MIA flags. They shut off the view of the protesters and the eight individuals became irrelevant. I left before the end of the event so do not know if anything else happened, but restraint and ignoring them was just great.
“Became irrelevant.” Those two words seem to sum up the clowns and desperate-to-be-hip twenty-somethings of today’s abortive “Crash The Tea Party” counterprotests.
But all hope is not lost. They still have until July 4 to become … something.
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