CAMPUS

DC Tea Party on Tax Day Attracts Over 3,000

Joe Biden says paying taxes is patriotic. If that’s the case then the Founding Fathers were nothing more than whiny traitors who didn’t want to do their fair share to support the Crown and Society.

I humbly submit that Joe Biden has no idea what he’s talking about.

This April 15^th, true American patriots (3,000 of ‘em) met at Lafayette Square across from the White House to protest unprecedented levels of government spending, taxing, and control. The protest was a peaceful demonstration that not all of America is willing to lie down to a centralized government with the hubris to think it can spend our money better than we can. Despite a few hiccups, the protest proceeded smoothly in the freezing rain. Speakers spoke, “Don’t Tread on Me” flags flew, and horns honked in support as participants held up signs saying things like “Taxes ‘r Theft,” “Legalize Capitalism” and “If you tax more, I hire less.”

More than 800 such Tea Parties took place nationwide, involving more that 250,000 people. Started as a grassroots reaction to the “porkulus” bill, and spurred on by Rick Santelli’s now famous call for a “Chicago Tea Party in July,” the movement picked up steam as an avenue for increasingly outraged citizens to show what they thought of government intrusion into the economy. Though the Tea Parties were a bi-partisan appeal to reason, many on the left have denigrated them as Republican events backed by corporate interests and K Street lobbyists. That such leftist criticism has turned so shrill, so quickly, is evidence that supporters of big government are scared. They’re scared that these protests might not be simply Republican “rah-rah” demonstrations.

And, in fact, they’re not.

Several conservative Democrats got up to speak at the event in DC, calling for common sense in government spending. As Michelle Malkin observed at the Sacramento protest: “[Tea Party organizer] Meckler said he heard that California GOP chair Ron Nehring was in the audience. Meckler invited him to say hi to the crowd — and then ripped him for waffling on the massive tax hike ballot measures (particularly Prop1A – $16 billion tax hikes). Massive boos from the crowd of thousands here against the Calif. GOP establishment.”

As to the assertions of Tea Parties being connected to corporate interests; that’s an intellectually disingenuous argument. Any politically active group can be linked to “corporate interests” (a la ACORN, Code Pink and the rest of the lefty protestosphere). Saying the Tea Parties have tenuous connections to vague, disembodied “corporate interests” is the same as saying that many of the people who attended them have hair: true, but vacuous.

Just because some political groups helped organize and coordinate protests does not mean they “co-opted” them or even initiated them. Correlation does not imply causation, and simply because FreedomWorks and AFP were involved does not mean that they were manipulating the message of the thousands of grassroots participants (like myself) for some sinister, undefined “corporate” aim.

Additionally, the fact that Fox News was covering these protests and giving them air time, even allowing individual anchors to promote them is by no means a reflection on the actual events themselves. Sean Hannity et al are not the “Fair and Balanced” part of Fox News. That leftist commentators allude to such a conclusion is an indicator of just how biased (and manipulative) they are. It would be like saying Kieth Olbermann is an objective reporter of facts: comically absurd.

All that said, the participation of such people and groups has as little to do with the actual message of the Tea Parties as logic does to Obama’s economic policy. Saying that big, evil corporate interests are behind protests attended by hundreds of thousands of disgruntled Americans nationwide is a red herring, intended to discredit Americans who have legitimate grievances. There were three thousand people at the DC protest alone (this, in a city which went 98% Obama) and I doubt Halliburton bused all of them in from their secret headquarters deep inside a volcano.

In fact, I know they didn’t because I talked to many of the protesters. I spoke with several small business owners, an employee of a construction company, some students, a public school secretary and a high powered consultant, among others. They were a mix of Republicans, conservative Democrats and libertarians (like myself) who had as much bad to say about Bush as Obama. Their message was overwhelming: bring accountability back to government, stop taxing us to redistribute wealth to those who don’t deserve it, and stop spending on massive entitlement and bureaucratic programs which don’t work, harm the free market, and saddle future generations with debt and inevitable tax increases.

Maybe our government got the message, but if not, there’s always July 4^th…