April 15th Protest Aftermath

As hard as they tried, the April 15th anti-Obama tea parties just didn’t achieve that goal of being ‘non-partisan’ and a ‘grassroots campaign’. According to Michelle Malkin, the protests were about American’s being fed up with high taxes, even as 90% of the crowd protesting were receiving a tax cut courtesy of the stimulus plan.

Michelle’s adorable readers shared their stories of heroics and oppression from the protests, like this gem from chotii:

Lots and lots and LOTS of cars honked and waved and thumbs-upped. The guys driving big rigs (garbage trucks, 18 wheelers, UPS-sized vans and so forth) seemed to be uniformly glad to honk their approval. Even one public bus driver did!

…

A lot of people tried to pretend we weren’t there. The people in hybrids and SmartCars seemed especially likely to try to make believe we didn’t exist.

OMG those hippies in hybrids and Smartcars, who are receiving tax breaks and spending less on gas, didn’t notice a couple of hundred people standing around on the sidewalks and parroting GOP rhetoric? Shame!

Of course the entire thing was non-partisan and just about taxes. It was covered evenly across media outlets and definitely was a grassroots campaign. /sarcasm

I mean, let’s look at how the media reported on the protests:

• Fox News Corporation — 133 mentions( Over Fox News and Fox Business )
• CNN — 36 mentions
• MSNBC — 32 mentions
• HLN — 24 mentions
• CNBC — 17 mentions

Definitely no hidden agenda there right?

Or let’s look at some of the corpor… sorry I mean lobbyist… wait, sorry I mean grassroots supporters of the Tea Parties and I’ll even use the Conservapedia.com definition (when available ) so I’m not accused of being an evil liberal!:

• American Family Association: The American Family Association or AFA is a non-profit conservative Christian organization that believes in protecting family values through consumer activism.
• Freedom Works: FreedomWorks is a conservative non-profit organization based in Washington D.C., United States.
• Americans For Prosperity (AFP) is a Washington D.C.-based political advocacy group which describes itself on its Web site as “… an organization of grassroots leaders who engage citizens in the name of limited government and free markets on the local, state and federal levels.”Who sponsors RightOnline, which helps show conservative bloggers how to harness the web to win people to their cause. Which, as a sidenote, nothing wrong with that.
• Sen David Vitter (R), who is sponsoring a bill to recognize the protests and declare April 15th as National Tax Protest Day. Yeah, seriously.

ThinkProgress has a list of the politicians who jumped on the opportunity to speak at the protests, and I’m happy to report that they are from both sides of the issues. Oh wait, nope, they’re all beltway Republicans. My bad.

But ThinkProgress is an evil liberal website, so I’m sure there were *some* Democrats in attendance that actually *are* upset by the stimulus plan and taxes.

As far as the attendance numbers, it was pretty good. No official headcount, but the estimates are around 500-1500 persons per protest, with ~2000 protests across the nation, putting the total around 1-3million people participating. Without discrediting the turnout, Fox News is calling it “Mission Accomplished” on the Fox Forum, Michelle Malkin calls it “MASSIVE” and “historical” in her posts.

That must mean when the anti-war protests broke out in 2003 that Michelle, Fox, FreeRepublic et al were astounded by the 20 million persons in 800 cities across the WORLD protesting?

hahahaha yeah, sorry. When The anti-war protest happened in DC in 2007, FreeRepublic reported how “low” and “thin” their numbers were at 25,000 attendees. Which happens to be about 25 times the amount of tea-party goers that showed up in DC. 25,000 = thin, 1,000 = massive. If that is how they are with numbers, I don’t think any one of ‘em has a better idea on how to fix the economy.

Conclusion
Ok enough of the snark, in all seriousness, I am GLAD that so many people turned out and coordinated these events. I’m glad that a portion of the protesters had best interests at heart and are honestly upset about how our government has been run, not over the past three freakin months, but DECADES.

At the same time I’m ashamed that right-wing pundits and politicians had to overshadow the protests and turn them into same-old beltway Obama bashing, and equally ashamed of the simpletons that were at there to protest a man and not an errant idea, policy, or even entrenched system.

Regardless of political affiliation, American’s coming together and protesting is EXACTLY what this country was built on, and I hope to see more of it. I may not agree with the partisanship that the GOP and it’s guard dogs pushed on the protests, but I can agree with the sentiment and ideals that the protests stood for: that Americans are finally getting involved and will let their gov’t know when they aren’t happy.

Hopefully that’s something that people on both sides of the aisle can agree with.