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bedsitter23 ]: The North Iowa Tea Party wants you to know something about your President.
The sign is already down, evidently thanks to a backlash from the Iowa Tea Party, which wasn’t pleased and called the imagery “unproductive”.
The best bit – apart from the Rose Bowl bowling alley in Mason City deciding to ban tea party activists from further meetings because they listed the bowling alley’s general line as a party contact number – is how NITP co-founder Bob Johnson (who says he wasn’t on the committee who approved the sign) admits the Hitler/Lenin visuals probably detract from the message, but it’s not disrespecful to compare Obama to either of them because the basic message is that Obama is taking the country in the wrong direction – just like Hitler and Lenin did.
See what he did there?
In any case, the incident illustrates one of the Tea Party’s more persistent problems – its apparent inability to prevent the paranoid extremists in its ranks from defining the party’s image. Numerous Tea Party leaders have insisted that the party is not racist or extremist or packed with right-wing conspiracy theorists, and that the few racist extremist conspiracy theorists who turn up at rallies aren’t representative of the “real” Tea Party – but somehow those few manage to be put in charge of billboard ideas.
Which is one reason (of dozens) why I can’t take the Tea Party seriously. Whatever you think of the GOP and the Democrats, they’re both reasonably good at building a party platform and then sticking to it and staying on-message – except when they don’t, of course (which is why I don’t take them too seriously either). Obviously you’ll have differences of opinion within the ranks, but generally the ones who go off the reservation don’t define the party image. They’re the exception that proves the rule, if you like.
The Tea Party has the opposite problem. And if yr constantly having to put out PR fires started by the extremist wing of yr own party that you apparently have no control over, what makes you think yr organized enough to run a country?
Not that being organized makes you any more qualified, as the Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated. Which, ironically, is why the Tea Party has a following in the first place. So maybe what the party really needs is to just say “screw it”, roll with the flow and find itself a modern-day George Washington to bring the grass roots together under one banner.
Like, I dunno, Glenn Beck.
Why not? If nothing else, he can’t possibly make the Tea Party look more radical.
Well, not much more.
Mixed messages,
This is dF
bedsitter23 ]: The North Iowa Tea Party wants you to know something about your President. The sign is already down, evidently thanks to a backlash from the Iowa Tea Party, which wasn’t pleased and called the imagery “unproductive”.
The best bit – apart from the Rose Bowl bowling alley in Mason City deciding to ban tea party activists from further meetings because they listed the bowling alley’s general line as a party contact number – is how NITP co-founder Bob Johnson (who says he wasn’t on the committee who approved the sign) admits the Hitler/Lenin visuals probably detract from the message, but it’s not disrespecful to compare Obama to either of them because the basic message is that Obama is taking the country in the wrong direction – just like Hitler and Lenin did.
See what he did there?
In any case, the incident illustrates one of the Tea Party’s more persistent problems – its apparent inability to prevent the paranoid extremists in its ranks from defining the party’s image. Numerous Tea Party leaders have insisted that the party is not racist or extremist or packed with right-wing conspiracy theorists, and that the few racist extremist conspiracy theorists who turn up at rallies aren’t representative of the “real” Tea Party – but somehow those few manage to be put in charge of billboard ideas.
Which is one reason (of dozens) why I can’t take the Tea Party seriously. Whatever you think of the GOP and the Democrats, they’re both reasonably good at building a party platform and then sticking to it and staying on-message – except when they don’t, of course (which is why I don’t take them too seriously either). Obviously you’ll have differences of opinion within the ranks, but generally the ones who go off the reservation don’t define the party image. They’re the exception that proves the rule, if you like.
The Tea Party has the opposite problem. And if yr constantly having to put out PR fires started by the extremist wing of yr own party that you apparently have no control over, what makes you think yr organized enough to run a country?
Not that being organized makes you any more qualified, as the Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated. Which, ironically, is why the Tea Party has a following in the first place. So maybe what the party really needs is to just say “screw it”, roll with the flow and find itself a modern-day George Washington to bring the grass roots together under one banner.
Like, I dunno, Glenn Beck.
Why not? If nothing else, he can’t possibly make the Tea Party look more radical.
Well, not much more.
Mixed messages,
This is dF
