Why the Tea Partiers Should Thank the Tea Party Crashers

*** UPDATE - Cross posted at Flopping Aces! ***

This year's April 15th Tea Party protests saw an interesting twist. Groups of leftists are so impassioned by their hatred for anyone who would be opposed to their agenda that they came up with a novel way to oppose them: infiltration. They planned to crash the party, showing up with signs showing extreme racist views, misspellings, etc. Inadvertently, their idea may be the most helpful thing they could have done for the Tea Partiers as well as the most damning indictment of our mainstream media.

First off, PJTV's Bill Whittle (video requires registration but is free) raised an excellent point - are there so few radical, racist, homophobes who can't spell that the left has to infiltrate with their own? More significantly is the message they never realized that they sent. Basically, what every crasher and supporter is saying is that our mainstream press is so lazy, gullible, and easily manipulated that anything that supports their partisan views will get published, regardless of whether or not actual evidence supports it. Another inadvertent consequence is that the crashers made it far more difficult for the press to use them as typical Tea Party members, as they would have loved to do.

A great example is in this article from the AP. The headline read, "Tea party leaders anxious about extremists". Yes, you're damned right that they are, given how the press has treated the movement in the last year. From ignoring to thinly veiled contempt down to idiotic accusations, the left has done its best to show how it looks down on those unenlightened enough to appreciate the benefits of trillion dollar federal budget deficits. So yes, the Tea Partiers were ready for these crashers, knowing that no matter how insane or outrageous their signs were the press would jump at the chance to point them out as representatives of the movement. But let's go back to my point from the end of the last paragraph. This created a problem for the press. Knowing that the word on these crashers was out, they would be under much greater scrutiny for who and what they chose to portray these events. They couldn't simply grab a random loon and prop him up, as the blogosphere would be ready to investigate the background and legitimacy of these sources. Remember when journalists used to do these things?

Another interesting question is why didn't the Tea Partiers do the same to all of the leftist protests during the Bush administration? Why not plant a few people with idiotic signs that would portray them as an angry mob of crazies? It wasn't necessary. Not that our press noticed, of course. As I am fond of saying, that's the beauty of our mainstream press. When they have a story to tell, they don't let pesky details like facts or the truth get in the way of their story!