Shawn Millerick of Now! Hampshire quotes an anonymous source (naturally) to claim that state Democrats are recruiting “liberal activists willing to attend so-called tea parties on Thursday and carry signs expressing racist or fringe sentiments.” Similar “crash the party” efforts are taking place around the country, Millerick says.
Talk about inoculation! From now on whenever some wingnut carries a wingnut sign at a wingnut rally, the other wingnuts can claim it’s all the work of “liberal activists.”
If true, it’s a stupid thing to do, for the simple reasons that (1) it does provide inoculation, and (2) when your opponents already are making themselves look ridiculous, it’s really bad tactics to get in the way.
However, unless the wingnuts can come up with some more solid evidence than “anonymous sources,” this story bears all the marks of a clever fabrication.
Update: I partly take the last comment back. According to Evan McMorris-Santoro at Talking Points Memo, some flaming idiot named Jason Levin has organized a Crash the Tea Party effort in Oregon to infiltrate the Party and push it further Right. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
There is actually some evidence that the Levin guy is a right wing operative. Greg Mitchell passed along this link yesterday and if you follow that to the original source link, they make a pretty good case that it is tied to right wingers. Hoping someone investigates this further. It’s a ridiculous prank.
Libby — So maybe the so-called infiltrator is really a counter-infiltrator working for the Right to make the Right look more ridiculous to inoculate itself from looking ridiculous. Works for me.
It does seem plausible to me. Hoping someone with more skills and resources than me figures it out. Seems like a job for TPM.
Infiltration or counter-infiltration, it’s absurd either way. If Levin wants to play mind games, then he should wear a sign saying “This sign is false”.
What would really inoculate the tea party is if the partiers themselves eject someone expressing “racist or fringe sentiments”. A few ‘get out of here you racist bum’ incidents might give the tea party a little credibility.
But I doubt that will happen, for if it does then they’ll start ejecting each other.
paradoctor, your thinking is way too straightforward for the TPers. So much easier to be a Rightie pretending to be a Lefty pretending to be a Rightie!
Didn’t James Taylor have a song about that? “Saw myself in my rear-view mirror, lookin’ in my rear-view mirror…”? Freaky.
Let me see now, the Levin guy is planning to infiltrate an upcoming tea party and, undetected, pass himself off as one of them. (Has to be undetected of course, because if the protesters know what he’s up to it won’t work; they’ll smack him with their protest signs.) So he shares his cunning scheme with only those people connected to the Internet.
I’d bet big money that he truly is one of those radical lefties, who see the Tea Partiers as a threat to the socialist athiest communist agenda– except I’m saving up all my pennies to buy some swamp land in Florida.
They’ve already got the Larouchies and other certified whackos hanging around their events, so what’s a few more? If the lefties do it in the right tongue-in-cheek way, it could make for some fun video-bites, sort of like that “Rich People for Bush” group that was around for awhile.
How about if he wore a sign saying:
“Your Ad Here”.
I think that would reach the Poe level; no-one would be able to tell if it’s genuine or not.
joanr16; the Danish poet Piet Hein once wrote:
Mirrors have one limitation;
you cannot, by hook or by crook
use them to see how you look when you aren’t
looking to see how you look
The inoculation angle was exactly what I heard a right-wing radio host (are there any other) claim here in BeerTown. Quote, “If we see Obama being compared to Hitler, it’s not us, it’s some whacko lefty”.
“Escalating the Hysteria”
The teabaggers are nothing but “Escalating Hysteria”, I don’t believe they deserve one tenth of one percent of the political clout that is attributed to them. The cables love the dimwitted teabaggers, it a great story (a bunch of racists making public fools of themselves), what could be better for broadcast super sensationalist folly? How about lefty’s infiltrating, yeah that sounds like a good story, even better. Having the dimwitted teabaggers makes the usual fight between publicants and Democrats much more marketable and fun.
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Well, the Tea baggers better head the infiltration plot off at the pass. They should develop a secret handshake, or a code greeting so they can know who’s the real patriots and who’s the un-American liberal infil – traitors. Maybe a greeting similar to AA where one might announce that they’re a friend of “Bill W ” except the legitimate Tea bagger would say, ” I’m a friend of Barry O”.
And in typical conservative fashion, the fact that racist signs had been seen many times previously will all be but forgotten. Just because the Tea Party recognizes that they now must hide the racism in order to gain popularity, they are still in the Klan.
Maybe I’ll just take the train next time:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/15/airports-closed-volcanic-ash-iceland
Tea Party Protests everywhere today. If I didn’t have to work I’d like to go dressed as a can of Maxwell House. Or maybe wearing a tin foil Yarmulke.