4/16: Tea Party Hangover

Tax Day has passed and the "tea party" protests are over, but conservative bloggers are still buzzing with excitement. Righty bloggers are portraying the coordinated demonstrations as a "smashing success" and are posting tons and tons of pictures from various protests across the country. Liberal bloggers, on the other hand, are posting pictures of racist and otherwise offensive signs that various protesters were holding. Lefty bloggers are also accusing the tea party protesters of lacking a coherent message.

It's worth noting how much the rightroots' current tactics differ from those of the Democratic netroots. Liberal bloggers have little use for street protests; Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas recently derided Code Pink as "an ineffective, self-indulgent, obnoxious and tone-deaf organization." The netroots' stated goal is electing Democrats -- preferably progressive ones. But while most (albeit not all) lefty bloggers are dismissive of activism that doesn't have to do with winning elections, their conservative counterparts have become increasingly interested in street demonstrations. Prominent righty bloggers Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin have been relentlessly promoting these tea party protests for months.

Perhaps this shift in the rightroots' focus is an inevitable consequence of the fact that the GOP is no longer in power and lacks the ability to make policy. But do these protests serve a purpose, other than providing frustrated conservatives with an emotional outlet? Reynolds says yes, suggesting that the organizing that's currently being done by these protesters could "revitalize" the GOP and impact the 2010 and 2012 elections. Moulitsas disagrees, arguing that conservatives are wasting their time waving signs in the street when they should instead be "fighting for an electorally viable Republican Party."

What else is happening in the blogosphere?

• Conservative bloggers (Emanuel, Malkin, Hewitt, Hemingway) are blasting CNN correspondent Susan Roesgen after she had several testy exchanges with protesters at a tea party rally in Chicago.
• Liberal bloggers (Benen, Cole, Lemos, Sudbay, Yglesias) think TX Gov. Rick Perry (R) crossed the line with his comments about TX seceding from the union. Some conservative bloggers are praising Perry, but others think he went too far.

TEA PARTIES: A Smashing Success

Some conservative bloggers are implying that the tea party protests were effective because they made Democrats and reporters nervous:

• RedState's Pejman Yousefzadeh: "The tea parties that went on to commemorate Genuflection To The IRS Day have been a smashing success. [...] Try as some of the various news organizations did to downplay the effect of the tea parties, it cannot be denied that they made an impact. Naturally, this success worries the defenders of Big Government; so much so that while pretending not to be concerned about the effect of the tea parties, opponents of small government have gone on the warpath to make their disdain clear."
• Power Line's John Hinderaker: "Are the tea parties the start of something big? We'll see. But one thing we know for sure is that they are making the establishment very nervous."
• Right Wing News' John Hawkins: "The Left has never been as freaked out by Al Qaeda or the Soviet Union as they are over the Tea Parties."

NRO's Jim Geraghty speculates about "where...the tea parties go from here": "Several sites are attempting to ensure that the enthusiasm of yesterdays tea parties isn't a flash in the pan, including AfterTheTeaParty.com and TaxDayTeaParty.com. [...I]f conservatives want to make sure stimulus funds don't get spent on crap, applying pressure at the local level is a way to leverage the tea party energy into something with real impact on the ground. Who knows? It might even get some conservatives involved in government on a more regular basis. Back in 1996, an obscure Chicago lawyer and law school lecturer was motivated to get involved in state legislature, and within a decade, he was running for president."

Meanwhile, RedState's Erick Erickson echoes Moulitsas's claim that elections are what really matter, not protests: "The tea party protests...are frankly meaningless. Showing up to protest does nothing. You and I can put meaning into these protests by harnessing the day's energies for real change -- throwing the bums out and restoring freedom in a free market."

Erickson's co-blogger Jeff Emanuel argues that the tea parties will have an impact on the 2010 elections: "Those who participated (and are participating in) any of the thousand modern-day tea parties being held around the country today get it -- and when this movement grows through 2009 and into 2010, and when its momentum is felt at the polls next year, [Democrats will] start to get a clue just what magnitude a sleeping dragon they awoke with their profligate spending, their spreading of the wealth, and their encroachment into people's personal lives and decisions."

TEA PARTIES II: What's The Message?

Liberal bloggers are accusing the tea party protesters of lacking a coherent message:

• BooMan: "The problem with these tea parties is that they are really just expressions of unarticulated rage. And any successful piece of activism has to be specific and coherent. Even the core message (Taxed Enough Already) isn't particularly helpful because the vast, vast majority of the protesters just received a modest tax-cut. Their grievances are all over the place, although they're mainly pissed off about deficit spending. I think they've made it plain that they don't want to pay more taxes to fix the deficit problem, but they have no message about what wars and programs they'd like to slash. We're left with nothing to chew on."
• Atrios: "[T]here's obviously nothing wrong with the right attempting to engage in protest politics. The problem is that it was never clear what they were protesting. So far Obama has cut taxes for most of the population and... well, that's it. The protests of 'The Left' have long been mocked for lacking message discipline. That criticism has often been fair. The difference is that our side's protests generally have a single point ('don't do this stupid fucking war in Iraq') which gets hijacked by a bunch of other causes when the speakers hit the stage. But the teabaggers... honestly, I still have no idea what it was about. I mean, I know it was about tribal allegiance against Barack Mumia Saddam Obama III. But it wasn't actually about anything else."
• Pandagon's Jesse Taylor: "Tea Partiers are hoping that if they mimic the energy of anti-war protests and the savvy of Obama's new media operation, that at some point an actual movement will spawn. Getting together a bunch of pissed off middle-aged white people with no clue about how the tax system works in public areas will generate a coherent agenda designed to combat the stimulus; if it gets enough media coverage, they will DOMINATE THE AGENDA. It's like taping a horn to a horse and waiting for it to alight on a magic cloud of stardust and pixies."
• Obsidian Wings' publius: "I'm sure our modern-day Samuel Adamses aren't supporting big military spending cuts. I doubt they care that taxes are unchanged or lowered on 95% of families. I suspect they had almost nothing to say about the spending and executive overreach of the [George W.] Bush years. Logical consistency, remember, isn't the point. The point is that tea parties give them an opportunity to reaffirm their own ideological self-image. In their own heads, they want to be 'small government' people. In this sense, the tea parties are simply atonement -- trying to 'out out' the damned spot."
• MyDD's Todd Beeton: "[M]aniacs around the country are gathering to protest the...errr..biggest middle tax cut in history, or something? Or is it the bailouts that began under Bush? Or perhaps that scary bogeyman big government spending? All? Either? No one seems to really know."
• Balloon Juice's John Cole: "You know what really irritates me about the tea parties? The basic fact that if right now, it were President John McCain and not President Obama, and nothing else had changed, these tea parties wouldn't exist. You know it, I know it, and even the teabaggers know it. It is just such transparent bullshit that it is offensive. The most these guys ever did during the last lost eight years was put a limp Porkbusters logo on their website, but now that we have President Malcom X George McGovern Shabazz, they are freaking out like there is no tomorrow. So absurd."

The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan thinks the tea party protesters need to present a clear alternative: "Protesting government spending is meaningless unless you say what you'd cut. If you favor no bailouts, then say so. If you want to see the banking system collapse, then say so. If you think the recession demands no fiscal stimulus, then say so. If you favor big cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, social security and defense, then say so. I keep waiting for [Glenn] Reynolds to tell us what these protests are for; and he can only spin what they they are against. All protests against spending that do not tell us how to reduce it are fatuous pieces of theater, not constructive acts of politics. And until the right is able to make a constructive and specific argument about how they intend to reduce spending and debt and borrowing, they deserve to be dismissed as performance artists in a desperate search for coherence in an age that has left them bewilderingly behind."

MEDIA CRITICISM: You Call This Objective?

Conservative bloggers are blasting CNN's Roesgen after she had several testy exchanges with protesters at a tea party rally in Chicago:

• Hot Air's Allahpundit: "Unreal: CNN reporter openly contemptuous of tea parties."
• Malkin: "CNN earns the Tax Day Tea Party Big Loser Award: Biased. Busted. Beclowned."
• Townhall's Greg Hengler: "CNN's first interviewee is a man who does not know why Obama is a fascist but can't stop repeating that he is. The second interviewee is a man who, once recognized as a non-fringe element, gets the mic taken away so Roesgen can defend Obama. Bottom line: This segment is a time capsule. Mark it under 'CNN's unapologetic bias.'"
• Emanuel: "From the department of pathetic ignorance or willfully not getting it (not sure which to file this one in yet) comes this clip of a CNN reporter shouting down a Chicago Tea Party attendee for not displaying the appropriate appreciation and gratitude to President Obama for his gift to the state of Illinois of billions in borrowed money and trillions in new debt."
• Townhall's Hugh Hewitt: "This biased coverage was nicely summed up by the hilarious and instantly archetypal 'report' by CNN's Susan Roesgen, which begins with Susan plucking from the hundreds of available tea party participants one guy with an Obama/Hitler sign, and then follows this superb bit of news gathering with a contentious, argumentative interview with a man with a baby who wants to talk about the principles of Lincoln. When Roesgen morphs into [WH Press Sec.] Robert Gibbs and begins to lecture the man about his eligibility for a tax refund and the amount of stimulus spending the state of Illinois is going to receive, Roesgen does more to end the media bias debate in this country than a dozen books by Bernard Goldberg. We can all rely on Roesgen and her producers to keep a close watch on the White House and the Democratic majorities in Congress, right?"
• NRO's Mark Hemingway: "Of all the leftist protests I've covered over the years -- and I've covered many of them -- I have never seen a reporter enter the fray and act personally offended by the many, many examples of outrageous behavior at a protest. There's little to be gained by it, and it's simply not professional. What Roesgen is doing here pure hackery. Even as grandstanding, she fails. She goes about things with all the subtlety of a brick through a window, and in the end it appears she's just an angry jerk."

Liberal bloggers, on the other hand, were more offended by the protesters whom Roesgen interviewed:

• The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "Obviously, it's not fair to suggest all of the far-right activists attending Tea Parties were as confused as the strange folks CNN talked to in Chicago, but the 'movement' has a long way to go if these guys were in any way representative of the whole."
• AMERICAblog's Joe Sudbay: "I hope America is getting a good look at the teabaggers (but not while they're actually teabagging.) They really hate the president. It oozes out of them in a very disturbing and creepy way. The talking point for the day is that Obama is a fascist. [...] These people don't live in the same country I live in -- or even on the same planet. These are the people who made Rush [Limbaugh] the leader of the GOP. No wonder the party's got no future."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: You Can Laugh, But...

The Atlantic's Ross Douthat thinks the tea party protesters have the right idea, even if some of them look silly:

"[The tea parties] have all of the weaknesses of the anti-war marches: Their message is intertwined with a sense of disenfranchisement and all kinds of inchoate cultural resentments, they've brought various wacky extremists out of the woodwork (you know, like Glenn Beck), and just as George W. Bush benefited from having opposition to his policies identified with peacenik marchers in Berkeley and Ann Arbor, so Barack Obama probably benefits from having the opposition (such as it is) associated with a bunch of Fox News fans marching through the streets on Tax Day, parroting talk radio tropes and shouting about socialism. Obama is a very popular President, at the moment, his unpopularity among Republicans notwithstanding, and it's awfully hard to see the Tea Parties doing much to change that reality in the short run; if anything, they're far more likely to reconfirm the majority in its opinion that American conservatism is increasingly wacky, echo-chamberish, and out-of-touch.

Still, here we are in the sixth year of the Iraq War, and all those anti-war protests, their excesses and stupidities notwithstanding, look a lot more prescient in hindsight than they did (to me, at least) when they were going on. So if you're inclined to sneer and giggle at the Tea Parties, keep in mind that just because a group of protesters looks ragged, resentful, and naive, that doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong to be alarmed."

LEST WE FORGET: This Ain't So EZ

McSweeney's Christopher Mah posts "Excerpts From My 2008 Tax Return, Form 1040EZ":

Line 1. Wages, salaries, and tips. This should be shown in box 1 of your Form(s) W-2. If it is not, you might not technically be employed. Attach your Form(s) W-2.

Line 2. Taxable interest. If the total is over $1,500, you cannot use Form 1040EZ. It is not our job to tell you which form you should use instead. It is your responsibility, resourceful citizen, to determine this on your own.

Line 3. Unemployment compensation and Alaska Permanent Fund dividends (see page 11 of booklet)

Booklet, page 11: Unemployment compensation and Alaska Permanent Fund dividends (see line 3 of Form 1040EZ)

Line 4. Add lines 1, 2, and 3. Divide by ?. Add 17. Multiply by Avogadro's number and subtract your resting heart rate. This is your adjusted gross income.

Line 5. If someone can claim you (or your spouse if a joint return) as a dependent and you're earning enough income to pay taxes, you're probably old enough to move out of that person's basement by now. If no one can claim you (or your spouse if a joint return), enter $8,950 if single or $17,900 if married filing jointly.

Line 6. Subtract line 5 from line 4. If line 5 is larger than line 4 but less than line 2 and greater than line 1, what time will Train A overtake Train B? This is your taxable income.