I can’t help myself.
From The Town Talk (bold mine):
Tea Party on the Red will be held Wednesday, April 15, from 5 to 7 p.m at the downtown amphitheatre in Alexandria.
The program starts at 5:30 p.m.
The activities include a presentation of colors by the National Guard, the Daughters of the American Revolution and Sons of the American Revolution, patriotic singing and throwing tea in protest into the river.
Guest speaker will be Clyde Holloway.
This is a bipartisan protest against high taxation.
I have absolutely no problem with a group of people assembling to express their disagreement with taxation policies. The freedoms of speech and assembly are fundamental to our representative democracy. But there are several problems here:
1. If it is true that the National Guard was recruited to present the colors, then they need to immediately and publicly back out of this. The Guard has absolutely no place in an overtly political protest.
The simple fact that the organizers of this event would place the Guard in such a position is brazenly disrespectful and irresponsible.
2. Is it really necessary to litter our river with teabags? Really?
3. And finally, no, this isn’t a “bipartisan protest,” Town Talk. It’s part protest against the Obama Administration and part campaign event for Clyde Holloway.
Markos Moulitsas of that evil bastion of liberal propaganda, The Daily Kos, cuts right to the heart of the problem with these “tea parties”:
Still, there’s something a little bit off kilter about this whole craziness, and I think Atrios figured it out:
I was talking with BooMan tonight about how dumb and empty right wing bloggers are these days. I suggested that the equivalent on our side would have been if in 2003 left wing bloggers spent all their time talking about their designs for the giant puppets they were going to bring to the anti-war demonstrations.
Yup, that’s it. Back in our early years, we had better things to do with our time, like organizing for upcoming elections — the things that actually matter in our modern political system. But the wingers have never been much for electoral organizing, what with their dreams of becoming the next Rush-Limbaugh style media sensation. Their single-minded obsession with punditry leaves little room for the hard work of fighting for an electorally viable Republican Party. And given that it’s their ideology specifically that has made them toxic to the voters, they’d have to come up with ideas and whatnot. That wouldn’t exactly play to their strengths, know what I’m saying? I mean, their best idea right now is to wave tea bags.
Again, no one disagrees with you waving your tea bags in defiance. In fact, many of us progressives think it’s downright awesome, because, as Markos implies, it just reinforces that the wingers are more concerned with bloviating, stagecraft, and empty gestures than in actually proposing policies that work.
So for that, thank you, and enjoy your party.
You can volunteer to fight in as many wars as you want, but without taxes to make the income for a war machine, you’re not even going to get that boat out of the harbor to go to the battleground.
CenLamar 
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