Media still clueless about Tea Parties

To hear the media tell it, the Tea Party movement is one of the most mysterious forces ever to surface in national life. Since February 2009, when CNBC's Rick Santelli urged his listeners to dump unfunded derivatives into Lake Michigan to protest the developing culture of bailouts, they have been nothing but open about their fears of insolvency, their discomfort with increasing size of the government and their terror of deficits. The media listen closely to all these objections, and decide they must mean something else. They say they fear debt, and the media insist that they must fear Hispanics (why they hate Marco Rubio), that they fear blacks (why they hate Thomas Sowell), that they fear strong women (why they want Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin to be sent back to the kitchen in chains). Much as the Republican win in the 1994 midterms was dismissed as a "tantrum" by the late Peter Jennings, Tea Partiers are described as being driven by inchoate anger, but the spin on their nature has tended to change. First, they were described as an ignorant rabble, much as the Washington Post had once pegged evangelicals. Then polls showed that they were a rabble that was better off and better informed than the public in general, and they became a selfish and privileged rabble: a privileged rabble parading as populists...more