The Atlantic Wants a ‘Liberal Tea Party’ and I Can’t Stop Laughing
by Stephen Green
Over at The Atlantic, which used to be a serious magazine, David Graham wonders, “What Would a Liberal Tea Party Look Like?” I’ll pause here a moment while you wipe the tears of laughter from your eyes.
“A new president has taken office, elected in response to widespread economic dissatisfaction. Now he’s trying to make big changes to the government, and some voters are upset,” Graham wrote. “They’re angry at the president’s party for backing the changes, and they’re angry at the opposition party for not doing more to stop it.”
“That’s a fitting description of what’s going on now, but I was thinking of 2009, when the Tea Party movement erupted amid Barack Obama’s attempt to pass major health-care reform.”
Um, no. The protests emerged in response to Obama’s trillion-dollar stimulus package. And when Graham mentioned former House Speaker John Boehner as some kind of Tea Party favorite, there were more tears of laughter. Accuracy doesn’t seem to be his thing.
At least give Graham credit for earnestness; he appears to believe what he wrote about the Left’s need for a grassroots — er, something, anything, to revitalize the Democrats. And he was good enough to mention the original attempt at creating a Lefty Tea Party alternative — the short-lived (and entirely astroturfed) “Coffee Party.”
But let’s talk about the Tea Party for a moment, which got stomped into the ground by Obama’s Deep State buddies at the IRS. Having failed at fighting wasteful government spending through peaceful protest, conservatives rallied around Mitt Romney during the next go-around in 2012, despite our reservations.