Salon: "Tea Partiers as the new Hippies"

[shumoon]

I wish people would stop trying to paint this as a bunch of fed-up Americans tired of the two-party-system. If these people were so principled we certainly would have heard of them during the Bush administration.

I bet none of them would be out there if McCain had won the election. This movement is almost completely motivated by people unable to deal with there being a black democrat behind the president's desk.

Right on, Matt. These types of people definitely come out of the woodwork when a Democrat is in the White House. Remember in 1995 it was Timothy McVeigh and the whole militia movement during the Clinton presidency. Their gripe then was the intrusive scope of the federal government. But the government became more intrusive during the Bush presidency with the Patriot Act, yet these groups became silent when there was a Republican in the Oval Office. Now that there is a Democrat president who is Black, these groups have again re-emerged with full force, only now they call themselves Teabaggers, Oathkeepers, Birthers, or 912ers.