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What Did The TEA Parties Accomplish?
By Harris Sherline
April 27, 2009

The TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Parties drew national attention for a brief period in the recent news cycle. It was an interesting exercise in peaceful public gatherings to protest government policies, the sort of assemblies that our nation's Founders envisioned. It was inspiring to many Americans, not just those who attended the estimated 2,000 plus gatherings, but also to substantial numbers of those Americans who did not participate directly in the rallies.

The Tea Party crowds have been estimated as totaling around 250,000 people who felt the need to be heard. I did not attend any of the Parties because one was not organized in the community where I live. However, I listened on the radio and followed their activities with great interest. I may not have been there to protest in person, but I emphatically agree with the message they were expressing.

Columnist Michelle Malkin, who attended the Tea Party in Sacramento, CA, noted: "Let's use liberal math to calculate attendance at last week's nationwide Tax Day Tea Party protests. When Left-wing activists make crowd estimates, the algorithm is: six figures = one million. An incomplete survey of newspaper accounts and organizer estimates pegged the Tea Party protest population at a minimum of 250,000. We can now, therefore, officially call it the Million Taxpayer March. Or the Million Right-Wing Extremists March if you work for the Department of Homeland Security."

Media coverage was mixed. The leading liberal news sources (The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, ABC, CBS and NBC, etc.) viewed the Tea Parties as an exercise in futility, ginned up by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other right-wing "extremists." CNN joined them in excoriating and denigrating those who attended.

These media organizations, and it appears most of those who work for them, simply did not understand the message, claiming that only those who oppose Obama and voted against him participated, or that the Tea Parties were only about taxes and "taxation without representation."

In a further effort to marginalize those who participated in the Tea Parties, critics stressed the point that the tax policies of the Obama administration are taxation WITH representation. Other assertions about the Tea Party crowds included such characterizations as not including any minorities, specifically blacks and Hispanics, or Democrats and people who voted for Obama. The critics were not only wrong but they have also been unwilling to look beyond their own biases.

Newt Gingrich noted, "Liberal politicians and pundits did their best to discredit the Tea Parties by describing them, first, as a partisan Republican movement, and, second, as a revolt of greedy old rich people who don't want to pay more income tax."

Actress Janeane Garofalo said on CNN: "It's not about bashing Democrats, it's not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don't know their history at all. This is about hating a black ma