On Sunday, September 3, in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, Tea Partiers marched with the Wheeling Township Republicans at the town’s Labor Day Parade. Upon passing the home of AFL-CIO member and retired Buffalo Grove Fire Department Lt. Larry Andres’s house, they were harassed by Andres and his friends watching the parade at his property on Bernard Avenue.

Lt. Andres and his comrades, clutching overflowing plastic cups and wearing stickers to support Democratic candidate Brad Schneider, shouted “Republican-free zone….Go union!!” and the sexually explicit epithet, “move along Tea-baggers!!!”

Lt. Andres, a pillar of the Buffalo Grove community, was given a “lavish” retirement ceremony in 2007, which included the presentation of an American flag from Buffalo Grove fire chief Tim Sashko. He has been quoted as leaving the public sector at age 56 in 2007 to pursue an acting career in a “Scrooge” play.

We stopped to find out why these individuals were so hostile to the Tea Partiers marching in the parade, but all we could get out of these goons were the usual responses, “They [the Tea Parties] breed hate….They are against everything we stand for.” But when questioned about any specific examples, these agitants were, as usual, not prepared to give a coherent answer. You can see how things went downhill quickly, in the following video.

Is this an example of how the Tea Party “breeds hate,” or the how the unions do?

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So after this whole Shirley Sherrod thing, I’m thinking, Andrew Breitbart has a point.

Let’s review:

1. The Tea Party was born, causing a frightened media to drum up accusations of racism
2. Later, Congressman John Lewis claims Tea Partiers shouted the “N-word” at him. The press runs with it. Breitbart posts a $100K reward for evidence. None comes.
3. The NAACP creates a race-baiting resolution to smear the Tea Party.
4. Breitbart responds with the Sherrod video – becoming the first conservative to use leftist tactics on the left.
5. It works: the White House and the NAACP look stupid.

Moving on, from the Powerline blog, New York Times reporter Matt Bai writes this of the Tea Party movement on July 17th: (more…)

Defending the Tea Party to its opponents is like explaining Bob Dylan to his critics: their ears don’t hear what your heart understands.

For a year now, Tea Partiers have peaceably assembled and petitioned government for the redress of grievances; and, for a year now, the political class has feared, reviled and defied them.

In sum, Washington power-brokers and special interests treat the Tea Party movement as a political bacillus to be quarantined until high priced pollsters, pundits and consultants clad in Gucci lab coats can find a vaccine. In truth, the Tea Party movement is a soulful, spontaneous call for the restoration of citizens’ God-given rights and a revitalization of our representative institutions so that “We the People” can preserve our cherished way of life. Thus, a Tea Party protest is a hymn of American redemption, one which to truly be heard must be felt in one’s heart.

Indeed, amid the folksy din of organic theatrics, at its principled core the Tea Parties constitutes an earnest, spontaneous, decentralized political movement arising from diverse grassroots centers of gravity. Bonded by a shared faith in their freedom and American Exceptionalism, the Tea Party’s eclectic mix of Republicans, Independents, Libertarians and Democrats is deeply concerned about the challenges confronting this great nation we’ve inherited and must bequeath to our children. Consequently, as patriots rather than materialists, Tea Partiers measure their loss of sovereignty by the growth of big government’s insane, unsustainable spending, which edges us further toward fiscal implosion and exacerbates the disorder within our troubled republic.

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Glenn Reynolds in Saturday’s WSJ:

There were promises of transparency and of a new kind of collaborative politics where establishment figures listened to ordinary Americans. We were going to see net spending cuts, tax cuts for nearly all Americans, an end to earmarks, legislation posted online for the public to review before it is signed into law, and a line-by-line review of the federal budget to remove wasteful programs.

These weren’t the tea-party platforms I heard discussed in Nashville last weekend. They were the campaign promises of Barack Obama in 2008.

Mr. Obama made those promises because the ideas they represented were popular with average Americans. So popular, it turns out, that average Americans are organizing themselves in pursuit of the kind of good government Mr. Obama promised, but has not delivered. And that, in a nutshell, was the feel of the National Tea Party Convention. The political elites have failed, and citizens are stepping in to pick up the slack.

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