Since the left’s racism-based attacks of the Tea Party movement have failed, liberals have shifted gears slightly. Now they’re just calling Tea Partiers plain crazy.
A new report from the Culture and Media Institute shows a widespread media attack on the Tea Party and its candidates’ sanity, something the report’s author, Nathan Burchfiel, told The Daily Caller is most likely a result of the left’s inability to form a legitimate argument against the Tea Party.
“It [calling Tea Partiers crazy] is a way to distract from the issues,” Burchfiel said. “It’s the same thing with the racist argument: You try to paint them as racists so you don’t have to talk about the issues.”
Consumer Watchdog, a progressive advocacy group, launched a new Times Square jumbotron advertisement asking people if they’re upset with corporate bailouts, home foreclosures, insurance rate hikes, Wall Street greed and if they are “mad as hell,” but think the “Tea Party is insane,” encouraging viewers to visit their website – consumerwatchdog.org.
The organization’s president, Jamie Court, told TheDC Consumer Watchdog made an active decision to use the word “insane” in its ad and that the group could have used “nuts” too.
“Of course we actively made the decision to raise the question of whether the Tea Party is insane,” Court said in a phone interview with TheDC. “The reason we did it, again, is because we wanted to call out a provocative question in the largest public square in America.”
The “Call Them Crazy” trend hasn’t yet been shown to be something that was actively decided upon by the media in general, but Burchfiel doesn’t rule out a JournoList-type scandal rising to the surface in the future.
“I don’t want to say that there’s a conspiracy that they [cable commentators and Democratic strategists] get together on the phone and develop a strategy, but we know that that’s happened before,” Burchfiel told TheDC. “I don’t know that that needs to be the case for this to still be an important story.”
In particular, Burchfiel said the witchcraft slams on Delaware’s GOP Senate candidate and Tea Party favorite Christine O’Donnell aren’t substantive at all.
“When she dabbled in witchcraft or dated or wiccan or whatever when she was a teenager, does that really determine how she’s going to govern?” Burchfiel said. “Does it really affect her position on taxes or spending or whatever the Tea Party issue it might be that she wants to focus on?”
