Despite an invitation that promised the meeting to be open to the public and closed to “lobbying”, it was neither. In fact it was the opposite. Everyone that spoke in the first hour had a specific issue to lobby, asking for petition signing and circulating their “calls to action”. A group from Redding traveled down in an effort to recruit for its “regressive democrat club” and a candidate for Congress sent a representative to campaign.
A bloated loud mouth, claiming to be an Army Colonel, a chemical engineer and a newspaper columnist spent the first twenty minutes spitting out every nonsensical thought that came into his otherwise empty head. No introductions were made and no organisation was attempted, though the meeting was billed as an “organisational meeting”.
When a member of the public proclaimed that he had been going to “Tea Party” meetings and “was looking for something different”, he was initially shouted down by a loud-mouthed, post-menopausal cow in the audience and told to “Get Out”. But someone spoke up and said he should be allowed to finish his statement. The crowd clapped vigorously and it appeared that the cow was over-ruled.
However, five minutes later, another young man spoke up and introduced himself as someone who had gone to “Tea Party” meetings in the past. He had a very polite tone and manner and said that he was there “to see what he could learn”. But before he could finish his statement, another disruptive, post-menopausal cow, this one a “professional club organiser” from Redding, shouted him down and angrily proclaimed that “such people were not welcome”. She started to go into a paranoid rant about how the “Tea Party” was “trying to disrupt meetings everywhere”.
I asked the organiser to stop the disruption of people trying to introduce themselves. When he refused, I put a stop to the disruption with my own unique form of disruption. If speaking politely and calmly doesn’t get you enough respect to stop the cows from shouting you down, I think my own brand of speaking finally did get their attention.
I left the meeting, as my educated and politically experienced friend had left ten minutes before me. This was not the place for intelligent people, or educated people, or people with real experience in the politics of this country. This was a place for the dim-witted and cowardly and the folks who want to push them around. It was the place for people with no power and no hope for any power.
It was the Tea Party. It was the Coffee Party. It was a bunch of cowardly fools being pushed around by controlling, passive aggressive, post-menopausal cows and bloated clowns.
The National Safety Net 