Moscow, get ready to party

Who's ready to party? This upcoming Thursday, the second annual Palouse Tea Party rally will be held in Moscow's Friendship Square. And judging by the ferocity of the reactions that Tea Parties provoke, I'd have to say that the right people view the Tea Party a serious threat. And as such, participants should arm themselves accordingly.

I'm certain that the left has noticed a sea change in the coverage that the Tea Party has been receiving from the mainstream news media. After a couple of polls showing that the Tea Party is nothing like the caricature, the narrative has shifted detectably in the last week. In addition, the left seriously overplayed its hand in its strategy of portraying the Tea Party as composed of angry white male racists.

On March 21 - the day that the U. S. House of Representatives passed Obamacare - the Democratic Party dug into its bag of tricks and found one of its old reliables, an accusation of racism. Several prominent members of the Congressional Black Caucus made a special effort to walk right through a Tea Party protest in full view of cameras and reporters. Afterwards, they complained that they had been spat upon and called "n*****s." And right on cue, like well-trained dogs, the mainstream news media played along with their natural allies. Even though the reporters had heard nothing with their own ears, seen nothing with their own eyes and had recorded nothing on their cameras or microphones that would substantiate the accusations, they chose to ignore the evidence of their own senses and reported the slurs as though they were the unassailable truth. As recently as this last week, a New York Times reporter was still repeating it. But it wasn't the truth, and most now know it.

And it appeared that most of the media were shamed into skepticism of their traditional allies, if not outright sympathy with the Tea Party, when Andrew Breitbart's $10,000 reward for a single shred of evidence backing up the Congressional Black Caucus went unclaimed. They had been scammed and they knew it.

Earlier this week, the Associated Press found that there are indeed racial epithets hurled at African-Americans at Tea Party rallies. These insults were shouted by liberals who find it offensive that there are African-Americans who stray from the Democratic Party orthodoxy and think for themselves: "They've been called Oreos, traitors and Uncle Toms, and are used to having to defend their values. Now black conservatives are really taking heat for their involvement in the mostly white tea party movement - and for having the audacity to oppose the policies of the nation's first black president," wrote the AP's Valerie Bauman.

The idea that only the Democratic Party can represent African-Americans is so ingrained that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder sued a small North Carolina town because it was converting to non-partisan municipal elections. He argued that blacks could only know who to vote for if candidates had a "D" accompanying their names on the ballot.

A CNN reporter embedded with the Tea Party Express reported that, "There were a few signs that could be seen as offensive to African-Americans. But by and large, no one I spoke with or I heard from on stage said anything that was approaching racist. Almost everyone I met was welcoming to this African-American television news producer."

Now I don't think that it was coincidence that CNN chose an African-American as its embedded reporter. The CNN intelligentsia probably imagined that their reporter would encounter a racially hostile environment that would make provocative images for Rick Sanchez, Wolf Blitzer and the rest of their drooling fools, and was probably pretty disappointed that the Tea Party failed to live down the CNN stereotype.

So how should Tea Partiers arm themselves for self-protection? They should bring along a video camera, of course. At the March 21 rally in Washington, D.C., dozens of protesters recorded the incident with small, hand-held video cameras and cell phones, and all their evidence gave the lie to the accusations of racism.

And they should also police themselves. It has happened before and will happen again that a leftist will bring along a racist placard for the news media to photograph. Or one might bring a sign advocating violence hoping to make the evening news. Point them out, call them out and condemn them. The narrative is turning. Don't lose the momentum.

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Costello is a research technician at Washington State University. His e-mail address is kozmocostello@hotmail.com.