The party line of the Democrats and their fellow travellers is that the Tea Party Movement is fueled by racism. The moral scum who make these absurd and scurrilous allegations ought to be ashamed of themselves. I name names and go into details in other posts which you will find in the Race and Leftism categories. But just to verify what I already had excellent reasons for believing, namely, that there is no racist motivation to speak of behind the Tea Party protests, I decided I'd better attend one, which I did today. I visited one of the lesser gatherings of the day here in the Valley of the Sun, one held at Freestone Park, Gilbert, Arizona. The main speaker was Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. There was no racism apparent in the signs, the speakers, or the people I observed and spoke with. No racism, no extremism, no xenophobia, no overheated rhetoric, no incitements to violence. Just trenchant political dissent in the good old liberty- and free speech-loving American style, something that leftists don't understand, laboring as they do under the strange conceit that they own dissent, as if dissent were something inherently leftist. Here are some amateur shots of the event by your humble correspondent.
The biker on the right's first patch reads, "Helmet Laws Suck." I counted a total of four bikers at the event of the innocuous sort. No Mongols or Hell's Angels.
A lot of old people, but also a lot of families with kids. Middle America, soccer moms, not the 47% of Americans who pay no taxes, but the productive ones who do.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio at the podium, 77 years of age, re-elected some 13 times, whose parents immigrated from Italy legally. Hated by the Left for doing his job and enforcing the law. Said he works 14 hours per day. Attributes his health to olive oil.