America's North Shore Journal

Back when Andrew Sul­li­van was a con­ser­v­a­tive, he sent lots of traf­fic this way with a num­ber of links. So, I feel a cer­tain sad­ness with his change of per­spec­tive over the last few years.

Andrew wrote a piece titled The Tea Tantrum Move­ment for The Atlantic. It is his take on the Tea Party protest move­ment based on an admit­ted hour or so of on-line research.

He pro­fesses to have emerged from his rig­or­ous course of research per­plexed, both­ered and bewildered.

He describes the move­ment as "some kind of amor­phous, gen­er­al­ized rage on the part of those who were used to run­ning the coun­try and now don't feel part of the cul­ture at all". He calls it "ado­les­cent, unse­ri­ous hysteria".

Andrew makes the error that most lib­er­als insist upon, that this is a move­ment of the Repub­li­can Party. Had he looked at the exist­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion of the hun­dreds of Tea Par­ties already held, he would have clearly seen that the move­ment is made up of some very aver­age peo­ple, peo­ple who have never "run" the coun­try. Per­haps he did look, but chose not to engage his intellect.

He even man­ages to make a seri­ous his­tor­i­cal error. The men who con­ducted the orig­i­nal Tea Party were NOT ille­gal immi­grants, but Eng­lish­men fed up with hav­ing their rights tram­pled by a dis­tant government.

That is the bone of con­tention for Amer­i­cans today. Our gov­ern­ment has grown dis­tant and is fail­ing to respect our rights, the rights we have enjoyed from the found­ing of this nation.

Andrew needed to come up with a few hun­dred words for his pay­ing gig, so he slapped some­thing on the wall with the hope it would stick. It's brown, and sticky, and smells. I would have hope for a lit­tle more reflec­tion and hon­esty from a man who I once admired.