We wondered, back when the Tea Party Express was running ads on Fox, why they bothered, since they'd soon be getting all the free advertising they could ask for.
And sure enough, Griff Jenkins has been filing reports from the multiple cross-country stops for the tour since its outset, provided for all the various Fox anchors (Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, Neal Cavuto, Bill O'Reilly, the Fox and Friends crew) to feature in their regular broadcasts.
Quelle surprise: they haven't had to run any ads on Fox since they started touring.
Most of the time, Jenkins -- who's clearly cheerleading this effort and not trying in the least to act like an actual reporter -- at least has bothered to mostly feature interviews with attending teabaggers, so as to at least create the appearance of some semblage of journalism in these reports.
But last night, on Sean Hannity's show, Jenkins just dropped the pretense, and gathered the teabaggers in New York behind him as props and launched into a rant about how these events were all about average Americans taking back America from an out-of-control federal government. He wasn't reporting; he was essentially being a paid propagandist for the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, which is the sponsor of this event.
And the funny thing is, as we reported earlier, the Our Country Deserves Better PAC has ALWAYS been about opposing whatever policies President Obama pursues. That is, this is a specifically anti-Obama campaign, and the rhetoric about "out of control government" is a fig leaf:
The "Our Country Deserves Better" PAC, in fact, was founded in August 2008 -- before the election -- specifically to oppose Barack Obama and his policies. (They called it "drawing contrasts between Senator Barack Obama and John McCain".) In October 2008, for instance, Williams was out on the stump campaigning against Obama as a "socialist" on a previous bus tour called the "Stop Obama Express". They've also runs ads comparing Obama to Hitler.
Jenkins claimed this was "black and white," but the crowd shots are almost completely of white faces. Moreover, I'll wager that every single one of them is a disappointed Republican -- if not a McCain voter, then a Ron Paul voter.
In fact, a better name for the whole enterprise would be The Sore Loser Express. Because that's who's coming out for these things -- people who think they can get a do-over on the election.
Including the fine folks at Fox, evidently.
