This September 11th, Tea Party organizers will commemorate that American tragedy not with a plea for shared sacrifice and national unity, but with a partisan shindig. But what they are calling the "Woodstock of tea parties" has only one thing in common with the legendary 1969 gathering in upstate New York. Like the throngs at Yasgur's farm, the Tea Baggers are hallucinating, just without the acid.
From the Des Moines Register comes the latest word from the Tea Parties who turn on Fox News and tune out the truth:
An event described as the "Woodstock" of tea parties is planned for Sept. 11 at the Monona County Fairgrounds in Onawa in western Iowa.
Craig Halverson of Griswold, who is helping to organize the event, said supporters hope to attract at least 1,000 people from Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota and other states. He said they are inviting prominent conservative speakers and plan to have bands perform patriotic music
The event will have a "Take back our country" theme, Halverson said. Although the activities will occur on the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, he said organizers don't plan to spend the day reflecting on those events.
Of course, reflection has never been a strong suit of the Tea Parties. Even without the herb, acid and peyote, the Tea Party movement has been a non-stop 18 month hallucination. Just by getting high on Glenn Beck, the assembled Birchers, Birthers, Deathers and Deniers wrongly believe Barack Obama is a Muslim who wasn't born in the United States, that Medicare isn't a government program and that 70,000 marchers at a DC event spontaneously morphed into 2,000,000. Only two percent of Tea Baggers are even aware of the Obama tax cuts that 95% of them received. Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, the Joan Baez and Janis Joplin of Tea Partistan, claim the hard-core conservatives masquerading as independents are anything but reliably Republican voters.
While details of the event remain sketchy, the theme song of the September 11 Woodstock event should be Procul Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale." Regardless, the coming desecration of the 9/11 disaster is just the latest manifestation of the bad acid trip that is the Tea Party movement.
(This piece also appears at Perrspectives.)
