I'm less interested in the contents of this long USA Today cover story on the tea party movement, which tells us nothing we didn't already know (teabaggers are mostly Republican! they're mostly white! they're older! they're less inclined to think blacks suffer race prejudice!) than I am in the fact that the paper timed this poll so it could run a story about it on the Friday before the Fourth of July. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but putting the tea party movement on the cover of USA Today for the Fourth suggests athat USA Today accepts the 'baggers notion that they themselves are especially American, far more so than the rest of us.
Granted, the tea partier whose photo appears above the fold isn't wearing a tricorn or a U.S. flag top hat, but he is posed behind his family Bible, which, to a lot of the heartland, amounts to the same thing. (Click to enlarge.)
Maybe the timing is a coincidence. Or maybe USA Today knows its target audience overlaps the tea demographic, and is just hunting where the ducks are. But it seems to me that simply declaring that you have a monopoly on patriotism is persuasive to people who know better, at least if you do it long and loud enough.
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