The utter failure of Operation American Spring -- which drew a tiny crowd in D.C. yesterday instead of the 10 million or 30 million or however-the-hell-many million its organizers hoped to draw for a demonstration intended to purge the U.S. government of all its insufficiently wingnutty leaders (McConnell and Boehner as well as Obama, Pelosi, Holder, et al.) -- can be explained a lot of ways, but I think danps at Corrente is right about this:
... it looks like the only way the Tea Party gets real numbers in DC is if the Koch brothers charter buses for the event. Not very grassrootsy!That's a point I made in one of the most-read posts ever on this blog -- or, to be accurate, most hate-read. The post, from last August, was titled "This Is What the Tea Party Would Have Been Like Without Fox and the Koch Brothers"; it discussed, um, a sparsely attended demonstration at which many embarrassing arguments and assertions were made. Why weren't the crowds at that demonstration bigger? Why were the messages so embarrassing? (Then it was racism; at OAS it was chemtrails and rumored FEMA roundups.) I said that it was because deep-pocketed pros weren't helping out with message guidance or money or publicity; in the absence of that, the fearsomely large, allegedly grassroots tea party was just an absurdly small collection of haters and cranks.
This didn't go over well with the 'baggers, as you'll see if you scroll through the 619 comments at that post, or the 171 comments at a follow-up post. (I'm not sure how they found what I'd written, but I was the hottest thing on wingnut Facebook for a while.)
The demonstration I was writing about was sponsored by a group then known as Overpasses for Obama's Impeachment, and now known as Overpasses for America. To state the obvious, the group focuses on hanging signs over overpasses demanding the president's removal from office. And, well, what do you know: Overpasses and Operation American Spring are allies:
Overpasses for America is teaming up with Operation American Spring to deliver "Articles of Impeachment" to the House and Senate on April 22, before a planned rally in Washington D.C. on May 16, Overpasses for America founder James Neighbors told the Examiner....Failure loves company, I guess.
Here's the horrible, Journey-esque music video posted at the Overpasses site in honor of Operation American Spring. (UPDATE: Sorry, folks -- as the only person on the planet who hasn't yet embraced the nerd/sci-fi/ComicCon culture onslaught of the past few decades, I didn't realize that this is the theme to Star Trek: Enterprise. It's still horrible and Journey-esque.)
