The TEA Party That Wasn’t

It has only been a six months since we saw the TEA Party phenomenon spread across the country with mass meetings being held in cities and towns across the country around April 15th, the day that federal income taxes are due at the post office.

It has only been a two months since the Angst of August, when townhall meetings were disrupted by slogan yelling miscreants who simply “wanted their country back.”

And it has only been a month since Glenn Beck’s 9-12 Rally where either 70,000 people – or 1.5 million people, depending on who you are willing to believe - converged on Washington, DC to celebrate their ignorance of all things important.

Time in terms of only months have gone by, and now that the cool weather has returned, so too have cooler heads prevailed.

TEA Parties are finally at long last on the wane.

In case you weren’t going to go there, and you are in the vast majority if you didn’t, I decided to go to the Sugar Land TEA Party yesterday and check it out, again. And write about it, again. I left the house early recalling the last time I went I had difficulty getting a parking spot. Recalling the crowds of April I made sure to get there in plenty of time.

Remember the throng? Here is a photograph of it that I took on that day.

Yesterday, an equally bright sunny day, a great day to be outside, this is what the scene looked like after the speakers started speechifying.

And here are some excerpts from those speeches.

That last guy was a guy named Termite Watkins. He was their “keynote speaker.” That’s right, Pete Olson had other plans that day. Termite is a good ol’ boy who runs an extermination business. His main claim to fame besides being an ex-professional boxer is that he is the only person to go to “The Country of Iraq” to kill bugs. That’s right, right there talking to the assembled masses was an Iraq War profiteer. Termite, who lives in Deer Park, was there hawking his book “Termite,” which was on sale in one of the tents for the low, low price of only $14.95 (plus tax). One thing I think we can take away from his speech is that being a Christian is all part and parcel of being a teabagger.

And while the speakers were speaking, we had this curious threesome walking around the plaza carrying that hand-painted sign that said that “Obama’s policy” was Genocide.

They didn’t bother informing anyone which one of his policies was genocidal in nature and I didn’t really want to ask. The guy in the red shirt is James Ives, by the way, the president of the teabagger group that put on yesterday’s event, telling them to please display their sign somewhere else than right in front of the speakers.

So they moved around with the sign until they got to a point where I could see what was printed on the back of their hand-lettered sign, giving a whole new meaning to the concept of recycling.

But finally, and last but certainly not least, I heard a commotion coming from the back of the assembled masses. The rally was winding down and my curiosity finally got the better of me so I wandered over to find out what was happening. There by the fountain were 4 or 5 people wearing Obama regalia, one was waving an American flag and two others were holding up a signs supporting healthcare reform.

Outstanding, I thought. Not only do we have such a poor showing at this rally, this showing is certainly not something I would have expected to have happened in April. I think the people standing around them might have been a little bit in shock. One of them, probably the class clown 40 years ago, recovered enough to circulate around the crowd asking for donations for the anti-TEA party goers.

People thought he was really funny.