Ok, the most entertaining thing I’ve read in a long time was the recent New York Times Op-Ed “The Billionaires Bankrolling The TEA Party”, by Mr. Frank Rich.  It shows that the New York Times has learned an amazing lesson.  With the success of the National Enquirer and the Jon Edwards story, something which used to be the sort of stuff you might expect to hear first from such a prestigious organization as the Times,  the Times has learned and decided to emulate the National Enquirer!

Mr. Rich wrote:

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Vive la révolution!

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “deathpanel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

The Koch brothers, Mr. Frank?  Really?

Wow. I’ve been to three TEA Party rallies thus far and I’m still waiting on that Murdoch/Koch reimbursement check for my gas and food…

I can see that I’m going to have to have a stern word with their secretaries.

Crap… I’ve lost my copy of the “Conservative Movement Bank-rollers Index”…

Can another of you conservatives please post Rupert Murdoch’s number for me? And not the normal phone tree number either, give me the “Conservative Direct Line To Rupert Murdoch’s Office” number, please. It should be the third one down on everyone’s phone number card…

Look, I don’t put any stock into the George Soros bogeyman that some conservatives love to bash. I don’t say that every single lefty movement is inspired by Soros money because of a single, simple fact: George Soros cannot pay every liberal in America, personally, to vote for him.

So what if “BIG MONEY INTERESTS” bought the permits and equipment for a rally somewhere? Who cares? It’s the people who show up of their own free volition that matter.

For example: Glenn Beck’s 8-28 over the weekend.

Does it matter that he put on a fund-raiser to make it happen? Does it matter that he invested a lot of his own time, both personally, on TV, and on the radio, urging people to come out to DC for it?

Or does the fact that 300,000 – 500,000 people showed up for no reason other than they believe demonstrate to us what really matters?

I went to the very first round of TEA Parties. They were held on April 15th, 2009, and there wasn’t anything fancy. There were no huge stages. No stars. No cameras to which the politicians could flock. In Memphis (where I attended because I was out of town with work and it was closest.  Only forty five minutes away.), there were about 2,000 people gathered together in the Audubon Park. No speaker. No lights. No agenda. Just a bunch of people who heard Rick Santelli’s impromptu rant on the internet and said “Yeah! That’s a great idea!”, then put action to their thought.

The original advertisement for the thing was this Facebook profile. I found it with a quick Google search after I got off of work, from my hotel room.  It certainly didn’t require the complete fortunes of some trio of nefarious billionaires to put it together!!!  Cheap and minimal hassle, that is how this movement started.

That was the birth. The start. The Genesis. And it was 100% totally grassroots. Just a bunch of yahoos on the internet.

Only after the first set of rallies, only after April 15th, 2009, when people saw how many of these things spontaneously happened all over the country, and how big they were, ONLY then did the conservative talking heads and the politicians come running.  Only then did money start flowing into the movement.

We had to prove to them that we were a substantial voting block before we got any attention whatsoever. They were all sitting in DC, seriously thinking that the ’08 election had been a “mandate for socialism” until their base rose up and FORCED them to get their act together. The TEA Party has, and always will be, populated by the people who didn’t wait for the politicians and Big Money Interests to do something, but people who did something for themselves.

As befitting those of us who believe in doing for yourself and not letting the government do for you. That’s what we’re supposed to do. It’s common sense that things have happened this way, and there is no need to get all Area 51 on us and claim that we’re all just little marionettes dancing to the tune of the new version of the Bilderbergs, Rockefellers, the Illuminati, etc.  That’s not news befitting the New York Times.  It belongs on the cover of the National Enquirer, in the checkout line at the local grocery store, Mr. Rich.

Plenty of perfectly logical, valid reasons why this is not the brain child of three rich white dudes of whom no one has ever heard.

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