An Interactive History of the Tea Party's Many Co-Conveners

Originally published on ColorLines.

John McCain. Newt Gingrich. CNBC. Fox News. Even poor old Michael Steele. It's taken a whole lotta leaders to keep this party going. Click your way down memory lane.

Tea Party Timeline on Dipity.

Ironically, it all started with a quintessentially black oratorical device: the call and response. John McCain asked his campaign rally if they knew who Barack Obama was. Somebody shouted back, "A terrorist!" And so it began: About thirteen months of madness in a public square dominated by the Tea Party's wild, demonstrably false but still lasting claims about both the president and his agenda. But they didn't do it on their own. Conservative think tanks and lobby groups, corporate media outlets and the Republican Party have all kept the party jumping--and profited from it.

We've put together an interactive timeline of that dismal history. Watch the videos, follow the links, then forward along.

 

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Comments

[rhoadie]

02:51 PM on 04/25/2010

Renku - excellent video compilation. The right-wing blogger calling for vandalism has clearly exceeded the protections of free speech by inciting criminal acts. I don't necessarily approve of all the things Obama has done, but he's had little choice when faced with the partisan obstructionism that has poisoned political dialogue in this country. In Denver, a very small but very vocal minority has fanned the flames of partisan anger to the point where rational debate is dead. The left and right are equally at fault - though the right has had more media exposure. Our local version of Glenn Beck is Peter Boyles, who regularly questions Obama's birth credentials, patriotism, and faith. All this is punctuated by the typical AM Radio barrage of callers who cannot formulate a single articulate sentence to explain exactly why they're so angry. Everything has been reduced to buzzwords, talking points and slurs.

[pasc]

07:25 AM on 04/22/2010

Checked out your site, nik. I don't get it. What's the goal? How do you decide what to put up? Movies w/ Palin's email issue? Schitzo, my friend. Too schitzo.

[nikflorida]

08:37 PM on 04/21/2010

What a nice compilation, and what a great tool! Thanks for introducing me (to the tool, of course; I already knew about the Tea Party)

http://nikflorida.org. Where we don't tell you WHAT to think, just to think.