they hate us, we hate them...we can't win

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Can we really solve our society's problems with beer? Of course we can, and should. Beer is indisputably the ideal facilitator of conflict resolution. But a better answer is probably still "beer and a thorough investigation by Internal Affairs, supervised by the public", because in the same week of the "beer summit"* we've got a gay lawyer in D.

Comments

[qqthxnvkhfuuzza]

I don't know if we're talking about the same tea party movements, but the one I'm familiar with has a national coordinator who gives her organization's imprimatur to emailing pics of Obama with a bone in his nose as a legitimate means of campaigning against health care reform.

So, no, I really don't think most self-identified tea partiers would be allies at all in resisting police abuse of power in all or even most cases. While principled anti-statists may or may not have initiated that movement, they sure aren't driving it now, and haven't since at least as early as the April protests. Teabaggery is now very much the plaything of the Obama-deranged conservative movement, whose use for anti-authoritarian rhetoric extends to decrying relatively minor state infringements of their own "freedom" (like returning the top marginal income tax rate to where it was under Reagan), and no further. Your own message may be one of personal freedom and tolerance, but it's not theirs, and they outnumber you by a lot.

And with what's left of conservatism comes all the craziness, cultivated over generations but only now coming to full flower thanks to a leadership vacuum. (The left analogues of birthers would be 9-11 truthers, and the other comparably extreme types on the left are pretty much all Nader voters and unreformed Trots who don't like Obama either, and we sane Democrats don't like them.)