The morning of the Madison Tea Party it was snowing and deceptively slippery. We almost went into the ditch a few times on the way to the bus stop. We passed two cars that did. One of them took out a mailbox.
Our bus driver was a great guy named Jim. A Vietnam war vet. He said that his parents were Democrats and raised him as a Democrat, but he knew they wouldn’t agree with what the Democrat party stands for today. It’s been hijacked. But he’s not too crazy about the Republicans either. He said that as a fellow Vietnam vet, he doesn’t like McCain at all. Later he told some of the others that he and his wife comfort themselves with the idea that they didn’t vote for him, they voted for Sarah Palin.
I didn’t engage in many of the conversations. I hung back and observed. My fellow travelers discussed potential 2012 candidates. Palin came up once, but they didn’t discuss her in any detail. The general sentiment is that she’s not running. One of the guys was a Ron Paul fan. That was an interesting conversation.
After the rally, the same guys were talking about it, and the one guy said that he liked Palin now after seeing her speak in person even more than he did in 2008. But they still didn’t think she was running. That guy is a Romney fan. He said that he believed in the old jump-through-the-hoops way of running for President. So because Palin isn’t going through the conventional channels, in his mind, she’s not running.
They all had their own picks, but they all agreed on one thing: they’d vote for whoever went up against Obama.
Palin rocked that speech, by the way. Practically flawless, and with the wind whipping at her papers and snow dotting her glasses.
There were supposed to be two rallies yesterday. Ours on one side of the capitol building and the unions on the other. I never went over to see if they ever held an actual rally themselves. It seemed like they just marched around on the sidewalk in back trying to disrupt ours.
I heard that Andrew Breitbart got into it with some protestors after the rally, but alas, I didn’t see it myself.
Someone captured the music they were playing around the outside:
Yeah, baby. Tax the rich! And that is an awesome blue hat.
These are the so-called champions of free speech. Drown out any dissenting views. Or at least try. If you don’t have enough people, bring a lot of drums to make it sound like there’s more of you than there really are.
Maybe it’s because I was more toward the front, but I didn’t mind the protestors. Unless you were standing right by them you could still hear everything just fine. As a matter of fact, from where I was it sounded like they were cheering us on. If you didn’t know any better, you would have thought they were a bunch of excited Tea Partiers.
As I was leaving the event, there was a lady standing there with a sign that said, “Care about educators like they care about your children.” I saw the sign first. I followed the sign down to the woman holding it. She had the sourest puss I’ve ever seen. She looked like she was sucking on a lemon at that very instant. Unfortunately, my camera was already full because that picture would have been priceless. “Care about us like we care about children!” Held by a grouchy battleaxe. Aw, that’s not very nice. Maybe she was just cold.
The way leftists think is so weird. It would never occur to me to go protest someone else’s rally. You wanna have a rally, go for it. Knock yourself out. But that’s just me. Maybe they’re just insecure.
A lot of the protestors looked like they had just got done smoking a stash of weed. Seriously. That is not hyperbole.
The woman that got proposed to was right behind me. I loved how she was in a camo hunting jacket just like her future husband.
There was one guy down in front of me who got through to the steps of the Capitol and got into it with some of the Tea Partiers. I didn’t see it until it had started already. He started giving everyone the finger. The police let him stay. The Tea Partiers blocked his view with signs. All he did the whole time was yell “Liar! Liar! Fox Lies!” at everyone, but you could barely hear it. It was downright funny.
Here’s a mix of some of the videos I took. At the beginning is the protestors marching around on the sidewalk about an hour before the rally was supposed to start. That’s why there aren’t a lot of people on the grass yet. Then there’s a clip later on when they were playing a Johnny Cash bit. You can see the Tea Party crowd has gathered and the protestors are marching around on the sidewalk in the way back. The guy holding a Palin/Trump sign cracked me up. You can hear me chuckling. Then there’s a bit of “God Bless the USA”.
A couple guys next to me started a few chants in response to a couple stray protestors that filtered up.
The next clip is after the guy down front started causing trouble. I think he started pushing on some guy or something. I missed the first minute of it. He did start flipping the bird, but I didn’t catch it. After he caused a ruckus, everyone around him whipped out a camera and started filming him. Haha. I had to cut it because I zoomed in and it got dizzy, so there’s a bit missing from the middle. After it was over he started waving that little noise-maker that you couldn’t even hardly hear.
Then the last clip is my favorite. Some of the organizers gettin’ their party on:
It was cold the whole time, but maybe a third of the way through it started snowing. The wind was blowing pretty good. Thankfully, I was bundled up, but my toes went numb. I should have worn boots.
I’ve only listened to James T on the radio a few times. He was an awesome emcee.
Here’s Vicki McKenna. She was great. All the speakers were. If anyone knows where I can find video of the whole rally, please let me know. Especially James T.:
Andrew Breitbart:
Woo! James T! That’s him kidding around, “blessing” the Capitol building. Here’s some of what he had to say:
I won’t bother posting the Palin video right now. You’ve already seen that. I’ll post a round-up later with all the articles and photos, videos, etc…
It was an absolute blast. Four + hours in the cold will drain you, but it was totally worth it. And I even got a kick out of the protestors. It made the whole thing more lively. And a lot of them made me laugh. All a part of the adventure.
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