The 9/12 tea party in Washington D.C. had an amazing turnout. I’m sure very few people expected the numbers to be as high as they were. Many liberal bloggers said only a few hundred or a couple thousand people would show up. Wow… they were wrong. I have not been able to find official numbers, but estimates are anywhere from 70,000 to 1.5 million. The true number is probably somewhere in the middle, but even if the low estimate of 70,000 is correct, the turnout was still much better than expected. This goes to show just how angry Americans are getting over the unconstitutional and expanded role of the federal government in our lives. I have a feeling that these protest will only continue to grow. Here are some pictures of the crowd.. I mean… angry mob,
UPDATE–
The Washington Examiner has a great piece about the 9/12 protest. It is by their Chief Political Correspondent Byron York. Here are some excerpts from the article,
Dr. David Dunch had never been to a political demonstration before. Yet on Saturday Dunch, a surgeon who has practiced for 25 years in Youngstown, Ohio, found himself marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, wearing a white medical coat with a small American flag tucked into the breast pocket, explaining what’s wrong with President Obama’s national health care proposals.
“It’s a mistake,” Dunch says. “It’s going to result in ultimate rationing and limiting care to our elderly. We need universal access of patients with pre-existing illnesses. We need to open up the 50 states to all insurance plans. We need tort reform. We don’t have to trash the current system.”
Dunch has come here with his wife, who is a nurse, because he believes the president is “telling half-truths” by citing the support of the American Medical Association to suggest that most physicians favor Obamacare — when in fact the AMA represents a relatively small minority of doctors. The situation is enough to turn a private physician into a protester. “I’ve never been political before,” Dunch says. “This is atypical for me.”
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Some of the protesters had traveled farther than just the distance between their home town and Washington. Dr. David Levine, a psychiatrist from Rockford, Illinois, was Ramsey Clark’s volunteer press secretary when the ultra-liberal former U.S. attorney general ran for the Senate from New York in 1976. Now, Levine, wearing a faded NEWT GINGRICH 2008 t-shirt, was on the streets of Washington in a crowd of conservatives. What accounted for the change? “It started when liberals just stopped making sense to me,” Levine said. “I was listening to NPR, and nothing was making sense. So I started reading more and more conservative things, and here I am.”
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Their attitudes toward Obama himself are complicated. No one I met expressed hatred for the president. A few had voted for him, and others, like Christy Smith, said they were deeply moved when he was elected. Many others opposed him all along. But now, the predominant mood is deep distrust. They believe Obama will raise their taxes, that he will blow up the health care system, that he will weaken America’s defenses.And they wonder who he is as a person. “The company you keep tells a lot about who you are,” says Tres Berden, a truck driver from Newark, New Jersey. “With all of those associations of his, from Rev. Wright to Van Jones — you don’t know those kind of people without being one.” Berden, one of the few African-Americans in the crowd, is a Democrat who now considers himself a libertarian. He voted for Obama, but quickly became disillusioned. “He isn’t the person he sold us,” Berden says.
You’ve probably heard descriptions of the marchers as crazies and haters and fanatics. Perhaps there were some in the crowd. Far more important, though, was the very presence of so many everyday Americans protesting in Washington, just eight months into unified Democratic control of the White House and Congress. What did Barack Obama and his party’s leadership on Capitol Hill do to bring doctors and truck drivers together in common cause on the streets of the nation’s capital? More than anything, these people are afraid that the new president is running the country off a cliff. They’re in no mood to remain silent now.
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You said: “This goes to show just how angry Americans are getting over the unconstitutional and expanded role of the federal government in our lives.”
Gently, I think you forgot to insert the word “some” in front of “Americans.” It occurs to me that you would be shocked to know how many Americans love Mr. Obama and think he is doing good things. As you may know, in surveys, a majority of Americans identify themselves as Democrats whether they vote that way or not in any given election. Even if Obama’s ratings are down in certain areas, most Americans still like him overall and think he is a good person who will be good for our country over the next four years. So, if just 50 percent or a little more of Americans like Obama, is the opposition side that does not like him prepared to initiate a second American Civil War (bullets and all) to force your opinion on the 50 percent of Americans who disagree with you? Are you one of those Americans who, like the preacher in Arizona, is praying for Mr. Obama’s death and just waiting for the inevitable self-appointed assassin (worked into a state of personal frenzy by talk radio and conservative blogs) to step forward and do the nation a service.
You are probably not. You seem like a nice person. The people who show up at these tea parties strike me as being the members of the lunatic fringe who would be thinking and hoping like this.
That’s just a personal evaluation from an ordinary American out here on an ordinary street in an ordinary part of the USA.
Charles,
What shocks me is not the number of people who love Obama, but the reasons why they love him. They usually can’t articulate why they love him except to say that he will make things better. When asked how he will make things better they reply, “He is going to change things.” That’s what shocks me. There is no depth or a deep rooted belief system with the many Obama supporters I have spoken to. Most don’t know why they believe what they do and they know nothing of history. Those that do know why the believe what they do, in my experience, usually consider themselves Marxists or socialists.
Have you noticed the difference between the people protesting the unconstitutional practices of our government and those that protested Pres. Bush? Sure, there are some crazy loons in the conservative camp, but the vast majority of tea party protester are honest, hardworking Americans who have never been to a protest before. They are not crazies, they are concerned citizens reacting to the breech of contract (the Constitution) that are government is involved in.
Now what about the people who protested Bush wherever he went? Do you judge them by the same measuring stick? Where you one of the people who said that Bush needs to die? Or do you think Bush was the mastermind behind 9/11? Probably not, you seem like a nice person, but those people who protested Bush seemed like the lunatic fringe who would be thinking and hoping that someone would kill Bush. That’s just a personal evaluation from an ordinary American out on the street in an ordinary part of the USA.
If I may ask another question, do you have any evidence that the majority of people protesting on Saturday were lunatics from the fringe who want Obama to die?
Great post. It was an awesome development, even if the MSM is trying to downplay it.
No. I said that they “strike me” as being fringe lunatics—not that I have polled each of 70,000 people to know precisely what is on each person’s mind. You see. I think that is part of the problem here. Just as I cannot give you specific, empirical information that clearly demonstrates that these 70,000 people are fringe lunatics, similar blanket statements from conservatives that X number of people are just a bunch of communists, socialists, or left-wing Neo-Nazis is probably no more fair and correct than what I said.
I think the place where people on both sides are talking past each other rather than communicating to each other is that they ignore what one side says on a particular subject and take a mental leap far beyond that to what we imagine that they really mean or are planning, which means that we are painting other people with our worst fears and imaginings (paranoia) rather than according to what they are really saying and what is really happening. Let me give you a couple of examples.
One is President Obama’s speech to school children. The White House said that it was going to be a positive message for school children. Instead, many conservatives took a vast leap of imagination beyond that. It was all based on the cultivated assumption that, “We all know how evil all of these liberals are and how they are always on the prowl to devour whatever we believe is good.” Therefore, something awful was about to happen and people took a hysterical leap of fantasy into an imaginary world where the President and his minions were going to do some awful thing to our school children. It did not happen. The speech came out as advertised.
Now. Let me give you an example of a time when I did the same exact thing myself. Just after 9/11, I was so angry that I wanted to bomb the whole Middle East. I even wrote a letter to Vice-President Cheney and asked him to do a Roman Empire job on them and crucify an Arab every 6 feet apart on roads throughout the Middle East. I had very unChristian thoughts on my mind to be sure. And no one, I mean no one, wanted to go to war in Iraq more than I did. In fact, I was so vociferous on the subject that I actually got kicked off a blog frequented by Iraqis living outside of Iraq. They thought I was nuts, and I probably was at the time.
Sadaam Hussein and WMD. In my mind, I knew he had to have it. It was a slam dunk. It was a no brainer. Given his personality and cruelty, he was absolutely certain to have WMD. It was there and hidden somewhere. It had to be. Why else was he acting so weird with the UN weapons inspectors and trying to deny them access to facilities. I took a great leap beyond what he was saying (not that you could trust him) and painted the whole situation with my IMAGINED REALITY of what must surely going on—rather than what was really going on.
Well, as we later found out, he never had any WMD. In fact, he was so scared of the United States after the 1991 Gulf War (Ain’t it great that someone was actually scared of us for once?) that he destroyed what WMD he had to be sure that we would not attack him again. What we did not know (but do know now) is that his WMD reserves (when he had them)were kept primarily for the purpose of deterring his internal political enemies such as the Shiites and Kurds. While he was scared to death of the United States, he was even more scared of losing power to his internal political enemies. So he had a nearly impossible task—a real tight wire to walk. He had to convince George W. Bush (and me) that there was no WMD, while leading the UN weapons inspectors on a merry chase to fool his internal enemies into believing that he did have WMD—to keep them at bay. Of course, that was a fool’s errand, and he paid a high price for it.
However, the point is that I and a lot of other people got it wrong. He said there was no WMD. We took a flight of imagination about what was really going on and acted on that imagination as if it were reality.
I think this is one of the big problems in our own politcal discourse here in the United States today. The various sides are ignoring the facts about a given current issue and elevating their wildest and most fearful imaginings about the loyal opposition to a pedestal of undeniable truth. Suddenly, a Methodist Democrat in Louisiana gets branded as a socialist simply because he wants to spend a little local tax money to buy some food for poor people—not because he is informed by Karl Marx—but because he was informed by Jesus in that sermon last Sunday morning. Similarly, as you pointed out in one of your recent posts, all too many Democrats are wiling to leap to the wild imagination that anyone who criticizes President Obama must be a closet Ku Klux Klan member.
I think our worst imaginings out here are getting the best of us and that we are at real risk of devouring each other in some awful way—like a second American Civil War. What passes for political discourse (on both sides or several sides) these days has, in my opinion, long ago crossed a line into outright hatred—so much so that the wild imagining is perceived instantly and automatically as truth.
I am reminded of two Bible verses in this regard:
“But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another” (Galatians 5:15)
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:
My suspicion is that Satan is somewhere laughing his fanny off over what we are doing to each other, and I am as guilty as anyone.
Charles,
You said, “I think the place where people on both sides are talking past each other rather than communicating to each other is that they ignore what one side says on a particular subject and take a mental leap far beyond that to what we imagine that they really mean or are planning, which means that we are painting other people with our worst fears and imaginings (paranoia) rather than according to what they are really saying and what is really happening”
How can you say this when in your previous comment you said,
“Are you one of those Americans who, like the preacher in Arizona, is praying for Mr. Obama’s death and just waiting for the inevitable self-appointed assassin (worked into a state of personal frenzy by talk radio and conservative blogs) to step forward and do the nation a service.
You are probably not. You seem like a nice person. The people who show up at these tea parties strike me as being the members of the lunatic fringe who would be thinking and hoping like this.”
You totally contradicted yourself and criticized your own style of commenting. Didn’t you take a mental leap in asking me if I was praying that someone would kill Obama (I’ve given no indication of that), or in assuming that all the tea party protesters are of the lunatic fringe? You have discredited yourself, so how am I to take you seriously? You attack me and other conservatives without providing evidence for your attacks, then say we should not attack each other. Then, after making it seem like you would love to “bite and devour” the people who attended the 9/12 tea party, you quote scripture that speaks against that very thing. You seem to be confused.
Liberty, why do those who support Obama’s policies find it so difficult to understand and believe that there are millions of intelligent, rational and patriotic people who do not support leftist, liberal policies for our country. Do they really believe stop reason or discussion and bow at the altar of Obama?
It’s Cultural Marxism.
Wow so many “extremists” in one place! Democrats ignore them at their peril!
And I suppose next you will be telling us the George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were perfect little angels and did nothing to run this nation of a cliff. You guys broke your so-called 1994 Contract with America in spades and ran up the biggest deficit in American history. Who got us into a worthless war in Iraq that has cost a deficit busting fortune? They did. Who got 1000s of American kids killed for nothing because of a bunch of bare-butted Arabs who want to kill each other—but they have to kill our kids first to get access to each other. And who started the $ trillion bail out for Wall Street. They did. And guess what else? I bet all of those Wall Street bank executives and insurance magnates that took away my life savings were all Democrats, Marxists, and socialists–right? I would bet my last dime that the majority of them were Republicans.
Suddenly, now, with people like you, none of that ever happened. It’s all Obama’s fault. Well, I’ve got news for you. We senior citizens out here on main street know who caused this mess, and we are going to remember it at the ballot box for an extremely long time. Senior citizen = We VOTE.
Charles,
You’re right, Bush and Cheney are terrible. Let’s all go to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and tell Bush what we think of him. Oops! He doesn’t live there anymore!
Fail troll is fail.
Bush gave us the biggest deficit? No, sir, that honor belongs to President Obama – what is it now, 1.5 trillion in less than a year? Sure, let’s compare him to Bush’s deficit – I’ll take Bush.