Newsweek Gushes About The “Coffee Party”
“Tired of all the Tea Party talk, Annabel Park decided to throw a Coffee Party—and 200,000 people showed up.”
That’s the sub-headline from a Newsweek article gushing about the coffee party, started by a liberal activist to counter the tea party movement. Of course, that 200,000 figure is based on the number of Facebook Fans the movement has. As Moe Lane points out, the “Addicted to Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn” Facebook group has more fans than the “Coffee Party.”
But what I found most interesting about the Newsweek article was this excerpt:
But then, Park didn’t set out to create a political movement in the first place. She was just exhausted by all-Tea-Party-all-the-time on the news. One night in January, she signed on to her Facebook page and ranted about “the false narrative that the tea party is the real America.” Her friends picked up on the post and it led to the creation of the Coffee Party. Within days, thousands of people signed up on Facebook.
All of a sudden Park was a political leader—of what, she didn’t quite know—and the target of right-wing fury. Conservative bloggers unearthed—scandal!—that she had once briefly worked for The New York Times and supported Sen. Jim Webb, a moderate Democrat from Virginia. One online commenter accused her of being a “Chinese agent.” The notoriety didn’t really hurt: the group now has more than 200,000 members, and every status update Park posts gets about a million views.
What utter whitewashing.
Park wasn’t just some random citizen deciding to vent some political frustration. And her background goes far beyond merely working for a liberal newspaper and supporting a Democrat candidate from Virginia. She’s a professional political operative who worked in online advocacy for the Obama campaign. And I’d be willing to bet that she continues to get no small amount of support from her former employers.
The tea party movement consisted of thousands of spontaneous rallies attended by millions of Americans all across the nation. The “coffee party” is a Facebook group started by a professional operative with fewer members than any random Justin Bieber fan group.
Color me unimpressed.
On a related note, Jim Hoft notes that the “Coffee Party’s” claims about wanting civility are…ringing pretty hollow.
Tags: boy scouts, flagstaff, tom strickland
