#8. Christine O'Donnell and The Tea Party
The way we heard it:
"The Tea Party is just a swarm of redneck doofuses, not only unworthy of serious consideration from the rest of us but 100 percent deserving of scrotum-based epithets. Because they're just that ridiculous."
And Christine O'Donnell was the new Queen of the Crazies. It didn't take long for us to find out that she was personally bankrupt, a dabbler in witchcraft and not all that knowledgeable about this holy document she swore she was building her candidacy around. Plus, everything that came out of her mouth was pure hilarious moonshine. Which was probably why she stopped giving her mouth a national platform six weeks before the election. But that didn't stop the media from talking about her, because O'Donnell so perfectly represented everything else about the Tea Party.
There were blatant racists and blatant Obama-to-Hitler-comparison-makers. All year we saw misspelled signs and angry, red-faced Colonials. People like Anderson Cooper and President Obama showed how seriously they were taking the party by calling them "tea-baggers." And nobody blamed them, because all year long, the media gave us a picture of the Tea Party that made it perfectly clear: This is a joke.
But the truth is ...
It wasn't a joke.
For all those wackjob birthers captured on film wearing frilly lady blouses and triangle hats, there were thousands of ordinary people just living their lives, being regular, and not liking how their Republican Party had turned out. And even though Tea Party members tend to skew toward older, middle-class white guys, their overall demographics aren't that far from the rest of the country. Of course, regular people are about as riveting as dry toast, so they didn't get much screen time. Which is why it came as such a shock to everyone when 32 percent of Tea Party-affiliated candidates won their elections.
By focusing in on the assclowns the media painted a picture that not only wasn't accurate, but pretty much made constructive political discourse impossible. They didn't just fail to do their job -- they did the opposite of their job, and they've been doing it for years.
Like back in the 1960s, when they homed in on long-haired hippies dancing like spazzes and plugging every orifice they could with flowers, then declared these ding-dongs the voice of their generation. In reality, most kids from the 60s never looked like that or behaved that way, but that doesn't mean they inherently supported the war in Vietnam or were opposed to civil rights. They just weren't part of the hippie fringe. Look at your mom's (or grandma's?) yearbook if you don't believe us. Or look at this picture from Woodstock.
In case you can't tell, most of the guys are sporting relatively short hair ... at Woodstock.
So when we watched coverage of O'Donnell and the Tea Party this year, we were only getting the bonkers half of the picture. Now that CNN is teaming up with the Tea Party Express to host the Republican debates next year, we'll probably see a lot fewer costumed revolutionaries. But everyone will just assume the Tea Party cleaned up its act, when in reality it will be CNN.
