WaPo columnist attends D.C. Tea Party

He not only survived the experience, he actually came away with about as positive an attitude as a left-wing columnist from a left-wing newspaper is going to have:

I went to the "tea party" rally at the Washington Monument on Thursday to check out just how reactionary and potentially violent the movement truly was.

Answer: Not very.

Based on what I saw and heard, tea party members are not seething, ready-to-explode racists, as some liberal commentators have caricatured them.

Some are extremists and bigots, sure. The crowd was almost entirely white. I differ strenuously with the protesters on about 95 percent of the issues.

Nevertheless, on the whole, they struck me as passionate conservatives dedicated to working within the system rather than dangerous militia types or a revival of the Ku Klux Klan....

So, even though this Robert McCartney couldn't get through his piece without mentioning the whiteness of the crowd, he at least didn't go off the deep end with his description of the Tea Party that was held in Washington D.C. on Tax Day.

I was just wondering: if the supposed racism of a crowd is determined by which skin color overwhelmingly attends it, then I wonder if the same people who think the Tea Partiers are racists think the same thing about the so-called Million Man March that was held in D.C. about 15 years ago? Funny, I remember nothing but positive press coverage of that event at the time.

However, I will take a mark in the win column, and the more fair and balanced coverage this Washington Post columnist gave the D.C. Tea Party provides that mark.

It's a start, and certainly a refutation of the vicious craziness coming out of the mouths of the left-wing punditry on places like MSNBC.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." -Thomas Jefferson