To find extreme sentiments in Lafayette Park, it wasn’t necessary to look for the people with the most eccentric tea-bag-themed costumes. You could just pick a protester at random. “I think Obama’s plan is to create a catastrophic failure in our economic system, because then people will get desperate, and then you have the ability for a totalitarian government to move in,” said J’Neane Theus, 54, who retired from the Navy and now manages investments. She drove about an hour from Clarksville, Md., battling Washington’s horrific rush hour traffic to be an official marshal of the tea party (she had a white hat with “marshal” hand-scrawled in red ink to prove it). Her son, a 19-year-old Marine named Galen, stood next to her in a red, white and blue tie-dyed shirt, holding a sign accusing Barney Frank and other Democrats of treason. “I think that sounds very wacko; Americans don’t want to believe that. But we’ve seen this movie before,” the elder Theus said. I asked her where. “How about, well, fascist Italy, under Mussolini—and look at what happened to him, I would remind Obama of that,” she said. “Hitler. Stalin. Socialism has been proven not to work.”
Another seemingly sedate protester, Brian Smith, a marketer from Greenville, S.C., who was in Washington on business and came by the rally, wandered equally off message. “I love my country and I don’t like what’s going on,” Smith said. “Government—to be honest with you, and this will probably be misquoted, but on 9/11, I think they hit the wrong building. They should have gone into the Capitol building, hit out, knocked out both sides of the aisle, we’d start from scratch, we’d be better off today.” I pointed out that “they” did try to hit the Capitol. “Yeah, I know, they missed,” he said. “The wrong sequence. If someone had to go, it should have been the Capitol building. On that day I felt differently, but today that’s the way I feel.”
To be fair, conservatives have been doing this to liberals for years now. Get a few pictures of the zaniest people at an anti-war rally then smear everyone there with that extremism. I’ve been guilty of that, and I’m going to go ahead and admit that I was wrong.
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