Props to this fellow’s blog and others for this video of Gresham Barrett, a representative from my home state of South Carolina attempting to address a Tea Party demonstration:

In Michigan and elsewhere, I’m sure Tea Party demonstrations are filled with folks such as the one in this video hollering “Go home!” over and over, even as the speaker, in this case, Barrett, is trying to kiss up to them as much as humanly possible. But in South Carolina, where, who knows, we may declare our indepedence once again!, the commentary from the audience is particularly vitriolic. He uses the term “liberal Democrats in Washington, D.C.” to win their side. He says,

I will fight for you, and I will never turn my back on you, I can promise you that.

He tells the crowd, which doesn’t stop booing the entire five minutes of the “plea,” says,

The Obama administration, they don’t believe in you guys,

attempting to speak to them as if he’s beer buddies with the lot of them. He petitions them that “we” must fight them on the deficit, spending, taxes, and

above all taxation without hesitation (Notice, he didn’t say “representation” because even he knows the analogy is a bogus claim, even as, two days before, folks showed up in cities all over the country in Revolutionary era garb to protest against … something. It’s hard to say just what.) must be examined, exposed and extinguished.

So, what we have hear is a Tea Party demonstration, where a Republican representative, not even a Democrat, is virtually shouted off the stage, as he fishes for something to say, anything anti-Obama, anti-spending or anti-tax, to get them to agree on any point. How much more excitable would they have been if Ben Bernanke or Barney Frank or Obama himself were before them? Who knows? But I do know that telling a state representative to go home contributes nothing to the debate, nor do the scores of “boos” leveled at the man, the latter of which says to me that the angst, the emotional, excitable, reason-bending, rabble-rousing type of angst, was coming from, not a single person or two, but from the majority. Which, in turn says to me that either the Tea Party has lost control of its own message (if it ever had one) or if we get Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and the gang to begin talking about protests against the government on air, and all types of angry people to come out of the wood works, folks who are angry about all sorts of things from taxes to the Democratically-controlled Congress to big spending to the sun’s peculiar tendency to continue rising despite thousands and thousands and thousands of years of prophecy to the contrary.

But then again, South Carolina was the first state to secede the Union. It doesn’t take much for some folks over there to be rabble-roused.