Taking on Colorado’s left-wing liars (about the Denver Tea Party)

ProgressNowColorado, a group of paid left-wing propagandists, has written yet another dishonest article, this time their assessment of Denver’s Tax Day Tea Party.

The errors and omissions are non-stop, with essentially every sentence containing an erroneous implication or an outright lie. It’s not surprising given that (1) these guys are paid to lie, and (2) they were removed by police from the demonstration very early on, so they’re “reporting” on an event they really didn’t see.

[After reading this note, I encourage anyone who attended the Denver Tax Day Tea Party to contact Michael Huttner of ProgressNow and tell him what you think of his article and his behavior: The contact number, which is printed on the press release linked above, is (303) 931 4547.]

Here are a few of Huttner’s whoppers:

• They say they “braved a crowd of belligerent right-wing protesters”. In fact, police were reported to have said that it was the best-behaved large protest they’ve ever seen. Furthermore, it was ProgressNow’s own Michael Huttner who was escorted out by police after apparently trying to instigate an argument with a woman. It’s the leftists who were belligerent.

• ProgressNow showed a few posters which were arguably in poor taste, though it wouldn’t surprise me if they brought at least one of them. If those signs were real, they were a tiny minority among the signs such as “I work, you eat. That’s socialism”, or “It’s time to clean House…and Senate”, and of course the many dozens of Gadsden flags waving in the breeze. By the way, although any mention of Hitler is always instantaneously reacted to with revulsion, there is good reason to fear economic fascism in this country and there are real comparisons with Hitler’s pre-war Germany, including an emphasis on “green” and government-mandated health policies.

• It is an outright lie that the Tea Parties were “chiefly organized by right-wing lobbyist groups.” Certainly FreedomWorks served as a clearinghouse of Tea Party information and they encouraged participation. I interviewed FreedomWorks’ Brendan Steinhauser, who offered the following:

Unlike the unions or ACORN, FreedomWorks doesn’t pay its volunteers to protest. The outrage is real. The protests are real. They’re just the beginning. If Paul Krugman would have actually done some research or given us a call, he would have learned that. Since the left orchestrates most of its so-called “grass roots” events, it’s inconceivable to them that conservatives and libertarians can do this without those same types of methods. The tea parties are a little bit disorganized and decentralized precisely become they are coming from the ground up…and you can’t fake that.

• Then ProgressNow derides “keynote speaker” Josh Penry, who did NOT speak at the event. I guess Huttner wouldn’t have known that since he was thrown out for causing trouble. Huttner also quotes himself as saying that the Tea Party “brought out the worst elements in our political culture.” I suppose it’s true…since Huttner was there. Other than that, the statement simply shows the gutters in which the left is willing to trudge.

• And then there’s simply the despicable closing of the ProgressNow press release which says the Tea Party was made up of “a few hundred crazies and racists”. First, I didn’t mean one person there who seemed even borderline “crazy”. Angry, yes. Frustrated with government, yes. Fed up with both political parties, yes. Racist? You must be kidding. There will always be a racist or two in any crowd of several thousand people (Huttner must have gotten thrown out even earlier than I thought if he believed there were only a few hundred.) But as I and others written elsewhere, the real racists in this country are on the left, and I don’t believe anybody was there opposing Obama’s policies because of Obama’s skin color. And the left simply throws out the “you must be a racist” card simply to try to shut up people who disagree with Obama’s policies.

ProgressNow is just the latest addition to the left’s fear and loathing of a genuine anti-big-government grass-roots movement. They’re scared to death that people who disagree with their socialist, Nanny State policies will begin to push back against their Soros- and Tim Gill-funded propaganda and their Soros-, Gill-, and union-owned politicians.

These left-wing organizations, like Joseph Goebbels (Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda) operate under the presumption that if you tell a big enough lie often enough, people will come to believe it. And they’re probably correct, so it’s time for those of us who are sick of the left’s manipulation and fabrication to stand up and point out at every opportunity that Huttner and people like him are simply paid liars. On the bright side, I do believe people are waking up to this fact, as shown by the demise of Colorado Media Matters which operated as a slightly less low-brow (but just as untruthful) version of ProgressNow.