The Legend of the Baggers' Advance

James Wolcott remembers the immigration rallies and says tomorrow's Teabaggery is a just a white men's rage-a-thon over the tax burden George W. Bush reduced for them:

It's remarkable and telling how some of the biggest peaceful political rallies this country has ever seen took place only three years ago, only to be flushed down the memory hole. I'm speaking of the tremendous pro-immigration rallies that took place in 2006, with an estimated half-million people assembling in downtown Los Angeles alone. Those rallies did not lack energy, enthusiasm, or organization, and I daresay among those hundreds of thousands of people lobbying for enlightened immigration legislation were low-income workers with "real jobs."

Of course, their groundswell efforts were mocked, attacked, derided, and dismissed by the likes of CNN's Lou Dobbs and the right blogosphere, who had a righteous snit over the presence of Mexican flags. "Welcome to Reconquista" blared Michelle Malkin, the strands of whose fearmongering were disentangled and tox screened by David Neiwert at Orcinus. (Mickey Kaus, putting on his thinking cap and then taking it off again, mused that the immigration issue might very well be the stealth bombshell issue to boost Republican chances in the 2006 midterms, and we know how niftily that worked out.)

Three years later, the scope and sweep of the pro-immigration rallies has been erased from the record books and general discourse as the Tea Party movement is augured in as the first authentic grassroots stirring of protest from the American heartland since, like, whenever.

The difference is that the Tea Parties, heavily promoted by Fox News and talk radio, are a white-people production, which ipso facto makes them more representative to Glenn Reynolds and associates of what "real Americans" think and believe than an ocean of brown-skinned people practicing civic activism. If any of the Tea Parties have a six-figure turnout, I'll be impressed. But I suspect that you'll have to blow up the aerial shot real large--until the film grain is as big as asteroid-sized Grape Nuts--to find a black or brown face in this particular Army of Davids.

A Pauline confirms the GOP hijacking of the Baggers' party.