“After having a president who detests democracy and wants to destroy it, seeing someone who actually loves America is really refreshing," said Bettina Viviano, a tall blonde from Los Angeles who is making a documentary about ACORN voter fraud, to be released around the 2010 elections. “The people who are emerging from this, and Sarah Palin, are the only hope we have.”
..As we spoke, Taitz was flagged down by two passersby who recognized her on sight and whom she greeted warmly. Conventioneers had already been fully briefed on birtherism. Joseph Farah, editor of the extreme right-wing news site WorldNetDaily.com, had given a 20-minute disquisition the previous night before explaining the Biblical nature of his obsession with Obama’s citizenship papers: Could Jesus have gotten away with not having it all written down, when he came to rule the Kingdom of Heaven? Judson Phillips, the impresario of the whole event, praised WorldNetDaily onstage as an “amazing source of information” that he turns to every morning after reading his own site, teapartynation.com.
..If you’re wearing a tricorn hat, you’ve got the worst of it. But any tea partier at the Opryland hotel could be forgiven for feeling a bit hunted—there are now 200 credentialed media on the premises, or one for every three registered attendees. The lobby is filled with documentary filmmakers, television reporters, and print journalists, standing out in their pressed pants and blocky glasses, buttonholing anyone who looks vaguely tea partyish.
“It’s a bit intimidating,” admitted Beth Stoltzfus, a veterinarian from rural Pennsylvania.
The media themselves could be forgiven a little surprise—three weeks ago, the event was to be completely closed to press, except for five conservative news organizations, ranging in legitimacy from World Net Daily to the Wall Street Journal. It was a “working convention,” organizer Judson Phillips explained, where participants could learn unmolested. And it came with a weird kind of paranoia: When I identified myself as a reporter to an organizer through the Tea Party Nation social network, my membership was immediately revoked.
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