Bye-bye, Miss American TP

The rehabilitation has begun. How sadly predictable.

In the Washington Post last Thursday, an article described how Emily Ekins, a grad student, took photographs of 250 signs at the big Tea Party rally in D.C. and found that only 5% of them were racist. Yet 25% of the media coverage dealt with racism in the Tea Party. Today, in the New York Times, the reliably deranged altar-boy Ross Douthat takes up that study and cries “A-ha! Take that, you liberals!”

Here’s what the grad student, as opposed to the tree-wasting NYT columnist, says:

"Really this is an issue of salience," Ekins said. "Just because a couple of percentage points of signs have those messages doesn't mean the other people don't share those views, but it doesn't mean they do, either. But when 25 percent of the coverage is devoted to those signs, it suggests that this is the issue that 25 percent of people think is so important that they're going to put it on a sign, when it's actually only a couple of people."

Actually, Emily, 5% is quite a lot of people. In fact, I think the ratio is just about right. If 5% of your movement is made up of openly racist primates, then I think multiplying by 5 to cover the faint-hearted, the illiterate and the canny is quite reasonable. Icebergs have tips, y’know.

Aside from the TP’s screamingly obvious contingent of cranky-crackers-being-manipulated-by-big-business, there is the other screamingly obvious element driving the party. Some people in this country are happy to be stuck in Fantasyland 1950. The USA was then Number One, because every other nation on earth was on its knees. America made the rules, printed the money, and did what it wanted. It was a situation that couldn’t last, and it didn’t.

If you take the exceptional for the norm, of course you’re going to be disappointed. Simple as that.

So spare me the blame-the-liberals crap, Douthat.