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Finally!

— A caffeinated, piping hot beverage Party that the mainstream press can get behind!

Meet the “Coffee Party.” Whose most important redeeming quality seems to be, well, that they bill themselves as “an answer to the Tea Party, a year-old protest movement that’s steeped in fiscal conservatism and boiling-hot, anti-tax rhetoric.”

And what is that “answer”? A gathering together of salt of the earth folk like John Purser, a “humble” man who we’re told prefers “the simple life. At 69, he lives in a two-room house on a rural dirt road in Carroll County, drives a 26-year-old Ford pickup and takes odd jobs to get by. […] He doesn’t need much. Never has. But Purser, who worked in maintenance for Delta Airlines for 30 years, has seen the little security he might have had — his retirement money, for example, and his home’s value — fall apart in recent years. And he just doesn’t understand why some fancy executive should earn millions. His own daddy made $12 a week building roads for the Work Projects Administration during the Great Depression.

We feel your pain, Mr Purser. After all, what’s a salt of the earth guy like ol’ John here — and the millions more like him — to do? 30-years as a union laborer and he couldn’t manage to save enough to get by without dragging his humble, salt-of-the-earth bones outside to cut lawns (though one wonders if all the $6 cups of coffee had something to do with that. But I digress…)…? I mean really!

Clearly, the system must be broken, and so the answer is to use salt-of-the-earth populist phrases to demonize those “fancy” businessmen and their greedy capital-engorged businesses that routinely saddle people with jobs (though not “his own daddy,” who was taken care of by the kindly state), and — in a “civil” tone — to pretend that those who are upset with the ever-growing reach and theft of and by government are “obstructionists.”

Do that, and you’ve not only got yourself a movement, but you’ve got yourself a fine, progressive media-aided juxtaposition, to boot: notes a fine scotch, who sent along the link, “Tea partiers are crazy, homogenous, astro-turfed, and steeped in ‘boiling hot rhetoric’ but Coffee Partiers are ‘humble Southerner[s]’, ‘inner-city native[s]’ and of an ‘organically grown political movement’.”

Why, it’s like Darth Vader vs. the Joads! And ol’ Tom Joad, why, he’s just a simple man trying to get by. Whereas that Vader fella? He’s doing the bidding of the EVIL EMPIRE! And so it is the DUTY of the press to UNMASK the jack-booted hatchet man.

For the childrens.

0 Replies to “Finally!”

  1. B Moe says:

    Do you have any questions about Coffee Party USA?

  2. Joe says:

    What’s wrong with a bourbon party? With subsplinters such as the vodka, Long Island Ice Tea, and beer parties?

  3. bh says:

    When we hold tea parties we reference a logical historical background, the Boston Tea Party.

    History of coffee? It’s the history of international trade and the development of the first European stock and commodity exchanges.

    Cognitive dissonance forever! should be their official motto.

  4. sdferr says:

    The “About Us” page at B Moe’s link:

    We are diverse — ethnically, geographically, politically, in age and in experience.

    We are 100% grassroots. No lobbyists here. No pundits. And no hyper-partisan strategists calling the shots in this movement. We are a spontaneous and collective expression of our desire to forge a culture of civic engagement that is solution-oriented, not blame-oriented.

    We demand a government that responds to the needs of the majority of its citizens as expressed by our votes and by our voices; NOT corporate interests as expressed by misleading advertisements and campaign contributions.

    We want a society in which democracy is treated as sacrosanct and ordinary citizens participate out of a sense of civic duty, civic pride, and a desire to contribute to society. The Coffee Party is a call to action. Our Founding Fathers and Mothers gave us an enduring gift — Democracy — and we must use it to meet the challenges that we face as a nation.

    So spontaneous it only took a year for them to discover that they needed themselves!

  5. Chris S. says:

    Remember, these are enlighted country folk with down home charm and deserving of respect. They’re NOT racist knuckledragger rabblerousers like you lot.

    I know we made fun of liberals as being latte sipping, I guess they decided to run with it and make a party out of it.

  6. Carin says:

    Our Founding Fathers and Mothers gave us an enduring gift — Democracy — and we must use it to meet the challenges that we face as a nation.

    Who are our Founding Mothers?

  7. JD says:

    Note that the founders of the coffee party were ardent Barcky supporters, and good old reliable Leftist activists.

  8. sdferr says:

    Exactly Carin, who are they! They’ve been kept from you by the oppressive white male hegemony! Hidden all these years, they must be released!

  9. Obstreperous Infidel says:

    Betsy Ross? Martha Washington? Michelle Obama?

  10. B Moe says:

    They aren’t blame oriented, either.

    Except for lobbyists, pundits, hyper-partisan strategists, corporate interests, misleading advertisements and campaign contributions.

    Except for that.

  11. Pablo says:

    We are 100% grassroots. No lobbyists here. No pundits. And no hyper-partisan strategists calling the shots in this movement. We are a spontaneous and collective expression of our desire to forge a culture of civic engagement that is solution-oriented, not blame-oriented.

    P.S. Don’t look here. That is not the Annabel Park I knew.

  12. Sean M. says:

    I noticed that a certain name was conspicuously absent from the CNN article.

    Annabel Park.

  13. sdferr says:

    Hiding Founding Mothers again are they? Those bastard hegemonic evil white men will never quit!

  14. Sean M. says:

    Diseased minds think alike, Pablo.

  15. baxtrice says:

    At 69, he lives in a two-room house on a rural dirt road in Carroll County, drives a 26-year-old Ford pickup and takes odd jobs to get by. […] He doesn’t need much. Never has

    Having any sort of ambition to achieve more or strive for a more financially stable life is evil. You must take what life has given you and be content. Or in other words, shut up peasants.

  16. LBascom says:

    I think picking “Coffee Party” as their name contains some unintended irony.

    Economic theory predicts that if a government imposes a ceiling for the sales price of any good or service, usually set below the market price that would result from the interaction of competing suppliers and demanders, there will be shortages of goods because less sellers will be willing to sell at the lower price, while more buyers will try to buy at that lower price. The excess demand not being met by existing supply can be counted as the shortage quantity.

    Today’s Venezuela has become a textbook example of this Microeconomics axiom. A while ago at the supermarket I was unable to find any sugar or eggs. There is still some coffee on the shelves, but exogenous factors such as the lack of sufficient rain during 2009 and the unseasonably high producer cost of Colombian coffee beans, are only accelerating the alarm. Venezuela, the world’s leading coffee exporter during the 19th century, will soon be importing coffee for domestic consumption.

  17. Carin says:

    I like how the Coffee Party bullshit doesn’t really say WHAT they stand for besides vague statements regarding democracy and calls to action.

    [puts chin in hand and looks off into the distance]

    I wonder why that is?

  18. Abe Froman says:

    I made a couple of coffee shoprecruitment flyers for them last week. As a parody. But I don’t think lefties would get that they’re being made fun of.

  19. sdferr says:

    Annabel

    No obstruction you damned engagers!

  20. cranky-d says:

    Is it just me, or do these Coffee Party people sound so fucking tone deaf it’s a wonder they can hear at all? We know the next thing is that they will hold some weak-tea (see what I did there?) rallies where everyone holds up one of three pre-printed signs and the old-school media will report what an amazing new development this “Coffee Party” thing is. And, by the way, did you know that all the Tea Party people are ultra-conservative racists who want your grandma to die? Well, they are, but the Coffee Party people are good and pure.

  21. A fine scotch says:

    The media’s got their narrative (and the biggest megaphone) and they’re sticking to it, you racist, god-bothering, bible-humping, xenophobic, cousinfuckers.

  22. sdferr says:

    “…you racist, god-bothering, bible-humping, xenophobic, cousinfuckers.”

    We might add “anti-democratic teeming masses” to your list a fine scotch.

  23. Yugo Chavez says:

    This LBascom, he smells of the sulfur, no?

  24. steph says:

    I’m pretty sure Dolly Madison was a Founding Mother.
    And, she invented ice cream!
    But, pshaw, I think she may have had high falutin tea party sensibilities.

  25. What did his Daddy do after the WPA was over?

  26. Slartibartfast says:

    A gathering together of salt of the earth folk like John Purser

    I thought we were going with the “no salt” thing.

  27. geoffb says:

    B Moe in #1 cut right to the heart of it.

    I drink coffee. I live on coffee. Coffee is a longtime friend of mine. This “Coffee Party” is decaf, Postum.

  28. Obstreperous Infidel says:

    …you racist, god-bothering, bible-humping, xenophobic, cousinfuckers.

    To be honest, I did really want to fuck one of my cousins. I mean, I believe she was a second or third cousin (My grandmother’s cousin’s daughter), but damn, she was smoking hot. A stripper to boot. I never did fuck her, because that would have been uncomfortable.

  29. blah says:

    All I really want to know is if I can call them ‘Nut-Dunkers. As in donuts. Why? What did you think I meant?

  30. sdferr says:

    On genetic terms OI, I think the science teaches that it could have proved a highly rewarding outcome, nevermind the pleasures involved. That is, a very low probability of reinforcing deleterious mutations relative to the much higher probability of reinforcing beneficial ones.

  31. Obstreperous Infidel says:

    Thanks for the info, sdferr. I’ll look her up. I’ll have to clear with the wife first, though. I mean she was stripper and not one of the off 75th and Hough avenue type stripper, but a Vegas main strip type.

  32. Kresh says:

    Huh. I guess their definition of Astroturfing is “Anyone but us.”

    How typical. No real surprise there.

  33. sdferr says:

    cha-cha-cha!

  34. A fine scotch says:

    Note to self: Look up OI’s cousin.

    I’m still amazed this story is being featured on CNN.com’s main page (although it is no longer the main post on the main page).

  35. Sigivald says:

    bh: On the other hand, the aftermath of the tea taxes was Americans switching to coffee wholesale, and we’ve been famous for drinking a lot of it ever since.

    So the idea of coffee as a patriotic drink is not unrealistic or unprecedented. It’s just misapplied by these bozos.

  36. Alec Leamas says:

    Coffee is just so much more hip – I think that’s the idea. Just like the hipster music what sounds like three cats in a burlap sack being thrown into a river.

  37. Frontman says:

    “At 69, he lives in a two-room house on a rural dirt road in Carroll County, drives a 26-year-old Ford pickup and takes odd jobs to get by. […] He doesn’t need much. Never has”

    Well, then, he should be good and ready for the coming socialist paradise.

  38. Grass Root says:

    Huh.

    The Tea Party movement was under the legacy media’s radar until it became too large to ignore. And even then it was ridiculed as the “Tea Bagger” movement. The Coffee Party movement, a collection of beta males and alpha females, gets into th enews before it’s even off the ground.

    [Puts chin in hand and looks off into the distance.]

    I wonder why that is?

  39. sdferr says:

    Well heck, CNN leftists have interests too.

    oh, and MSNBC leftists, WaPo leftists, NYT leftists, CBS leftists, Chicago Tribune leftists, ABC leftists, NPR leftists, LA Times leftists, Boston Globe leftists, NBC leftists, Atlanta Journal Constitution leftists, PBS leftists, Philadelphia Inquirer leftists……

  40. […] Jeff’s entire Pro­tein Wis­dom post is HERE. […]

  41. JimK says:

    I liked Zombie’s Cocoa Party over PJ Media.

  42. sdferr says:

    See, Howell knows what’s what.

    (Why is it that Alan Ginsburg haunts the land?)

    Holy!

  43. JHo says:

    Consummate envy is just the thing to build a national political engine around. And the resulting supermajority. For the morality.

    And they say God is dead.

  44. dicentra says:

    Hey, I happen to love Postum and was royally hacked off when they discontinued it.

    THEN I found out that a local hot cocoa mix producer, Stephens, tried to purchase the recipe for Postum from Kraft and they said no, no, no.

    Jerks.

  45. steph says:

    Howell Raines is a poopy head, and cowers in unshaven rooms in his underwear, burning money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall. And a twit.

  46. the other Ken says:

    Actually I’ve been meaning to start a decaf party but I don’t really have the energy.

  47. steph says:

    The wheel is holy! The swiss cheese is holy! The spaghetti-o’ is holy!
    The hula-hoop is holy! The bagel and donut and cheerios
    and onion rings holy!
    Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is
    holy!

  48. bh, don’t forget the Joffee Coffee Theory of Expansionism. Essentially, bad coffee leads to militarism.

  49. Bob Reed says:

    Great post Jeff.

    I guess they’re hoping that the same people who will suspend credulity and buy the sob story of John Purser will buy all of the rest of their logic-defying progressive policy arguments as well.

    As you noted, this is a variant of a propaganda story that has been dragged out many times during my lifetime. I remember when Reagan was vilified for firing the air traffic controllers, or for ordering the “oppressed” railroad workers back to work. OPPRESSED!, I tell ya!1!11! One of my pals fathers worked for the Washington terminal, which was later absorbed by AMTRAK, ultimately becoming a conductor for the last 10 years of his career. I’m not sure why, but he always complained about living hand-to-vest, even though his 4 children were grown and out of the nest; in addition to his wife running a long time day-care center, under the radar, in southern Maryland.

    Now in retirement, he recieved in excess of 4500$ a month, for what was essentially unskilled labor his entire life. And he’s still complaining that he can’t get by, regardless of the tax advantages that retired railroad workers recieve, and had recently left Florida for Kentucky; where he told his son, my pal, that he was going to “turn another red state blue!”…

    Did I mention he was a lifelong liberal? Did I need to?

    I remember all of the “20/20”, “Nightline”, and other news program stories that ran in Ronnie’s first term about the laid off auto workers who couldn’t make ends meet, even though they had been making 50K/ year for the prior 10 years, more than double the national average at the time. But as now with your example, the hand-wringing is brought to bear in the hope that pity will override skepticism.

    It tears my heart out that Mr. Purser has to do manual labor to make ends meet. But, if he’s always lived such “a simple life”, where did the big union bucks from all those years go? And if his house is paid for, what’s putting the burden on his expenses? Couldn’t be the property taxes, paid for the “privilege” of living in Carroll county”, could it?

    The whole coffee party is an astroturf connivance, that is part and parcel of the continuous Obama campaign run by the astroturf King* Goebbels Axelrod. The “tell” is that it’s leader is the erstwhile Ms. Park, an former OFA operative, celebrated nutroot, and youtube propagandist.

    But I guess I’m preaching to the choir…

    * As much as it pains me, although I’m sure you are the man JD when it comes to stadium turf sales, Axelrod is the internet astroturf kind. Besides, don’t you sell the good kind that doesn’t eff up the players knees as much?

  50. bh says:

    That was great, RTO.

    Bad coffee, then, is the milk of warriors.

    Heh.

  51. The Lost Dog says:

    Bummer!

    “Comment by Joe on 3/12 @ 9:29 am #

    What’s wrong with a bourbon party? With subsplinters such as the vodka, Long Island Ice Tea, and beer parties?”

    My “Daddy” was a member of the “12 Year Old Scotch” party, and he had more money than you could shake a stick at.

    Too bad that his favorite bible story was the “widow’s mite”.

    The Salvation Army is lucky that he liked them more than he liked me…

    I’m still not sure whether he bought his way into heaven – or not…

    My ex is very thankful to my “Daddy”, though…

  52. I think the theory falls apart though when he starts talking about the US. (Exceptionalism!)

    He points to the opening of the first Starbucks in 1971 and the Vietnam War. But since the theory is about the effect of bad coffee, that should have sealed a resounding victory. :P

  53. Danger says:

    “But I guess I’m preaching to the choir…”

    Amen Reverend Bob;)

  54. Slartibartfast says:

    Good point, Robert. But the standards that have Starbucks classified as bad coffee are sufficiently elevated above Chock Full a’ Nasties that we were pretty much doomed to fail anyway.

  55. Lazarus Long says:

    “We are a spontaneous and collective expression of our desire…”

    You’re about as spontaneous as May Day in North Korea.

  56. Jim in KC says:

    I thought it was the Works Progress Administration?

    Is the CNN reporter a dumbass, or am I?

  57. Lazarus Long says:

    “What did his Daddy do after the WPA was over?”

    Starved to death, apparently.

  58. Lazarus Long says:

    “Huh. I guess their definition of Astroturfing is “Anyone but us.””

    You’d be wrong.

  59. Lazarus Long says:

    “Hey, I happen to love Postum and was royally hacked off when they discontinued it.”

    Even worse was when they stopped making Spatini.

  60. Mr. W says:

    I’m starting the ‘Pity Party’. We’re going to gather in groups and pretend to be supportive for the morons who were actually stupid enough to vote for Obama.

    “Awww…Are you sad because you didn’t get the socialist utopia that the latest in a long line of two-bit political hacks promised you…again?”

  61. geoffb says:

    #44, dicentra,

    I’m sorry you can no longer get it.

    I however despise the taste. I was forced to drink it all the time as a kid because of the SDA half of my family and it was a local product.

  62. Mr. W says:

    “No, there is nothing cooler than Al Franken at Netroots Nation. It is absolutely the coolest thing known to mankind.”

    Hunh. Who would have thought that angry and talentless people would be drawn to an angry and talentless leader.

  63. JD says:

    Bob Reed – I sell the good stuff, not that crap that the NFL released the testing about today.

  64. Mikey NTH says:

    The Coffee Party? Why it is like Woody Guthrie’s authentic fascist-slaying guitar was taken up by salt-of-the-earth common man Bruce Springsteen just before salt-of-the-earth common man John Mellencamp beat Springsteen down so he could record a multi-precious-metal-album song on that authentic guitar first.

    Salt-of-the-earth common man Billy Joel curses Woody Guthrie for having a fascist-slaying guitar and not a nazi-nixing piano.

  65. cynn's brain says:

    Wasn’t coffee part of the slave trade—RACISTS!

  66. Rusty says:

    #65
    Hey!
    Them beans don’t pick themselves!

  67. I’m all about a Whiskey Rebellion. Tired of weak Tea and imported Coffee. I’m ready for the grown up Party.

    Of course, Jeff, if there were a Hot Toddy Party, it would sweep the primaries with a firm *ahem* majority.

  68. LBascom says:

    Be afraid, be very afraid.

    Coffee party protests demonstrations sit downs overwhelm warm chairs in our nations capitol.

    This weekend marks the kick-off of the Coffee Parties across the country— which has been billed as the liberal response to the Tea Party movement — and I stopped by one of the Washington D.C. area gatherings Saturday morning at Peregrine Espresso in the Eastern Market area — only to find a small gathering of five activists huddled at a small table.

    (h/t Hot Air)

  69. B Moe says:

    Yeah but they were five really smart people.

  70. nikkolai says:

    Smart, yet probably smelly.

  71. guinsPen says:

    a small gathering of five activists huddled at a small table

    Perhaps the huddled asses of which Lady Liberty speaks?

  72. J."Trashman" Peden says:

    “At 69, he [Purser] lives in a two-room house on a rural dirt road in Carroll County…

    The stupid mo-fo, if he exists, should have left about 100 yr. ago just like the rest of us “Carrolls” did from Ohio. Apparently, “Four Dead in Ohio” didn’t even work on this imbecile. Enough said!

    signed, JCP III esq. and etc..

    p.s., wtf is wrong with a two room house as long as there’s plenty of beer?