I usually give myself a pat on the back if I manage to make it one read through one of M.D. Harmon’s columns but I have to admit I read his recent channeling of Wall Street Journal contributor John Fund twice. (“Prominent analyst discusses tea party, Palin, Clinton, Obama,” Aug. 27)

Fund takes a very long leap comparing the ’60s protest movement to the tea party movement and such a ridiculous reach cannot go unmentioned. Obviously Mr. Fund and Mr. Harmon have never attended a tea party event because they would see how much of a stretch their comparison is.

The New Left protests were made up almost exclusively of 20-something college students rebelling against both their conservative parents and the negative turn they saw was being taken by the nation they would someday inherit.

They occupied campus buildings, delivered fiery speeches from atop squad cars and stood firm in acrid clouds of tear gas, under police batons and sometimes bullets.

The tea party patrons on the other hand seem a much more “mature” crowd. (How many ’60s radicals had signs warning the government to “Keep your filthy hands off my Social Security?”) They seem content to complain about taxes and government from the neatly manicured, taxpayer funded parks and town halls where they gather. They are not the inheritors of this great nation. They more resemble the people who sat comfortably catatonic as this country’s future was nearly squandered in needless wars and rampant malfeasance.

They in no way resemble the wave of idealistic political warriors that Harmon/Fund fantasize them as. They are just longtime Republican voters who now act out in public, upset about badly losing the last two elections.

They have that right, but please don’t tell me that clumsily rewriting history and putting the same old product in a different package really means anything.

 

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