Memo to Paddy Mac: Reporters Should Check Their Sources

In his effort to portray the ‘€œfail, Democrats, fail’€ movement also known as the teabaggers, consistent pro-GOPer mouthpiece Patrick McIlheran attempts to further the fallacy that teabagging is a non-partisan explosion of discontent, rather than Republicans who want President Obama and Democrats to, well, not succeed.

Paddy Mac’€™s method: interviewing some joker who at one point shouted an obscenity when talking about Sen. Russ Feingold and letting him claim he’€™s got non-partisan cred.

(I’m not going to name his source who’s in the story.)But thirty seconds on “the internets” shows this guy has been showing up for the teabagging fun and helping to host events that let reactionary, intellectually-challenged dim bulbs like “Tax Free’€ Terrence Wall yammer how the key to getting out of the economic collapse caused by the failure of the Bush policies of tax cuts for the rich and corporation and deregulation for the banksters is more tax cuts for the rich and corporations and continuing deregulation for the banksters.

In the latest of his pro-GOPer screeds, McIlheran interviews his source, who said:

[He] said he didn’t do politics until last spring, when a bloated state budget got shoved through via one-party rule. The cost and the heedlessness grated. ‘€œI’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican,” [he] later told the crowd.

If he ain’€™t a GOPer, then I guess it’€™s a coincidence that he and his wife donate exclusively to state Republican candidates and officials. All of which came before November 2008, which I believe was well before ‘€œlast spring,’€ which my calendar says woulda been March-ish 2009.

And is it just a coincidence he hosted a fundraiser for a GOPer Assembly candidate?

But what’€™s most comical and insincere is this lulu:

“There’s been an awakening,” said [the source], a financial consultant who suspects his firm isn’t wholly enthusiastic about him piping up. “I think people feel threatened,” he said.

Turns out that despite his attempted martyrdom, I think the guy whose name is the same as the company and who is listed first on the site, doesn’t have to worry about “the man” firing him for expressing himself.

It’s the faux paranoid bullshit peddled as bravery that ought to be called for what it is: manufactured hysteria, the preferred emotion of the entire teabagging movement.

It’€™s almost laughable, as he tries to come off like the Unfrozen Teabagger. The modern world of partisanship frightens and confuses him.

C’mon, the teabaggers are about about wanting Democrats, most notably president, to fail. I get the strategy in trying to say that somehow this giant unrest suddenly exploded because of the President’s policies — that’s a better tale than GOPers want Dems to lose.

But (hyperbole alert) you have more likelihood of “Tax Free” Terrence Wall paying income tax than you do of finding a teabagger who voted for Obama. Trying to make the case otherwise demeans the intelligence of your dedicated readers. The day you find the first teabagger/former Obama voter is the day hell literally hath frozen over.

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