Well, the teabagging of America is in full swing, and the nation has… erm… not exactly been brought to its knees.

It was considered more than a bit of a non-event by large swaths of the media. I haven’t been following TV news, but the print and online media are largely treating it as slightly less important than last week’s Sewer Commission meeting. Checks of aggregators like Google and Yahoo turn up one or two stories, while Reuters apparently sent, um, no one (but Octomom’s doing a documentary series). The BBC has a “those-wacky-Americans” story on it, though.

The AP was there, of course, but they get all grumpy if you link to them, so we can’t comment on their coverage. Bummer.

So is this a news blackout? Is the media intentionally ignoring the biggest story of the day, the week, the year, the biggest story since 1776?

In a word, no.

The most comprehensive coverage is at, of all places, Daily Kos, where they’ve been mocking the entire concept for days on end. Their entire front page is loaded with tea party posts at the moment, including a number of eyewitness accounts.

The protests are unimpressive by protest standards. A few thousand here, a few thousand there — frankly, not all that exciting. A dispatch from Salt Lake City:

Several hundred people carried signs that expressed their anger toward politicians and federal debt, as well as their general frustration with government. They chanted scathing attacks against President Obama, even Gov. Jon Huntsman: Obama for creating the stimulus; Huntsman for accepting it.

If you can only get hundreds of wingnuts to protest government spending in Salt Lake City, of all places, there’s something amiss.

But from the same piece, we get a sense of where the protest is coming from:

The group protested taxes, but they were upset with the Obama administration.

“It’s everything. I don’t agree with any of his (President Obama’s) policies. I think he’s turning our country socialistic,” said protester Sue Pollard.

And as the above-linked BBC piece put it:

My sense of the people around me in Lafayette Square (what do we call them? Tea-baggers? Tea-baggists?) is that they are essentially the kind of people who did not like Barack Obama anyway and certainly did not vote for him.

In other words, it’s a tea tantrum from folks who aren’t inclined to like anything that’s going to happen as long as Obama’s in the White House.

And the protesters didn’t seem concerned about projecting a message to the “reasonable middle”. From La Figa at Firedoglake:

A gin-blossomed Vietnam vet tells me with a wink that he’s now an Independent–he

“switched after Bush let in all those Mexicans and Condi said we should sign the UN Law of Sea Doctrine. Where’s our sovereignty?”

And this from Newsday (yeah, yeah, it’s the AP piece):

Other protesters also took direct aim at Obama. One sign in the crowd in Madison, Wis., compared him to the anti-Christ. At a rally in Montgomery, Ala., where Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” blared from loudspeakers, Jim Adams of Selma carried a sign that showed the president with Hitler-style hair and mustache and said, “Sieg Heil Herr Obama.”

Charming. And not surprising.

Not like I have to tell anyone who reads this blog, but the tea parties, at their very root, don’t have a damn thing to do with spending or taxes. They have to do with the latest flailings of an ever-diminishing group of people who have to have something to hate in order to get out of bed in the morning, and currently have the incredible luck to have a black Democrat as President — a guaranteed bile target for at least four years, no matter what he does. Hell, if Obama eliminated taxation, if he abolished the IRS, if he took MSNBC off the air and replaced it with 24-hour reruns of Hee-Haw, these people will still turn up to protest something. Anything.

Which is fine by me, because the more the mask of civility slips and the more whacked out the wingnutjobs get on camera, the more the rest of the country will get creeped out. Kind of like the rest of us have been for a while now.