RUSH: All the tea parties are scheduled for April 15th, tax day, biggies. There’s even going to be a tea party here where we live, Mr. Snerdley, in West Palm Beach, right across from the big courthouse over there. You’re gonna have a big tea party in Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Atlanta — well, they’re all over the place. And yesterday word somehow got out that ACORN and a bunch of Obamatrons are so upset by this that they are planning on infiltrating the tea parties to cause mayhem and unrest and violence, that Obamatrons from ACORN want there to be fights and all kinds of violence breaking out to make it look like the people opposing the Obama administration are just a bunch of Looney Tunes. So Neil Cavuto yesterday had one of the organizers of the Sacramento tea party, Mark Meckler, and asked him about this infiltration and the threats. Cavuto said, ‘Mark, how seriously do you take these threats?’
MECKLER: We don’t take them seriously at all, and I’ll tell you why. It’s not that they don’t exist. We expect people to attempt to infiltrate. The reality is this is a very broad-based grassroots movement. There is no leader at the top, there’s no individual event that they could disturb that would cause us a problem nationwide. Also the people, we trust the grassroots. We know that the people are skeptical of anybody approaching these events and we believe that people are going to handle it well. In fact, we invite everybody to come to our events. We don’t care whether they’re from ACORN, the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, we want them all there.
RUSH: Yes, and they will all be there, trying to cause trouble. Just imagine, folks, thousands of seminar callers. These are people that are going to show up with anti-Obama slogans, they’re going to show up with pro-tea party slogans, that’s what they’re going to make themselves out to be, and they claim they’re going to try cause all kinds of trouble for the cameras. The organizers claim, ‘We’re not worried, we’re going to outnumber them, they can’t bring this about,’ but all it’s going to take is two malcontents causing a problem with the right Drive-By camera and that will be the only video anybody will see. The Drive-Bys are not reporting on this now, and they’re not going to report on this as it happens. This just flies in the face of the notion they put forth that this is a country in unified enthrallment of the Obama administration. Next up was John O’Hara, who is the organizer of the Chicago Tea Party. Mark Meckler still on there from Sacramento. Cavuto says, ‘John, if the malcontents from ACORN show up, something tells me they’re not going to be sharing the same placards. Are you worried about that?’
O’HARA: No, Neil, I’m not worried about it at all. If ACORN wants to send some of their paid pretend activists to show up, that’s fine.
MECKLER: The people understand what these movements are about. The people who are involved understand that they’re not racists, they’re not fringe, they’re not even partisan. I mean these are events where we’ve got people across the board — Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, liberals, Libertarians, you name it, everybody’s coming out to these events.
O’HARA: The real fringe group here, again, is these critics, ACORN, with their paid activists. It’s a typical left-wing smear campaign with ad hominem attacks rather than getting at the real issues we’re talking about.
RUSH: So the organizers know it’s being talked about, they know it’s in the works, they know that ACORN and others are going to show up. I don’t know how many of them are actually going to wear pro-Obama stuff. I mean infiltration means you try to blame them. Taking it over would be another thing. But they would love to be able to create the impression that the tea party supporters, the anti-Obamanots are a bunch of violent, out of control, destructive — like ACORN really is, and ACORN knows how to cause trouble ’cause it’s their business. So we’ll see. I’m glad to see that the organizers are not being off-put by this. In fact, they’re welcoming ACORN to become part of the festivities.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Let me address something here. I’m getting more e-mails about this than I can respond to, so let me attack it here. A lot of people are very nice and kind and requesting that I go to one of these tea parties. ‘Rush, you need to come out here to Atlanta! You need to come to your adopted hometown in Sacramento! You need to come to the one in St. Louis.’ I think I’ve been invited to speak at virtually every tea party. Ladies and gentlemen, I am too famous to go to these. These tea parties are… That organizer said it right: These are grassroots things. These things have sprung up on their own. There is nobody that can claim (although a lot of people are trying to) that they started this. There’s not… Mark Meckler had it right: There’s not one individual who had this brilliant brainstorm to organize all of this.
Now, there are a lot of people trying to take credit for it. This is genuine. This is genuine. And if you had to say anybody created the idea, Rick Santelli at CNBC, who has been neutered. (‘Spayed,’ for those of you in Rio Linda and Port St. Lucie.) But these things are exciting because they are the American people, who are just reacting to this thing, and it’s a great illustration — and I hope they’re all huge, and this is people who have no leadership, no elected leadership. They don’t feel they’re being represented anywhere, and they’re taking matters into their own hands. And they are going to try to demonstrate to their leaders and to the Washington elites and the media, that not everybody has fallen in and not everybody is a bunch of mind-numbed robots following along with the diminution of the American private sector. It just isn’t happening.