Talking Points Memo Lies About Tea Party Arrests
Many of us have seen this photo which has gone viral on the net:
The far left, which is not happy about this photo for obvious reasons, is touting a piece from "Talking Points Memo" claiming that nine or ten TEA Party protesters were arrested on Capital Hill.
Talking Points Memo is a radical left smear site that is designed with a custom Wordpress theme complete with ads to make it look "legit". Even the elite media does not consider TPM to be a reliable source. TPM is associated with writers at the Huffington Post. Readers might remember that this was before most of the Huffington Post staff walked out after Arianna Huffington refused to pay them after she had gotten her multimillion dollar windfall from AOL.
TPM likely edited this piece after the fact to make it look like people at a TEA Party protest were being mass arrested. So how is it that we discovered that TPM knew that those taken into custody were a part of a pro-life group that often gets arrested and not TEA Party participants? Google Cache doesn't lie:
Well look at that, Google shows that TPM did report that those arrested were a part of a pro-life group at the time. This has been scrubbed from the TPM web site. Anti-abortion protesters somehow got converted to TEA Party members. TPM was not careful to edit the entire piece though as at the bottom of the piece they left this update intact:
Friday update: Evan is running down the story of these arrests, Randall Terry's group was involved. Also, the man who was on the curb appears to be Norman Weslin, and we dug up some video showing him using similar tactics as he was arrested at a Notre Dame protest when President Obama spoke during graduation.
Randall Terry's group has made it a point to get themselves arrested for doing "sit ins" for decades. TPM either forgot to scrub this as well or assumed that most readers would not know about Randall Terry's group. Randall Terry is so famous for getting arrested that most anyone who has taken even a moderate interest in politics knows about his group. Hardly the "storming of offices" and other violent imagery that TPM used.
[Editor's Note - I took screen shots of all of the pages involved in case our friends at TPM or HuffPo decide that they wish to engage in any further creative editing.]
Remember how we mentioned that TPM was affiliated with people at the Huffington Post? It would seem that they pulled the same trick at Huffington Post, but were more careless:
Notice how they claim Politico.com as a source and even include a quote? But when one follows the link to the Politico.com piece there is no mention of any TEA Party activists being arrested.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. ABC News reports that on the same day nine leftists demanding health care to be nationalized were arrested for "occupying" the office of Senator Joe Lieberman. Through some miracle this escaped reporting at the Huffington Post and at Talking Points Memo, unless Huffington Post would dare consider trying to attribute the arrests of these nine leftists to the TEA Party.
TPM still has videos online attributing the arrests to TEA Party activists.