No group of political activists has been more intensely criticized than the Tea Party by the Washington political establishment and its allies in the traditional media. In recent days, thousands of left-wing zealots even signed petitions on Moveon.org and Daily Kos demanding that “Teapublicans” like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas be arrested and prosecuted for “sedition.”
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow also applied the sedition label to the Tea Partiers, and Tennessee Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen made an epithetic case for the prosecution: “A lot of those members are rabid, they’re sophomoric — literally, they’re second term in Congress — they’ve never worked in politics before. Really, you’ve got to think, we take an oath to protect this country from ‘all enemies, foreign and domestic,’ and these are the domestic enemies.”
