Why Police Like Covering Tea Party Rallies and Hate Anti-War D-Bags

James Taranto skewers the hapless witless illiterate "journalists" at the now paper-only and soon to be s-canned CSM:

The Christian Science Monitor has a report airing another "antiwar" grievance. Title: "Are 'Tea Party' Rallies Given Preferential Treatment by Police?" The story notes that local law-enforcement agencies have sometimes applied less stringent permitting and public-safety rules to tea parties than they did to "antiwar" protests.

In the parlance of constitutional law, such regulations are known as "reasonable time, place and manner restrictions." They are permitted under the First Amendment, but they must be "viewpoint neutral," which is to say that the government may not treat one protest more leniently out of sympathy with its message.

But as NewsBusters.org notes, the Monitor buries its lead in the fourth, "to be sure" paragraph. It turns out that the disparities in rules are not driven by sympathy for the tea parties, but by differences in the behavior of the protesters:

To be sure, permitting rules and police preparedness are often developed based on past behavior at various kinds of protests. Many go back to the 1960s and 1970s when violent rallies erupted over the Vietnam War. Such protests sprung up again during the presidency of George W. Bush, when protesters clashed with police in New York City and elsewhere during large-scale demonstrations against the Middle East wars. With tea party rallies so far proving more orderly, police have given them more latitude.

Of course no one but a skilled practitioner of paralepsis would suggest that the "antiwar" movement was composed of potential Timothy McVeighs. Yet everyone from left-wing bloggers to a certain former president has advanced that claim about the tea-party movement.

D-Bag and Serial Cocksuckee ClyntOOn, the Billy Jeff of yore, demonstrated that he is in danger of losing his anointed position as Chief Purveyor of BS and CalPers and other RICO-union crime schemes and falling into describing what is now a presumed majority of Independents and Republicans---remember when this silly a-hole used to croon that the "innate wisdom of the American people" had shown itself whenever his popularity was above 50% [in his two national elections, he never won a MAJORITY, but only a PLURALITY of votes and would have been an asterisk if the MSM had not vaulted Ross Perot back into the campaign after he had demonstrated his complete insanity concerning N. Koreans disrupting his daughter's wedding]. Billy Jeff now must face the following aimed at his empty-headed nonsense:
T

he Democrats' nasty attitude toward skeptical voters may help explain the latest Gallup finding: The gap in partisan identification among Americans is now a single point--46% Democratic, 45% Republican--after the Democrats enjoyed a huge advantage for several years starting in 2005. There's a six-point shift from a year ago, when the figures were 51% D, 39% R. But the number of "Republican identifiers" has held constant at 28%; the swing has been entirely in the direction of "Republican-leaning independents."

Has the tea-party movement's importance been exaggerated, as Martin and Smith claim at such length that it has? Only if independent voters don't really decide American elections.

The sooner that BJ ClyntOOn and his obnoxious spouse leave the political scene the better, and ditto for Botox Queen Nancy and the Dingy Harry Reid who both will get a rapid exit along with the Demo=rats to history's memory hole.