Local CBS affiliate labels tea party members with "join or die" flags "patriots"

[usregimechange]

Hundreds of patriots gather at the Joplin police station for a tax day tea party. Tea party members held signs and listened to speakers from the Missouri state legislature and members of Congress. The obvious topic was taxation and the national budget. Representatives Billy Long and Todd Akin were among the keynote speakers, talking about over-spending. People in the crowd wave flags saying join or die and don't tread on me. Akin said they took the same approach to their own budget as they want the rest of the country to be run. http://www.koamtv.com/story/14460611/hundreds-of-patriots-gather-in-joplin

Is this a reference to Benjamin Franklin's political cartoon or violent radicalism? KOAM takes a stand calling Tea Party members "patriots," lets hope the former is true and radicalism is their only endorsement. Either way this is more advocacy than journalism.

[sharesunited]

1. Just put quotes around "patriots" and I think that may fix it. The sign reads like fascism.

[ixion]

3. yeah, their use of the word 'patriot' here is inappropriate

the correct word would be protester, but I guess since it's not the left, well, you know. :grr:

[Cirque du So-What]

2. The term 'patriot' has been cheapened in recent years

starting with the execrable 'Patriot Act,' which was already waiting in the wings BEFORE 9/11 even happened.

I throw the prescient words of Samuel Johnson in the faces of KOAM's hack writers: ' patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.'

[ixion]

4. The term they're looking for is "protester" or "right-wing activist"

if they want to be consistent.

[iemitsu]

5. actually the best term is

reactionary.

[ixion]

6. in an objective sense, 'reactionary' is applying a value-judgement, just like 'patriot'

the term 'protester' describes their act in a neutral (more objective) manner.

That aside, though, I agree with you that they are reactionary fools.

[iemitsu]

7. the reason i prefer reactionary is

the anti-progressive meaning.
The French Revolution gave the English language two politically descriptive words denoting anti-progressive politics: reactionary and conservative. Reactionary derives from the French word réactionnaire (an early nineteenth-century coinage), and conservative from conservateur, identifying monarchist parliamentarians opposed to the revolution.<4> In this French usage, reactionary denotes "a movement towards the reversal of an existing tendency or state" and a "return to a previous condition of affairs." The Oxford English Dictionary cites the first English-language usage was by John Stuart Mill, in 1840: "The philosophers of the reactionary school—of the school to which Coleridge belongs".<5>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary

[lonestarnot]

8. And are you organizing a picket or some type of retribution?