Tea Party Tomfoolery

The first ever Tea Party Convention, aka Profiteer-a-Thon 2010, has kicked off in Nashville, and it already sounds great:

The opening-night speaker at first ever National Tea Party Convention ripped into President Obama, Sen. John McCain and "the cult of multiculturalism," asserting that Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."

The speaker, former Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., told about 600 delegates in a Nashville, Tenn., ballroom that in the 2008 election, America "put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House ... Barack Hussein Obama."

..."This is our country," he told the crowd. "Let's take it back."

Tancredo's speech received enthusiastic applause at times, but the crowd did not fill the large ballroom at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center.

Sad trombone. Wah wah wahhhhhhhhhhh. Still sounds like loads of fun, though!

Someone hung a poster of Palin from a balcony overlooking a garden atrium at the Opryland complex. In the hotel lobby, a few delegates sat on luggage and read copies of the Declaration of Independence.

And outside the convention hall, entrepreneurs sold souvenirs: sterling silver tea bag necklaces ($89.99), bags of "Freedom Coffee" ($9) and T-shirts emblazoned with a bald eagle ($20).

Hot damn. I haven't been this excited since I was in a truck stop on the Pennsylvania-Ohio border!