I've been trying to figure out when FOX News actually covered a bona-fide live protest that they didn't condemn or ridicule. Can you think of one? How many anti-war protests were held since the Iraq war began in which FOX proclaimed that they would give it wall to wall coverage because they just cover news events?

And when Cindy Sheehan broke through the veil of silence that the media draped over all anti-war protests, FOX sought out to destroy her, but it was too late and America turned against the war as Bush refused to see her while she camped out in Crawford.

For that matter, remember how assiduously FOX covered the hundreds of thousands of protesters who showed up to protest George W. Bush's inauguration in January 2001? Uh-huh. Me neither.

And when did any network promote any of these demonstrations, ever? Why should they? News organizations are supposed to cover the news and not try to gin it up.

James Wolcott catches Glenn Reynolds opining on a true grassroots movement made up of the kind of people he believes represents "real Americans."

In a drivelly press release masquerading as an op-ed, Glenn Reynolds did his bit to drum up the dramatic and political import of the forthcoming Tea Parties that he and his colleagues at Pajamas Media are fanfaring. The faux populism of this project is conveyed with this rhinestone:

These aren't the usual semiprofessional protesters who attend antiwar and pro-union marches. These are people with real jobs; most have never attended a protest march before. They represent a kind of energy that our politics hasn't seen lately, and an influx of new activists.

How lately is "lately"? I would think that even a pseudo-libertarian righty would concede that the Obama campaign possessed energy and attracted a fresh crop of recruits. It may be hard for Reynolds and his allies to credit, but liberals have "real jobs" too, or least jobs as real as being employed as a law professor with enough leisure to blog all day.

But let that slide.

It's remarkable and telling how some of the biggest peaceful political rallies this country has ever seen took place only three years ago, only to be flushed down the memory hole. I'm speaking of the tremendous pro-immigration rallies that took place in 2006, with an estimated half-million people assembling in downtown Los Angeles alone. Those rallies did not lack energy, enthusiasm, or organization, and I daresay among those hundreds of thousands of people lobbying for enlightened immigration legislation were low-income workers with "real jobs."

To Reynolds "real Americans" kind of look like him and smell like him. That's true Americana. Can you imagine if Tom Daschle, Paul Begala, James Carville and the late Paul Wellstone twittered and blogged and wrote op-eds for the NY Times, while Nancy Pelosi appeared on CNN and put out the call to arms as the Situation Room, Countdown, Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper promised everyone air time on their shows if they make sure to come on down to "the protests" they will be covering live, up close and in person? And it was funded by millions of dollars of the richest of the rich?

Lou Dobbs mocked the criticism of the tea baggers, saying that special-interest groups started war protests just like the New Santellis. Does he really believe that Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove are considered "grassroots" activists?

Wolcott wraps it up:

The difference is that the Tea Parties, heavily promoted by Fox News and talk radio, are a white-people production, which ipso facto makes them more representative to Glenn Reynolds and associates of what "real Americans" think and believe than an ocean of brown-skinned people practicing civic activism.

I hope to get to one of the Tea Parties on Wednesday and provide you with some video footage. I doubt most of them even know what the Boston Tea Party was or what they are protesting.

We just had an election and the people have spoken. They were not denied the chance to speak out and vote for the policies that will guide the country. But then, that seems to have escaped them.

Meanwhile Jack and Jill Politics reports on the parties' racist-paranoid underbelly.