It appears Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher is not impressed with former vice presidential GOP candidate Sarah Palin. He attacked her Tea Party Convention speech this weekend. Mr. Wurzelbacher posted messages to his Twitter account with the following tweets.:
“Palin’s speech does not represent the ‘Tea Party Movement’ it was a ‘GOP’ stump speech”
“The ‘Tea Party’ is an AMERICAN movement! Not party politics as usual!!”
Gaining fame in 2008 for asking then-candidate Barack Obama an on-camera question that elicited Mr. Obama’s famous “spread the wealth” comment, Mr. Wurzelbacher took jabs from various media personalities on the left. Mrs. Palin also received a large portion of media attacks during her time on the 2008 campaign trail.
The Wurzelbacher vs. Palin issue is not the only infighting happening around the Tea Party convention. David Weigel at the Washington Independent captured a dustup between Breitbart.com’s Andrew Breitbart and World Net Daily’s Joseph Farah:
I told Farah that his speech was getting negative attention already, and that Breitbart, who’d taken the stage after him, had criticized the “birther” parts of the speech. Farah shook his head and walked over to Breitbart in what seemed like an attempt to debunk my question.
“Andrew is my friend,” said Farah. “He has the right to disagree, and he has the right to say anything to a socialist newspaper that he wants. And if he wants to criticize his friend to you, and he’s dumb enough to do that …”
Breitbart raised his eyebrows. “I’m dumb to do what?”
The tea-party movement was initially pretty organic when Americans heeded CNBC’s Rick Santelli’s call to the people to create a second tea party in the tradition of our Colonial patriots, as he explained the absurdity of taxpayers bailing out those who failed to pay their mortgages. Rallies denouncing the Obama administration’s big-government policies popped up from big cities to small towns across the nation throughout 2009.
The growth of the tea-party movement impressed GOP leaders and conservative activists alike, so conflict over its direction is not unexpected. However, one hopes these growing pains of a large movement will not slow the momentum of a key American demographic who demands accountability from their government.
