FAILING TO PLAN IS PLANNING TO FAIL…. The Tea Baggers apparently had a little trouble in the nation’s capital today.
In Washington, D.C., protesters had planned to dump a million tea bags in Lafayette Square and even promised to put the bags on the tarps and clean up afterward. But their plans were thwarted after National Park Service officials said protesters didn’t have the proper permit to dump the bags, NBC affiliate WRC TV reported.
“We have a million tea bags here, and we don’t have a place to put them because it’s not on our permit,” said Rebecca Wales, lead organizer of D.C. Tea Party.
A D.C. think tank, the free market Competitive Enterprise Institute, said it would allow the dumping of the tea bags in its 12th floor conference room instead.
At the Lafayette Square protest, someone reportedly threw a box of tea bags over a White House fence, forcing the Secret Service to briefly evacuate the North Lawn area.
A second D.C. rally that had been planned outside the Treasury Department also was foiled by the lack of a permit.
So, these guys didn’t think it was important to come up with a rationale for the protests or to get permits for the protests. In general, it’s best to have both.
But it was the event at Lafayette Park across from the north end of the White House that was of particular interest. It wasn’t going particularly well, anyway, but officials were forced to break up the protest when some genius “threw an apparent box of tea bags over the fence” to the White House lawn. Secret Service officers, not surprisingly, had to clear the area and lock down the White House, not knowing whether there was a potential threat. (A robot was sent to inspect the “suspicious package.”)
The Tea Baggers were forced to just walk away in the rain.
It’s hard not to get the impression that very little thought went into these far-right festivities.
