Toxic Media Export - Tea Parties to the World
And away we go!
Quoting Balloon Juice here:
America’s always been proud of our gift for inventing both political and media tropes that become popular around the globe. But “our” latest inspiration, probably not so much:
NYT here:
The demonstrators appeared one day in December, just as children at an elementary school for ethnic Koreans were cleaning up for lunch. The group of about a dozen Japanese men gathered in front of the school gate, using bullhorns to call the students cockroaches and Korean spies. Inside, the panicked students and teachers huddled in their classrooms, singing loudly to drown out the insults, as parents and eventually police officers blocked the protesters’ entry.
Mr. Sakurai says the group is not racist, and rejected the comparison with neo-Nazis. Instead, he said he had modeled his group after another overseas political movement, the Tea Party in the United States. He said he had studied videos of Tea Party protests, and shared with the Tea Party an angry sense that his nation had gone in the wrong direction because it had fallen into the hands of leftist politicians, liberal media as well as foreigners. “They have made Japan powerless to stand up to China and Korea,” said Mr. Sakurai, who refused to give his real name.