We get email ... from the president of the Pensacola Republican Club

Ah, yes, it's always nice when I hear from people who perhaps aren't as enthused about something I've written as, well, I am. I mean, I don't get the kind of hate mail that Kos does, certainly, but every so often something drops over the transom that one might characterize as negative.

The latest comes from Pensacola Republican Club president Troy Schoonover. Now, as I've often said in conversations with people -- although I'm not sure I've ever written it here -- if someone emails me privately, I tend not to respond publicly on the blog. However, the exception I have made in the past is where the writer is, temporarily or longterm, a "public figure" with some kind of notoriety, or where the author clearly knows or ought to know that the email might end up on my sucky blog. Since I believe Mr. Schoonover's email satisfies both criteria, much in the same way a letter to a newspaper columnist would, I think I can justify a response here.

This is not, of course, the first time Mr. Schoonover has graced the pixels of Blast Off! Indeed, just last week I shared with you his quotes in the Pensacola News Journal about the then-upcoming teabaggers' balls. From the PNJ article:

“We see a mountain of taxation on the horizon, and it’s the spending we are doing right now that is going to lead to it,” Schoonover, a local financial analyst, said of why the protest was organized. “If we don’t do anything, we’re going to be a Third-World country with the spending we are doing.”

The protest is open to anyone who wants to vent their frustrations about the government, Schoonover said. The goal of the event is to consolidate and clarify the opposition to current governmental policies and actions.

"Spending we are doing right now" ... "Third World country" ... this is whence Mr. Schoonover is coming.

Just wanted you to have a little context before you read Mr. Schoonover's email to me Saturday night, as follows:

Thanks for giving a pithy speech at the TEA Party I organized, but remember, I said you were "half right", and calmed the crowd down on your behalf.

Have some respect, dude.

At least I had the temerity to admit that we'd made mistakes. Do you think the spending by Obama is going to lead us back to surpluses? I wish, but you know it won't.

What a poser. Can't even bone up and admit that your side had a lot to do with the mess that we're in as well, and that they're the ones responsible for making it even worse now.


Troy Schoonover
President
Pensacola Republican Club

Organizer
TEA Party downtown Pensacola

First of all, Mr. Schoonover, I think I was quite respectful of what you did, although I didn't mention you by name because I didn't know who you were. In my retrospective on the event, published first as a diary at Daily Kos and later cross-posted here at Blast Off!, I wrote, "After I spoke, the MC of the event [that's you, obviously] calmed everyone down and said, 'All opinions are welcome here. And besides ... he's half right.' That helped defuse the situation a bit ...." Perhaps you didn't read that retrospective essay; if you had, you would have known that you did, in fact, get some props, however anonymously. And while I don't think a lynch mob exactly was forming as I stepped away from the mic, I do believe your remarks helped settle the crowd. So I think I clearly have some respect, dude.

And yes, you admitted that your own party had made mistakes, too. I was impressed by that. But I think you're taking my critique of the Pensacola event, and of all the teabaggers' balls, a little too personally. While you may have been forthright and honest to some extent in acknowledging mistakes by the GOP, certainly the attendees in Pensacola, like those elsewhere, were not quite so charitable. My critique was not of you individually, but of the events themselves and the motivation for them on a large (that is, national) scale. When they're being promoted relentlessly by Fox News and sponsored in part by Dick Armey's FreedomWorks group, there is a clear agenda that is not just the ol' "Don't Tread On Me" anti-tax stuff. And, as I've pointed out before, if it were only about spending, (1) you would have been all for these protests during the Bush years, and (2) it wouldn't have had to have taken place on April 15.

No, Mr. Schoonover, I do not share your belief that President Obama's taxation and spending policies will "make it worse." The administration has admitted that in the short term, the nation's budget deficit will increase, but the trillion-dollar-plus deficit that President Bush created out of the surpluses he inherited will be more than halved by 2013 under the recently-passed Obama budget. "I wish, but you know it won't?" Actually, I know -- well, of course, I believe -- that it will lead us back to surpluses, if maintained as the administration intends.

But then, Mr. Schoonover, you do as most Republicans instinctively do by going to the ad hominem attack, calling me a "poser" (did you mean poseur, perhaps? Some sources say they're interchangeable but, really, not so much) and thereby insinuating that I'm trying to be someone I'm not, which is demonstrably NOT the case.

As for "bon[ing] up [what is it about Republicans and references to genitalia?] and admitting [stuff]," well, no, I don't think "my side" is nearly as much to blame, and I certainly don't think they're adding to the problem at all -- as I explained two paragraphs ago. Indeed, I consider myself significantly more to the left than President Obama is, so I actually believe his administration isn't doing enough to repair the economy, let alone end the illegal and unjustifiable war in Iraq and bring our troops home, eliminate torture, stop domestic surveillance, and so on. But, as I always say, Barack Obama in the White House definitely beats the alternative (Sarah Palin one unhealthy heartbeat away? I shudder to think ...).

Call me a pose[u]r if you will, Mr. Schoonover -- hell, call me anything you like -- but I treated you personally the same way I treated my audience on Wednesday: respectfully, but with clear and firm disagreement on the issue. I think ultimately you're just upset that I crashed your teabaggers' ball and took it viral ... and that the overall impact of them, with total nationwide attendance estimates ranging from 240,000 to a little over 600,000*, was and will be negligible. (By comparison, some 84,000 attended the Alabama Crimson Tide's spring football game yesterday -- that's at least 13%, and maybe more than a third, of all the teabaggers in America at one meaningless football game. Ouch ... that's gotta hurt ...)

I merely think, Mr. Schoonover, that you didn't have to be so, um ... testy. But, as you plan for those July 4 events supposedly in the works, I'll just say, "have fun storming the castle!"

UPDATE (10:38 pm 4/19/09): Wes F makes an excellent point in Comments, namely, that it's quite a puzzler how a purportedly nonpartisan event was organized by the Pensacola Republican Club.

There's no hypocrisy like Republican hypocrisy.

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* The high end estimate comes from Pajamas Media, a right-wing outlet, so its accuracy is highly -- perhaps necessarily -- questionable.