(H/T AP)
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It’s rare that a tea party group ever has good things to say about Mother Jones, which most grassroots conservatives seem to view as the leading voice of pot-smoking godless communists. But Wednesday, the founder of the Nashville-based Tea Party Nation, Judson Phillips, sent out an email responding to a 3-part Mother Jones investigation of a rival tea party group, Tea Party Patriots, noting that we had uncovered some “unpleasant details” about TPP’s financial management. While many other conservative outfits and TPP loyalists have dismissed the allegations raised in the story as the work of the liberal media, Phillips takes them seriously, saying, “Just because they are liberal does not mean they are not right.” That’s about as close to a compliment as we’re ever likely to get from him.
The reason for the semi-kind words is that Phillips has also heard some of the “rumblings of dissatisfaction” from local tea party activists about problems with TPP management and has found them to be legitimate. He acknowledges that there is no love lost between the two groups, writing, “We have never appreciated their arrogance, their claim they are the ‘official home of the Tea Party movement’, nor the way they have treated people.” Phillips says that his group decided initially not to create its own local chapters for fear of causing more dissension in the movement by competing with TPP, suspecting that the tea party movement could only handle so many local grassroots groups. Instead, Tea Party Nation has stuck to holding (unsuccessful) conventions and managing a website. Meanwhile, Phillips writes, “we have watched Tea Party Patriots move from being a grass roots organization to being a slick, inside the beltway organization, indistinguishable from groups like Freedomworks.”