Yesterday, Gateway Pundit (aka Jim Hoft, someone who I take to be more a useful idiot naif than an outright Glenn Reynolds type) offered "Team Obama Calls Out Swat Team on Tea Party Patriots!" (biggovernment.com/jhoft/2010/04/28/team-obama-calls-out-swat-team-on-tea-party-patriots), a journalism-free claim about an Obama event in Quincy, Illinois. It includes the video at peekURL.com/vfvrudm The local police chief has since issued a statement saying that a "Mobile Field Force Team" (not a SWAT team) was deployed because some in the crowd wouldn't stay on the right side of the street (link).

The tea parties have magnified this insignificant he said-she said incident through their lens of paranoia and persecution and have even gone beyond Hoft's fevered post with a video entitled "We Shall Overcome Obama's Riot Police" (peekurl.com/v4jpe8c). The video starts with an overdub of "We Shall Overcome", with the footage of the "Mobile Field Force Team" in the back. Not content to outrageously compare their movement to the Civil Rights Movement, they then proceed to baby-wave. And, all to support what exactly?

If they were smart - and I haven't seen even one tea party follower who's even in the least smart or aware - they would have tried to have a smart, experienced person to get a ticket to the event and then ask Obama a very good question. They could have even pointed out - right there at the event - that Obama lied in his speech.

Discrediting Obama to his face on video would have helped the U.S. and been very effective for their movement. But, they aren't even smart enough to know what's in their best interests. Instead, all they can do is one cheap, disreputable stunt after the other.