Crashing the Tea Party's Party

Jason Levin, a tech consultant from Oregon, has launched Crash the Tea Party, a group dedicated to infiltrating Tea Party protests and carrying wacky signs with the hopes of making the group seem so nuts it moves off the mainstream media's radar. Levin says his group has supporters across the country, with a big enough following to attract the nervous attention of Sean Hannity and users of FreeRepublic.com. "Our goal is that whenever a tea partier says 'Barack Obama was not born in America,'" Levin told Talking Points Memo, "we're going be right there next to them saying, 'yeah, in fact he wasn't born on Earth! He's an alien!'" The group's site says its goal is to exaggerate the partiers' "least appealing qualities (misspelled protest signs, wild claims in TV interviews, etc.)." Press coverage will decline, and then, Levin hopes, "the GOP stops listening to them and they disperse and they go back to their militias and cabins in the woods." He draws the line at violence, though: Nazi uniforms are ok, but throwing a rock while wearing a Nazi uniform is not.