Tea Party Express Calls Out David Weigel at Washington Independent

I'm not involved with top-level planning whatsoever, but I just got word from the folks at Our Country PAC/Tea Party Express that the Washington Independent's David Weigel is making erroneous statements regarding the organization's place in the tea party movement. See Weigel's piece, "Discord in the Tea Parties?":

I’m hearing — though the players have not yet responded to my questions — that there’s some serious friction between one of the main organizations of the Tea Party movement and one of the late-comers. The main organization is Tea Party Patriots, the genuine grassroots group (with some marginal ties to FreedomWorks et al.) launched in February, after Rick Santelli’s CNBC “rant.” The late-comer is the Tea Party Express, the offshoot of the conservative, GOP-centric Our Country Deserves Better PAC.

Our Country Deserves Better is repudiating the "late-comer" characterization. See, "We’ve Been Proud Supporters of the Tea Party Movement." This screencap from the post shows a February 23 entry at the Our Country PAC MySpace page:

And here's the response:

A reporter for a Washington D.C.-based newspaper referred to the Our Country Deserves Better Committee this week as “late comers” to the Tea Party movement. We had a good chuckle over this misrepresentation, because the Our Country Deserves Better Committee has been involved in supporting the tea party movement since it all began way back in February 2009. We’ve learned to be patient when members of the press get their facts wrong about the tea party movement and the goals of all of us who are involved in fighting for our country’s future.

So to make sure the record is set straight here’s the history of our involvement in the tea party movement – it is one that we are very proud of. We’ve been honored to work with hundreds of thousands of tea party supporters all across America – and our work has only just begun!

David Weigel's a talented young reporter, but he's by no means objective. He was formerly at Reason, so his shift to the radical left is particularly interesting in terms of the left/libertarian axis. Anyway, he's not to be trusted. See my earlier entry as well, "What's Up With David Weigel?"

Added: Weigel has updated with another post, "Tea Party Patriots vs. Tea Party Express."