WaPo's Weingarten Laments Journalists Don't Present Tea Party as 'A Posse Of Ignoramuses'

May 23rd, 2010 12:58 PM

Washington Post humorist Gene Weingarten is working in his hatred for conservatives in his Sunday Post Magazine column. The column is mostly a whimsical review of a George Bernard Shaw play and how Britain in Victorian times had a very uptight morality, and characters like pimps could only be portrayed as "loathsome deviants who would roast in Hell." Then he veered into this digression:

This sort of unwritten literary convention may seem quaint today, but such subtle rules are still practiced. For example, American journalists know they can write about the Tea Party, but only if it is presented as a serious ideological movement instead of as a posse of ignoramuses carrying signs such as the one in the second photo on this page [above].

But I digress!

The column is written as a letter to Akiva Fox at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, who apparently has brought in outside experts to review plays for the company newsletter. Weingarten predictably joked that the moral guardians of the Victorian age were "persons with names like Sir Percival Wussingham, Lady Plushbotham-Harrumphton and Geoffrey Stammerblush, second Earl of Priggington."