Crayons ready? The Tea Party has its own coloring book for kids!
The Tea Party Patriots has declared itself "proud" of its "Tea Party Patriots' Coloring and Activity Book for Children," describing it as the "perfect gift for the little Patriot!" (Even patriots as little as 2 years old!) With simple black-and-white line drawings, it extols the virtues of privatized medicine, the superiority of the free market above everything else, and -- floating in a cloud above Mt. Rushmore -- it screams out, "No more taxes!"
Marketing the book to "little patriots" as young as 2 years old seems rather dubious, as 2-year-olds are unlikely to have studied the complexities of modern economics. Those who are just a little bit older will likely balk at the book's many typographical errors, even if they don't quite know enough about history to recognize the segments of text that the Tea Party Patriots simply made up. But who cares? What youngster can resist a cover that shows a lemonade stand on the White House lawn where money grows on trees and a white kid can have thought balloons about the stack of bills the black kid is holding?
The L.A. Times described it as "cheerful in tone, semi-literate in its writing and factually challenged." Yet it's selling like flapjacks: the British Guardian reports that it's being reprinted daily to keep up with the demand!
Is this new? We don't remember a Watergate or an Iran-Contra or even a Monica Lewinsky coloring book for kids (though we'd love to see how they'd want kids to color in poor Monica's Gap dress). As for this book, we're dying to see it, but we're not about to give the Tea Party our $3.95 just for a good belly laugh. The only thing we know for sure is that all those kids are going to run through their peach crayons coloring in all those white people -- and they are going to need new Little Patriot Toys.
So what's next? What else can the Tea Party market to their own little monsters?
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