A Seattle blogger named Liberty Belle (Keli Carender) is credited with organizing a mid-February 2009 protest against the stimulus package that she originally called the “Porkulus Protest.” The protest gathering of about 100 people became known as a “tea party.”

CNBC’s Rick Santelli is widely acknowledged to have began the nationwide launch of the movement. He was being televised from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange when he went into a rant about proposals that the government step in to help homeowners facing foreclosure. He said, “Do we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages? This is America! How many of you people (looking at the floor traders behind him) want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” He went on to suggest that he would organize a Chicago Tea Party, where capitalists would dump “some derivative securities into Lake Michigan.” The video of his tirade became a YouTube hit, and the movement was born.

Tea party protests sprang up across the country, and MSNBC and other media outlets began running stories demeaning the gatherings.  I tolerated the frequent “insider joke” about “tea baggers” (apparently the commentators didn’t believe average people would know how to use the Internet to learn what that term means).  However, I stopped watching Rachel Maddow the night she said something to the effect that it was difficult to understand what the protestors were saying, because their words were muffled by their white hoods.

I’ve been an interested watcher of politics since the mid-1950s, and the criticisms by public officials against the Tea Party is the first time I can recall politicians demeaning a significant group of their customers, the voters.