Tea Party leader a surprise hit on Letterman show (h/t Instapundit)
CBS “Late Show” host David Letterman, of all people, featured an interview with Pam Stout, the president of the Sandpoint, Idaho, group called the Tea Party Patriots. (By sheer coincidence, Sandpoint is also the birthplace of Tea Party icon Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska.)
Stout’s 15 minutes of late-night fame proved quite compelling TV viewing. Where other encounters between the media and Tea Partiers have erred strongly on the side of confrontation, the dominant tone of the Letterman exchange was actually kind of sweet. Letterman played up his image as a comparatively naïve follower of the political scene, announcing at the outset that “I know nothin’ about the Tea Party.” Stout responded patiently to Letterman’s queries, projecting an image of a wholesome, quiet-spoken Middle American activist.
How did she get on his show?
There must be a Tea Partier in the Letterman casting staff who’s not coming out of the closet.
I love that they asked for “Public Defenders”, now they know about the undercover FBI agent. The simpleton Tea baggers keep missing the point. These are the same whiners that were crying when the McCain/Bailin ticket lost. Now they are crying again because their yelling (because they are haters not debaters) did not stop health care from passing. They think they can scare, intimidate and force others to go along with them by comments like “This time we came unarmed”, let me tell you something they are not the only ones that are armed and not all ex-military join the fringe militia crazies who don’t pay taxes and run around with face paint in the parks playing commando, the majority are mature and understand that the world is more complicated and grey then the black and white that these simpleton make it out to be and that my friend is the point. So it’s only fitting that their leaders are Sarah Bailin, Victoria Jackson, Michele Bachmann and their turn coat Glenn Beck. So if you are bothered that there are some misconceptions of your group, well then I think you need to be more careful who you invite to give you speeches.
She did come off pretty well. Letterman twisted what she said about Obama, which was legitimate expressions of concern over his extensive efforts to suppress his various personal history documents, into support for the birther notions, which she expressly rejected at the outset as well as after he twisted it.
In the third part, he got in a nice diatribe of Official Leftist Talking Points® about how the Iraq invasion has turned Iraq into a hotbed of terrorism — after all, we all know that it wasn’t one before, despite the fact that Saddam ran three of the six known terrorist training camps in the world…. No, Saddam was having major problems finding terrorists to fill the ranks of his camps. Yeah.