NATO "Tea Party" Violence

Well those violent Tea Partiers were back at it...this time in Chicago at the NATO Summit.

It was the middle of the lunch rush Saturday, and Mike Winston was working in the kitchen of his Tinley Park restaurant, the Ashford House, when a waitress screamed a fight had broken out in the dining room.

Police call the melee at the restaurant a targeted assault by a mob that Winston said wielded metal batons and hammers. Ten diners were hurt in the attack, and three of those were hospitalized.

Tinley Park police had five suspected assailants in custody, and Winston said 18 young men, all wearing hooded jackets and obscuring their faces with scarves and other coverings, stormed into the restaurant.

We know that they HAVE to be Tea Partiers because the Tea Partiers ALWAYS protest with their faces covered....like this.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.

Of course by now, you know that we are talking about yet another Occupy protest and not a Tea Party protest.  Sundays protests were by far the worst of the weekend.

Protesters and police clashed outside the NATO summit in Chicago, where world leaders met to discuss the way forward in Afghanistan.

Police hit protesters with batons as they pushed against a line of officers, video from CNN affiliate WLS showed. The clashes came toward the end of a day of peaceful protests.

At least 45 people were arrested Sunday and four officers were taken to the hospital with injuries, said Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy. One officer had been stabbed in the leg, he said.

Of course it took CNN another 5 paragraphs to briefly mention that the reason police acted the way that they did was because the "peaceful" protesters were throwing bottles and debris at officers but hey....who needs THAT particular context.

The Chicago Tribune's reporting on the protests added further context and shows that the marchers knew exactly what they were doing in confronting police.

A rally organizer told protesters that they had a street permit, but it had expired. He urged the crowd to leave.

"The police are going to move us off the street. We've been telling you this would happen," the organizer told to the crowd.

Activist Andy Thayer used a bullhorn to implore the crowd to move.

I have to admit that I was prepared for the worst.   Mayor Emanuel was clear, prior to the summit, that his police department was not going to stand for them disrupting the summit and the protesters were equally clear in their intent to do just that.  Given that this is a city and a police department that has a rather sorry history of handling protests.  The fact that the weekend ended with just 45 arrests was actually a good weekend.

But it is another reminder going into convention season of the reality that the Tea Party is not the violent protest group that the media and the left (pardon the redundancy) wants people to believe.  It is the Occupy Movement, that President Obama embraced, that are the violent ones....and that will intensify as we get closer to election day.