In case you hadn't noticed, and you probably haven't, the Coffee Party which was hyped in the mainstream media as the liberal alternative to the Tea Party movement has pretty much faded away. A recent Washington Post article about another liberal group response to the Tea Parties, "One Nation," didn't even mention the name "Coffee Party." The ultimate political impact of the Coffee Party ended up being somewhere between nil and none. However, there is one lasting legacy of the Coffee Party: classic comedy videos.
Most of those videos feature Coffee Party founder, Annabel Park, performing a bizarre stream of consciousness analysis of her own navel. Although her droning voice and recycled New Age philosophy filtered through a leftwing prism will usually induce yawns in the casual listener, a true comedy connoisseur can recognize the incredible inadvertent humor in her one-woman group therapy sessions.
Take this video in which Park describes the Korean War as basically a dispute between two competing economic systems:
"...As you know, that Korea was once in a civil war. And it is still a divided country right now. ...And why did they fight? They fought over an ideology. They fought over a system of government. An economic system of government..."
Just an economic dispute? Bada-BOOM!
Rather than outline how to actually DO something, Park continues droning on unabated as she flits from topic to topic in the alternate reality:
...This is why we have to carve out this space. It's like a literal space where people feel safe... And you respect this space. You respect this process...
Like carve out a space. A literal space. A safe space that you can respect along with the process that...blah...blah...blah.
Meanwhile the Tea Parties, sans such painful self-analysis, are actually DOING something by making rally appearances in public such as the massive march in Washington, DC last September 12 and frequently confronting elected officials at townhall meetings on matters of policy which often result in fascinating videos. Such Tea Party videos are replete with revealing reactions from congressional folks as Russ Carnahan who instigated derisive laughter at a townhall with his ObamaCare "answer" and, most recently, Brad Sherman who acted clueless about the attempted New Black Panther Party voter suppression case when questioned about it.
The Coffee Party? Those people haven't ventured much beyond giving the impression that they are sounding off on an analyst's couch while pondering their inner id as you can see in yet another Annabel Park video deep in the middle of navel-gaze mode wherein the one-time Obama political operative discusses the necessity for non-partisanship:
"...It's an analytic thing. It's an intellectual conception thing. Where you are able to look at an issue with your intelligence, with your personal experiences..."
"...We open ourselves up to think about things with different frameworks. And maybe even find a framework that works even better than anything that's being proposed instead of accepting the framework that's already out there..."
Although the Coffee Party has quickly faded out of our own stream of consciousness, the classic comedy delivered up by its founder shall live on for all eternity. Just add a laugh track to the DVD set and it will be ready for sale on the Home Shopping Network: Coffee Party Comedy Classics.