The Code of Conduct for the Whidbey Island Tea Party Patriots cautions its members not to start fights with opponents, although “If you choose to get close to them physically, do so in friendship as fellow Americans only.” Likewise, “Do not offer lewd gestures, call people names, tell them to go home or [to] get a job.”It was presumably in that friendly, no-naming-calling spirit that Whidbey Tea Party organizer Terresa Hobbs posted an open letter to Sound Publishing on her party’s website the other day. It was probably too long to run in one of the regional newspapers owned by Sound, and besides, she said, “I don’t trust them to edit a letter any more than I trust them to edit an interview.” (However, Sound’s South Whidbey Record

ran the letter unedited on its own site yesterday; it was also picked up by the P-I). So what motivated Hobbs to graciously explain her party to her fellow ‘Mericans? “The impetus for this letter,” she writes, “is the inane comments, editorials and endorsements I’ve seen in the local papers, besmirching the Whidbey Island Tea Party Patriots, by staffers and readers who don’t have a clue what they’re talking about and are obviously talking (as my dad would say) ‘out of their a**es.'”Apparently in keeping with the no-name-calling credo, Hobbs prefers not to spell out bad words in public. In that same vein, she will not spell out “bagger.”First the pejorative term that some claim is used by Tea Partiers to describe themselves; tea b***er. I’ve been a member of the Tea Party since its inception and can assure you, no Tea Partier has ever used it to describe him/herself. The first time I heard the term was when it was used by the odious Janeane Garofalo on a left-wing cable talk show, in conjunction with the ‘racist’ label. Not being a member of the homosexual community, I had no idea what it meant and had to ‘google’ it. Now when I see or hear someone use the term I want to ask “does your mother know you talk like that”?…She goes on to explain what the party is not (besides not name callers): Not anarchists, not racists, not violent, not ignorant, and not anti-union. Furthermore:We also understand how hate speech, demonization and name-calling is being used to divide the country by way of race, gender, economic status, age and culture in order to keep united Americans from digging our heels in and stopping the headlong rush to exchange our Constitutional Republic for a social democracy in the name of ‘progress’.

And Sound Publishing was a party to that name-calling, she indicated. As she put it, the Tea Party is “being maligned regularly and consistently in your publications by people who are afraid to post using their own names and who, at best are simply ignorant, and at worst are deliberately using lies and half-truths to smear people with whom they disagree.”Additionally, “We’ve been maligned by the elitists who think they’re the smartest people in the room,” she writes, adding, “But mostly we’re maligned by people who’ve never talked with us, or listened to what we’re saying. To my mind, they’re idiots and you really can’t argue with an idiot.” Well said, Terresa. Can’t argue with that.Speaking of the Tea Party: Check out this ever-popular post, The 10 Funniest Teabonics Signs.Follow The Daily Weekly on Facebook and Twitter.