Party Time With Jenny Beth

Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots is one of the activists featured in Tea Party: The Documentary, which premiered Tuesday in D.C. She's also featured in my column today at The American Spectator:

Jenny Beth Martin didn't set out to become a movie star. Yet Tuesday night at the Ronald Reagan Center amphitheatre, the mom from Georgia was a celebrity at the big-screen premiere of a new film that features a cast of thousands.
Wait -- better make that "hundreds of thousands." . . .
The amazing growth of the movement is highlighted by one of Martin's earliest on-screen appearances, showing her speaking at a Feb. 27 event in Atlanta, where a small crowd turned out on a cold rainy Friday. Martin subsequently explains that she was one of about 20 organizers on a Feb. 20 conference call that led to that first round of Tea Party gatherings, which followed commodities analyst Rick Santelli's now-famous Feb. 19 rant on the CNBC network.
As the film makes clear, however, Santelli's call for a Tea Party protest tapped into a deep vein of discontent that started growing among grassroots conservatives during the Bush administration. The documentary begins with audio of a Dec. 19, 2008, speech by President Bush advocating a bailout for the auto industry: "If we were to allow the free market to take its course now, it would almost certainly lead to disorderly bankruptcy and liquidation for the automakers."
Indeed, although some have characterized the Tea Party movement as motivated entirely by partisan GOP opposition to President Obama, it was Obama's Republican opponent, Arizona Sen. John McCain, who took the lead in advocating passage of the Wall Street bailout in September 2008. . . .

Please read the whole thing.

UPDATE: It's real. And it's spectacular. And I'm not necessarily talking about Pink Elephant Pundit.