NY Times, Washington Post Hide Phony 'Coffee Party' Astroturf Roots — at the NY Times!

What product works best for hiding artificial roots? Printer’s ink, of course!

For more information, check recent copies of The Washington Post and The New York Times, both of which portrayed 41-year-old Annabel Park as a concerned citizen from Virginia who became the accidental founder of a new grass-roots liberal political group, Coffee Party USA.

In the articles, Park–who is identified as a “documentary filmmaker”–preaches “respectful and civil engagement,” even with the more successful source of her knockoff inspiration, the populist Tea Party. And in an online chat presented by the Post, she issues the following declaration:

We are purely grassroots movement, independent of any party, corporation, or lobbying organization.

Yet there was nothing accidental about Park’s anti-Tea Party activism; the Coffee Party’s roots are about as grassy as the signature surface of the old Houston Astrodome; and Park’s facade of cooperation is undermined by her “tea bagger” epithets on Twitter.

Meanwhile, her claim that the Coffee Party is “purely grassroots” and “independent of any party” is laughably rebutted by the fact that the registrant for the website was listed as “Real Virginians For Webb, 14461 Sedona Drive, Gainesville, Virginia 20155″ until the information suddenly went private behind a proxy. That’s “Webb” as in Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, one of at least two elected Democrats for whom Park has actively campaigned (as evidenced by this campaign video, “Real Virginians for Webb”:

[youtube qIQ5Nq1ApRQ nolink]

The other Democrat? Barack Obama. So intense was her support for the would-be president that Park co-directed a video for the YouTube channel, UnitedForObama, in which she encourages her mother to give a pro-Obama testimonial in their native Korean. The slick four-minute production, titled “Annabel’s Mom Takes on Sarah Palin, In Korean!!!,” features jaunty piano music and English translations of her mother’s homage to Obama, including this comment, which has the vague ring of a “Dear Leader” haiku:

I listened to Obama’s speeches/and, though my English isn’t perfect/I started to change my mind about him./I came to understand/what he wanted to accomplish/and what we really need is Obama.

The video also makes good on its title’s promise:

Sarah Palin…/that woman worries me./It’s not just that she’s inexperienced,/and a little fanatical./Thinking of her as VP worries me;/to think of her in charge of the US./This is a time for America to change.

[youtube wphLKCEQO4U nolink]

The supposedly nonpartisan Park, whose comments and associations indicate solidarity with progressive dreams such as ObamaCare and immigration reform (amnesty), is still listed on the Internet as an officer of “Virginia Korean Americans for Obama“and as a contact for “Real Virginians for Webb” along with Eric Byler, her co-director on the UnitedForObama video and, according to the Post, her boyfriend.

The March 1 Times story quotes Park thusly:

We’re not the opposite of the Tea Party. We’re a different model of civic participation, but in the end we may want some of the same things.

But a series of Twitter Tweets from earlier this year belies her “Let’s roast S’mores around the campfire” image. A particularly telling January 26 Tweet, written within days of Scott Brown’s victory in the Massachusetts Senate race, exudes politically charged panic while sounding anything but charitable toward the rival Tea Party:

we need to re-engage the grassroots movement that got obama elected. we need to get busy. cannot give it away to tea baggers.

Then there’s this February 3 Tweet that outlines the Coffee Party’s true objective:

Need to push back ag the tide of tea party in an organized way..tea party, Fox & corp take our gov’t. Seize the moment!

So how did The Washington Post and The New York Times, in preparing separate feature stories about Park, manage to miss her blue-as-the-summer-sky political background? Most, if not all of the aforementioned information could have been uncovered by a series of simple Google searches. Instead, the Post‘s February 26 article called her the “de facto coordinator of Coffee Party USA, with goals far loftier than its oopsy-daisy origin.”

The Times piece, written by Kate Zernike (famously called “a despicable human being” by Andrew Breitbart at the CPAC convention), gives Park the sound of a giddy newbie organizer: “I’m in shock, just the level of energy here.” A Coffee Party chapter founder is identified as a former Obama campaign worker, but Park isn’t.

Then again, perhaps the Post and Times made a conscious effort to frame Park as an aw-shucks activist. It’s not as if the newspapers had never met her.

In December 2007, Park’s name appeared in the Post atop an opinion piece titled, “I can relate to America’s identity crisis,”in which she disparages new local legislation designed to curb illegal immigration in Prince William County, Virginia. (The issue served as inspiration for her and Byler’s collaborative documentary “9500 Liberty,” which “reveals the startling vulnerability of a local government, targeted by national anti-immigration networks,” according to the film’s Web site.)

“I believe the process was not democratic,” she asserts, despite the fact that it resulted from a public vote of county supervisors. “Democratic” is a word Park uses frequently (Examples: Her more recent Post assertions that “A key difference [between the Coffee and Tea parties] is in our emphasis on the democratic process” and that Coffee Party members are “democracy advocates more than anything else.”).

Hopefully Park doesn’t mean it in the same sense as Mark Lloyd–the FCC chief diversity officer appointed by the president she campaigned for–who spoke admiringly of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez’s “incredible … democratic revolution.”

Whatever the case, the Times had even more reason to know who Park really was. As her now-vanished LinkedIn page (still cached in Yahoo) reveals, Park worked as a Strategy Analyst for The New York Times from April 1999 to September 2000.

Oopsy-daisy!