Tea Party Visitors' Guide Has DC Residents Jeering

WASHINGTON (Aug. 23) -- Residents of the nation's capital -- those "inside the Beltway" types -- are used to being dissed by the rest of the country whose representatives, unlike them, get to vote inside the U.S. Capitol.

But a tea party visitors' guide for those attending Saturday's Restoring Honor rally on the National Mall has locals tittering and tweeting about how some anti-government activists view the seat of their government.

Karen Bleier, AFP / Getty Images

A tea party visitors' guide urges people planning to attend Saturday's rally at the Lincoln Memorial to stick to "safe" parts of the nation's capital.

The protest will feature Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial 47 years to the day after civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his historic "I have a dream speech" there. Here, according to a post on the Maine tea party website, is what rally attendees should know:

DC's population includes refugees from every country, as the families of embassy staffs of third world countries tend to stay in DC whenever a revolution in their homeland means that anyone in their family would be in danger if they went back. Most taxi drivers and many waiters/waitresses (especially in local coffee shops like the Bread and Chocolate chain) are immigrants, frequently from east Africa or Arab countries. As a rule, African immigrants do not like for you to assume they are African Americans and especially do not like for you to guess they are from a neighboring country (e.g. Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia) with whom they may have political or military tensions. It's rare to meet anyone who gets really offended, but you can still be aware of the issue.

The post then explains, "Many parts of DC are safe beyond the areas I will list here, but why chance it if you don't know where you are?"

It describes the city's predominantly African-American and low-income neighborhoods as ones to avoid and recommends Metro lines that it says are safe (Red) and ones that are not (Green and Yellow).

Locals have been taking exception to all these strictures, and they're fighting fire with fire. The website WeLoveDC offered tips to locals "for things to enjoy in DC that will no doubt not be overrun by protester-tourists, falling as they do outside of the designated safe areas."

And the DCist website posted a map for "For the Tea Partiers Who May Be More Visual Learners," outlining the supposed "safe" area.

"You can travel safely in this area without encountering immigrants, Africans, homosexuals, automatic weapons, or homosexuals with automatic weapons. If you avoid the Green and Yellow Metro lines. And buses. And coffee shops. And restaurants. And taxis," says a note on the map.

One commenter on the Maine tea party site, Roger Ek, thanked the blogger for the advice, noting he had visited Washington in 1998:

While I was there I stayed in a cheap hotel and had the window open. I was on the third floor. I called home and while I was on the phone there was a burst of 9MM automatic weapons fire in the street. My wife said it was pretty loud and was that the TV? I told her it wasn't the TV. It was live in the street in Washington, DC, which is more dangerous than Baghdad.

Efforts to reach the author of the post, Bruce Majors, were unsuccessful. But AOL News interviewed the friend who posted the guide -- and found he wasn't so amused by Washingtonians' reactions.

"Some of the criticism is a bit silly," said Andrew Ian Dodge, Maine coordinator for the group Tea Party Patriots.

He noted that when he visited Washington in the 1990s, a gunfight broke out near the place he was staying. When told that crime had plummeted since then, he expressed surprise.

"I suspect that many people who live in D.C. have a lot of pride in D.C.," he said, but that didn't make it right to "call us dumb Mainers who know nothing about D.C. ... That's not very polite either."