There's something deeply ironic about Patrick Buchanan having to reach back to a totalitarian dictatorship to come up with a metaphor for the teabaggers...

It's a funny idea, for sure.

But for whatever it's worth, I think the recession and the bailouts created the tea partiers the same way the recession of the early 90s spawned the start of the militia movement and the whack far right anti-Clintonism with all of its Arkansas projects mobilized and organized it.

And that does worry me. The Republicans have been adept, in the past, at harnessing this kind of anger. I think, or at least hope that some healthy lefty populism from Obama could co-opt the furor before it's used against us -- it'd be the right thing to do and good politics. But I'm not seeing it. And it may be that the Tea Partiers are so far gone that if you did something for them they wouldn't notice. So maybe Obama needs to throw some meat to us lefty populists.

"conspiracy theorists" ....

I am still waiting for someone to explain what the tea baggers are.

Interesting how they are coming under attack from the right and the left.

It seems those two sides merge at the mere idea the status quo is being challenged by anyone, ever.

And mind you I speak here of the fake "left" as described by the fake media.

Hey!, I must be a conspiracy theorist too!

Evan Bayh is telling CNN that "for a few weeks after 9/11 things were better" speaking of partisanship. Yeah, they were just great, Evan. (He figures it will take another such event to bring us together. I guess the DNC didn't list enough wars on their list of priorities to satisfy Senator Bayh).

Compared to centrists who think like Bayh, tea baggers are down right normal.

"...a 21st century network of pugnacious know-nothings looks like."

Pugnacious know-nothings who pose a real risk of acts of political violence that will drag the Republican Party down with them.

They successfully hijacked the Republican Party and executed or exiled the best Republican talent. And then, when folks woke to their senses, the Republican Party will have imploded into national irrelevance.

What a laugh...

This article is exhibit one as to why tea partiers call the MSM out of touch elitists.

Elitism in the Democrat party is exemplified by people that convinced themselves in college that they were smarter than some imaginary person in fly over country because they learned how to create footnotes and a glossary to substantiate a term paper that argued bigfoot was the result of a failed experiment by Monsanto corporation. As long as you use grandiloquent phrases and quote a historical figure or two, then it must be true. Then next semester you can argue the opposite point while using equally impressive didactic sources.

Most liberals brains were "washed" in college and solidified into stone, from which they never have recovered. They follow the latest trends and wait for Rachel Maddow or Keith Olberman to tell them what to think and off they go.

Here are some of the elitist memes...

In early 2008, Hillary was unbeatable. Anyone who opposed her was sexist.

In late Spring, Hillary was openly called a b!+ch, because to oppose Obama was to be a bigot.

August 2008, between conventions Obama and Biden lose bounce and are under attack. Leftwing pundits are nearly apoplectic as they criticize Obama as going off a Kerry like cliff because he is not going Medieval on his opponents. Eventually the Media comes to his rescue and the complaints of DNC ineptitude subside and are replaced with tales of heavenly unification.

In December of 2008, the lefty elite told us the Democrats had unified all peoples, all races and all movements and no party had ever been more unified and it would always be like this. We were also told the GOP was so fractured, it would never recover. They were divided and could never unify to pose a threat to anyone.

April 2009, we were told the tea party protests were a flash in the pan. A one time deal. Soon, mainstream Democrats began comparing grannies at town hall meetings, once an example of free speech and direct democracy, to nazis, fascists, violent mobs and terrorists. Riot police with military equipment surrounded AARP clad old folks gathering to speak to their representatives.

Fall 2009, Murmurings on the far left that Democrat party leadership were no different than the GOP and civil war on the left breaks out. Democrats everywhere complain that their part NEVER has any unified voice and the Republicans are ALWAYS unified and ALWAYS vote in lockstep.

2010, Scott Brown win begins new round of finger pointing. Some Democrats claim Obama is in freefall and the GOP are evil geniuses being controlled by a secret oil mafia that controls the media. Obama will never recover. Emanuel will never recover. Biden? ...well, he is the equivalent of Bernie in Weekend at Bernies, so doesn't really fit this analogy. He was gone decades ago.

Now, this article, like a Freshman term paper, pretends like Emanuel and the DNC leadership are "evil Geniuses" or at least wickedly clever, in being so all powerful as to coordinate protests of Tens of millions of Americans to come out and demonstrate that the polls that show nearly two thirds of Americans think Obama and the Democrat leadership are completely insane, are absolutely true and representative of the voice of the people.

Then the term paper is bolstered by references to red army commissars, the Know nothings, and leftist history revisionist Richard Hofstadter, so that it sounds elitist enough to sound as convincing as Bigfoot was created by Globalist executives.

I promise you, within weeks we will hear the opposite argument made again and the conspiracy theories about Exxon execs living in a bat cave below the Lincoln Memorial controlling the politicians and using sneaky and greedy Neocons to control the media through cliquish alliances of mixed loyalties.

Its like NYC local news sports broadcasters inflaming the Yankee fans that they think every bad road series is the end of their glory forever and every new trade is a guaranteed World Series Dynasty in the making. At some point the narcissistic flailing of the hands and the screaming is not just annoying, its pathetic.

The starting point for Steve Clemon's post about Tea Partying conspiracy theorists is to disavow being a conspiracy theorist, himself.

Then he does the Syntactical Temporal Mash-up thing and acknowledges how brilliant it would be if it turned out (in some apparently dystopian future) that Rahm Emanuel were a darker Prince of Extraordinarily fucked-up Darkness than Karl Rove, Extraordinarily fucked-up Prince of Darkness.

So in closing: it seems that some recent posts regarding the future, and politics, at TPM have taken two forms: almost science fiction or a sort of sword-and-sorcery time travel genre.

With regard to the future, it'd be swell if progressively-oriented people could get a grip and talk about what really exists. After all, being a progressive does not merely imply being about the future.

That's politics. You're welcome.

Didn't we always know that an African American president would stimulate some form of extreme kick back from the mouth breathers? So, why are we surprised by the Teaparty goers? And, we knew that the follow on to Bush would have to be so far to the right that it would almost fade from view, so why are we surprised by the Teapartiers?

The only thing that bothers me about the Teasters is that I was absolutely certain that my country wouldn't elect a simpleton as president. Then Bush got elected, and reelected.

The GOP courting the Tea people kinda reminds me of when they courted the evangelicals. Made all that hate noise about gays and abortion. How well did that work out for them?