Tea Party Weirdos

Holy crap. Have you seen what’s happening at the big Tea Party Convention out at Opryland? It looks like someone lifted America’s political rock and all the wackos crawled out from underneath.

Pith has been covering the festivities. You’ve got yer gay bashing 10 Commandments judge railing against President Obama for sanctioning “Pride month”; you’ve got yer anti-U.N. tin-foil hat conspiracy nuts warning that liberals want to take away yer car and yer suburbs; you’ve got yer immigrant-bashing ex-Congress Critter claiming the president was elected by people who “can’t spell the word 'vote' or say it in English.” (Dude, did you see some of the signs your Tea Partiers cooked up this summer? Glass houses, buddy.)

These are the speakers, people. These are not the fringe selling buttons in the lobby. These are the movement's leaders. Think on that one for a while.

This isn’t a “tax protest,” it’s one giant anti-Obama hate-fest. They’re pissed because they LOST THE ELECTION. Get over it, people. It’s the same weirdos and wackos we saw last summer making the rounds on YouTube with their racist rants and comparisons of Obama to Hitler.

After they retreated to their holes I sorta forgot how far outside the mainstream they are, God help me. Hey what do you expect: when media outlets like CNN kept referring to them as a “populist movement” that was only partisan at “some rallies” clearly I'm not the only one who bought the spin.

I mean my God, these Tea Party organizers have done a masterful job of presenting their movement as some kind of anti-tax, anti-government spending groundswell that appeals to both left and right. Every media report I see mentions that “most” but not all of Tea Partiers identify themselves as “conservative.” Meanwhile, Tea Party organizers are doing their damnedest to present themselves as “non-partisan.”

But that's not what we're seeing in Nashville. What we're seeing is the underbelly of American conservatism. So to all of you national news media folks trying to cover this confederacy of dunces, I know you want to lump the disaffected left and the loony right into one big, tidy box of unhappy voters. But no, you cannot. We are not the same. The disaffected left and the Tea Party right have absolutely nothing in common! Got that? The disaffected lefties do not now nor never will agree with Tom Tancredo, Judge Roy Moore and the rest.

And here’s another piece of news which goes against the media’s prevailing “Tea Party ascendent” narrative: the Tea Party candidate in Missouri just got his ass handed to him in a special election for the state assembly. Ooops.

Would someone please knock me on the head and call for an intervention if I'm ever again tempted to muse how awesome it would be if the anti-corporate left joined forces with the Tea Party right. Cripes, who slipped the crack into my coffee that day?

I’m glad the Tea Partiers are here and I’m glad the national news media is here to see them in all their awful Obama-hate. These folks couldn’t be further on the fringe, and I hope their bizarre rantings about socialism and black helicopters serve as a wake-up call to us all.