Tea Party: It's All Mental

The "Tea Party" has always seemed to this reporter to be as much mental as it was an organized thing, a crummy attitude expressed in comments across the iNternet, at pointless easily-mocked demonstrations composed mostly of retirees, & (in non-destination states & gerrymandered Congressional districts where there's a preponderance of aging honkie wretches) at the ballot box, so I was glad to see this agreed w/ me.

The key here is to understand the Tea Party as a mind-set, and not a literal movement. When it first began making noise five years ago, many on the left wanted to dismiss the Tea Party as a cynical exercise in astro-turfing, with moneyed right-wing interests bankrolling sham organizations that created the illusion of a grass roots-fueled movement. But the Tea Party, properly understood, is a term that describes the heart of the modern Republican base – people with similar cultural anxieties and economic grievances and the same deep distrust of Washington and hostility toward entrenched power.

And since 2009 their political energy has been directed both at fighting President Obama and at waging a purity campaign within the Republican Party. That intra-party aspect stems from the Tea Party’s understanding of how what to them is the most traumatic political development in the recent past – Obama’s election in 2008 – came about. For this, they blame George W. Bush and the Republicans who stood with him last decade as he enacted his “compassionate conservative” agenda. To the Tea Party, a direct line can be drawn from Bush’s fiscal profligacy and expansion of government (new prescription drug entitlement, expanded federal role in education, a brand-new Cabinet-level department) to the collapse of the economy and the rise of an anti-Republican mood that lifted Obama to victory in ’08 and handed him massive congressional majorities.

This reading of history is absolutely critical to understanding the Tea Party mind-set. It is driven by a belief that Bush and the GOP establishment betrayed conservative principles and gave Americans the wrong idea of what conservatism is – and that Americans therefore ended up falling prey to the false promises of Obama and the left. By this logic, only by ridding the GOP of establishment-types can the Tea Party restore the good name of conservatism, win back power and prevent another Obama nightmare from ever happening again.

Then, in those last two paragraphs, I actually "got" something I'd been missing these five yrs. of T.P.-ing. (Wotta maroon.)

Not that I pay close attention to anything, but the "If only we'd run a conservative candidate" whine never made sense to me (Don't they read the po — never mind, they're all "skewed!") until Kornacki explicitly connected the "George Bush, not a 'real' conservative" narrative w/ it. I suppose I missed the connection for these five yrs. of reactionary idiocy because the idea that G.W. Bush had somehow given these United Snakes the "wrong" idea about conservatism is one step too far into the Bizarro World even for me.

How delusional are these people? Is self-delusional redundant here?