There. Is. No. Tea. Party.

Episode #12,228 in an ongoing, award-ready series.

Repeat after me:

There is no Tea Party.

There is no Tea Party.

There. Is. No. Tea. Party.

And because there is no tea party, articles like this one by David Frum, "CNN Contributor" crack me right up --

How tea party could drive GOP to disaster
By David Frum, CNN Contributor11

Editor's note: David Frum, a CNN contributor, was a special assistant to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002. He is the author of six books, including "Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again," and is the editor of FrumForum.

Washington (CNN) -- A new CNN poll finds that about half of Republicans sympathize with the tea party movement. The other half either remain aloof or (5%) even express hostility.

That second group of Republicans has received remarkably little media attention this cycle. Yet their man -- Mitt Romney -- has held steady in first or second place for the past three years. Meanwhile tea party Republicans have bounced from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump to Michele Bachmann to Rick Perry to (now) Herman Cain, transfixing the media every time they lose faith in one messiah and search for another.
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Bwahahah!

Republicans "sympathize" with "the tea party movement", David, in exactly the same way a compulsive masturbator might "sympathize" with his own right hand, and you fucking well know it.

These assholes did not precipitate out of thin air, or leap intact and politically virginal

from the forehead or Ronald Reagan. As every survey has shown and everyone with an ounce of common sense who doesn't have a political axe to grind knew from the beginning, the "Tea Party" is a fraud. It is nothing more or less than the most heavily funded and carefully coordinated political re-branding effort in recent American history -- the latest layer of Koch-funded, Fox News promoted whitewash splashed over the same goddamn whelping box full of bigots and Bible-thumpers who have made up the base of the Republican Party for most of my adult life.

The Base that your GOP, David, spent so many decades and billions of dollars flattering, wooing and recruiting into your Party so you could win elections.

Or, as one of our podcast listeners put it:

The last decent conservatives (such as G.H.W. Bush) have retired, leaving four kinds of people in the GOP: traitors (e.g. the Kochs), messianiac dominionist nut jobs (e.g. Michelle Bachmann), useful idiots (aka: tea party), and geriatric bigots on holiday from the John Birch Society (also tea party). It's true, as some liberals charge, that we always had them with us, but we made them wear shoes and keep quiet in front of company. These people are not conservatives; they are dangerous, bomb-throwing radicals, and if Joe McCarthy were around today he would drag them before HUAC. It's a safe bet that Ike would have no truck with this kind, and I have begun to wonder if even The Gipper would recognize them. Lincoln would stalk away in disgust.

Six years ago, I wrote ("Reactionary") that the GOP was a reactor powered by hate and crazy, and cooled by soothing Villager bullshit:

The Koolant system that keeps it all from blowing apart at the seams and melting itself back into the masturbatory fever dreams of every wannabe Jefferson Davis circulate a viscous Koolaid-based composite goo made up of 43% David Brooks, 27% Tom Friedman, 23% Tim Russert, 12% Joe Klein and 10% David Broder.

and now that the Koolant is leaking away, the raw, raging core of the GOP's political Pretty Hate Machine is being exposed ways that people like David Frum can not longer cover up or wish away.

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Your Party Masters have burned your bridges and salted the Earth behind you, and now there is nothing left for you to do but desperately tunnel deeper into the Hell you have built for yourself.

Which is why John McCain now publicly grovels and kisses the poxy asses of the men who service and steered the Pretty Hate Machine diffidently past the bodies of the dead and dying of NOLA, and gleefully down the blood-tarred, bone-macadamed streets of Iraq. Men who went right after his family -- his wife and children -- and his honorable national service without a second thought when it suited their despicable purposes.

Because the Pretty Hate Machine does not come with a conscience, and it now casts its depraved shadow over their entire Party.

And over the entire nation that Party has seized.

And over the entire world that Party has polluted.

It has become all Means and no Ends but More Power, and as with all power, it comes with a steep price.

Because despite periodic and frightening bouts with Mussolinitis, we are not a fascist people by inclination.

In fact, we are taught to abhor authoritarianism. Our whole government is an exercise in the division and dissipation of power and the creation of strong, interlocking safeguards to protect us against the rise of a One Party/Dear Leader State. We number among some of our proudest moments (the Emancipation Proclamation, the defeat of the Nazi and Imperial Japanese Empires, the enactment of landmark Civil Rights legislation, the collapse of the Soviet Union) those occasions when we slammed totalitarianism to the ground, both at home and abroad.

And because these are the very safeguards and traditions that the GOP is working assiduously to destroy, and because there is no majority present in the active electorate actually lusts after the annihilation of democracy in America, they have to do it sloooowly and under a variety of false fronts and pretenses.

Yes there are millions of them, and yes they are virtually packed into the same party:

(h/t Vivian Paige’s blog for this clip from John Dean's terrific book, "Conservatives Without Conscience")

“Probably about 20 to 25 percent of the adult American population is so right-wing authoritarian, so scared, so self-righteous, so ill-informed, and so dogmatic that nothing you can say or do will change their minds,” Altemeyer told me. He added, “They would march American into a dictatorship and probably feel that things had improved as a result. They have the mentality of ‘old-time religion’ on a crusade and they generously give money, time and effort to the cause. They proselytize; they lick stamps; they put pressure on loved ones; and they revel in being loyal to a cohesive group of like thinkers. And they are so submissive to their leaders that they will believe and do virtually anything they are told. They are not going to let up and they are not going to go away.”

Nauseating, but they are the minority, which is why they have to sorta ease into it, one gay bashing, flag burning, pro-torture, intolerant, anti-choice, anti-Science skirmish at a time. No blitzkrieg, but an ambling, “Aw Shucks” Pinochetism that, as you watch it over the course of decades, has marched this country directly and determinedly towards oblivion.

But because this is not a Majority Blackshirt nation – yet – every two years the theocrats and Neocons need another few million more collaborators than they can pony up on ideology alone, which is why winning elections for Republicans is getting to be an ever-trickier business.

Sure they cheat when and how they can -- and it is a tactic that we must demand the Dems fight loudly and aggressively district by district -- but there is simply no way to rig every fucking election in every district that matters, which is why manipulating the Pretty Hate Machine requires ever more finely tuned motor skills.

Because if the entire Right Wing understands anything it is this – as frustrating and degrading as it is to men like Trent Lott, Tom Tancredo, G. Felix Allen and Rick Santorum who really, really want to shout their love for all things Segregated and/or Despotic from the rooftops, it is still not socially acceptable to publicly embrace and celebrate your Inner Klansman.

Thus they must commune with their Swine Army in code.

They must use lightly encrypting hatespeech to manipulate the Rove Rods to get the Electoral Reactor Core seething hot enough to activate the base...but always keep the Bobo Koolant level of soothing denial, spin and outright lies juuust high enough to keep the Moderates from being directly exposed to and freaked out by the unshielded Core of the GOP.
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And outside of the Heart of Confederate Darkness, moderate GOP voters who are kept carefully shielded from the truth and lulled into a cozy, supply-side coma by the Bobo Koolant are genuinely horrified when the Core of their Party is suddenly exposed and they are forced to face with eyes wide open the naked, roaring, venomous, unreconstructed filth that actually fuels and pilots the Conservative’s Pretty Hate Machine.

The monster that David Frum's Party of Personal Responsibility created to win elections is now running predictably amok.

And all the Koch's money and all the Koch's men cannot put his political Humpty Dumpty back together again.