The Tea Party at 12: No Bands Playing, No Flags Flying

You probably didn't notice, but last week was the 12th anniversary of the creation of the Fake Tea Party. And the reason you may not have noticed is because almost no one did. There was no wall-to-wall coverage on Fox like that which attended its birth. No news reports. No breathless retrospectives. No "Where are they now?" docudramas. Beyond Bill Scher doing yeoman's work to warn that the forces that powered the Fake Tea Party were are still very much with us --

The Tea Party Began 12 Years Ago. What’s Changed—and What Hasn’t.

CNBC’s Rick Santelli started it all by attacking Obama and a rescue plan that he called a subsidy for “losers.” Biden should be ready for the next Santelli.

-- the Fake Tea Party is just another weed-choked political grave in the Potter's Field of forgotten Republican scams.

Well, mostly.

Over at the Never Trump Revisionism Factory we find Matt Lewis using the corpse of the Fake Tea Party to retcon himself into the now-lucrative pantheon of Republicans who "have long argued" yadda yadda and something something warned years ago...

It’s the Tea Party Anniversary. Here’s Why I’m Not Celebrating.

The famous “Santelli rant” happened 12 years ago last week. I mark it out of sadness. It led us straight to MAGA-land.

...

While many of my Never Trump conservative brethren still see this movement as a largely positive phenomenon, I have long argued that there was a straight line from the Tea Party to MAGA. For sane conservatives, this was the beginning of the end...

Which may have been the impetus for Charlie Sykes to inviting him onto The Bulwark podcast where they could commiserate over various things.  

Like how there was a time, as recently as 2016, when CPAC might have been a little goofy, but was still a place where decent, God-fearin' folk could walk unmolested in the streets.  

And how there was a time when Matt Schlapp was a mensch.  

And how there was a time when Rush Limbaugh was fun and irreverent and a Man of Ideas.

And how they were both got hip to the fact that something hinky was going on with the Fake Tea Party before it was cool.

Charlie Sykes:  The other thing that happened was the way the grifters settled in.  And this is something else on the Right, uh, because...

Because you and every other Conservative Hate Radio goober spent decades corralling and hand-feeding claptrap to millions of Republican bigots and imbeciles?  Building an army of chumps who would be easy pickings for every thimble-rigger, flim-flammer and Trump on the Right?

Nope.

Sykes:  ...because I remember very early on um, when, y'know, pre-Trump I kept asking the question, "Who exactly is the Tea Party? Who's speaking for the Tea Party?"  Because I have all these groups popping up the claim that "We are the Tea Party" or "We are the Tea Party" and, um, y'know who... who basically gave you the the franchise and many of them were extremely strange.  And then of course you just had the people who were just raising money off of it -- using the outrage machine to raise as much money as possible.  So there's, y'know part of the story of... of the Right has just been the way that so much of these things have been taken over by... by the grifters and the people who are looking for the clicks and the contributions.

It either never dawns on Charlie or he is sunk too deeply in denial to admit that the reason the Right is riddled with "grifters and the people who are looking for the clicks and the contributions" is because manufacturing malleable chumps is what the entire Conservative enterprise has been all about all along -- one very long, very well-funded project aimed at dumbing down and angrying up the Republican base enough so that they would consistently vote against their own interests and instead make common cause with the plutocrats who bankrolled the whole thing and the carnival barkers they hire to lure the rubes into the tent.  

And once men like Charlie had labored long and hard to build a machine designed to crank out credulous idiots, as sure flies find shit and rotten meat, grifters followed their nose straight to it.

Of course, some of us on the Left would have been only too happy to explain to Mr. Sykes that the Tea Party was a fraud -- a rebranding scam to get Republicans off the hook for all the heinous shit they said and did during the Bush administration.  Some of us we're, in fact, using our tiny blogs and podasts to get the word out about the Fake Tea Party since the earliest days when Republicans began disappearing into the weeds and then and popped back onto the mainstream media's radar as "Independents"  From me in 2009:

The "Independent" Granfalloon 

...

And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their lives and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.

But men like Charlie Sykes were much too busy tone policing Liberal Hate Talker to notice our warnings.  

And well before Matt Lewis found himself basking in the glowing blurbs from the likes of Rick Perry, Ken Blackwell, S.E. Cupp, Andrew Breitbart, Erick Erickson and Tucker Carlson -- 

If you learned everything you knew about American politics from Matt Lewis, you'd be in pretty good shape. I should know, since I practically do. -- Tucker Carlson

for his paean to Sarah Palin and all that she stood for, "The Quotable Rogue: The Ideals of Sarah Palin in Her Own Words",  we Liberal Hate Talkers busied ourselves writing post after post after post about the Fake Tea Party which were dutifully ignored by everyone.  

For example, here is one of my own hundreds of contributions to the genre from 2010 with which some of you may already be familiar :-)

Now, The Bush-Belly Sneetches

But two years later, Conservatives with huge media platforms were still swearing that the Fake Tea Party was the salvation of the GOP

"The tea party helped save the Republican Party..." - @JoeNBC on MoJoe

— Matt Lewis (@mattklewis) October 22, 2012

And Charlie Sykes? Well, for Charlie the trials and tribulations of the Fake Tea Party were just one more excuse to bitch about the Left:

Happy 5th Birthday, Tea Party! The epic rant that began it all. http://t.co/5LmF1H8BlY

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) February 28, 2014

Left to Portray Tea Party as Bloodthirsty Zombies - Literally - Right Wisconsin http://t.co/WODyX6fO0I

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) March 27, 2014

Obama praises abortion advocate who called tea party ‘racist,’ suggested Romney wants to heave rape victims into water http://t.co/dB4RIbPH

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) February 7, 2013

@Murphyms73 Nio. the Tea party and NOT crackpots. Read what I wrote. People who support secession... are.

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) April 15, 2014

And this last grievance, the abuse of the noble Teabaggers at the hands of Barack Obama's IRS goons --

10 crazy things the IRS asked Tea Party groups « Hot Air http://t.co/D64zDUy9mo via @hotairblog

— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) May 11, 2013

-- was something that Sykes went on and on and on about.

Who knows, Charlie?  Maybe one big reason the IRS took an interest in the Fake Tea Party was because, as one high-profile MSNBC contributor put it, it was fraught with "grifters and the people who are looking for the clicks and the contributions."

Everywhere they turn these days, Dry Drunk Republicans like Lewis and Sykes find the same, terrible fact staring back at them.  That the Left has been right about the Right all along.

Which is why Dry Drunk Republicans work so hard at erasing us from history and rewriting the past to valorize themselves.

Behold, a Tip Jar!