Saturday, January 23, 2010

Tea Partiers Rebel Against Scott Brown

That, according to Joe Scarborough, who wrote a piece for Newsweek. Dick Armey, who supports the tea party through his FreedomWorks, is pleased with Brown. But the more loathsome of the tea party, the Glenn Beck followers, don't like Scott Brown one bit:
The Fox News host used his TV and radio shows to launch vicious verbal attacks on the newly elected senator. "I want a chastity belt on this man," Beck laughingly said the morning after Brown's epic victory over Democrat Martha Coakley. "I want his every move watched in Washington. I don't trust this guy. This one could end with a dead intern." Just in case the audience had somehow missed his suggestion that Brown was capable of having an affair with, and then murdering, a female intern, Beck repeated the line.

What is going on here? Why are the tea partyers turning on their own? Like any nascent populist movement, the tea party was born of deep skepticism and dissatisfaction with the status quo. As it turns out, many of its most passionate and vocal members seem just as mistrusting of each other as they are of the federal government. Read the whole thing
My working definition of the tea party: A collection of a wide variety of people from the haters, the bigots, the racists, to the the tax haters, who all share a disdain of government, be it out of intellect or stupidity. There isn't enough uniformity to pull together as a real party, but there is enough uniformity to knock the other parties off balance.