Andrew Sullivan wrote here and here about e inconsistency of teabaggers' criticizing Obama for budget deficits that are largely due to Bush's "program of fiscal recklessness"--which they supported. He noted that "[t]he nakedness of their opportunism doesn't make it any the less repellent:"
Maybe one day, the Republicans can regain some credibility by accounting for their past failures in ways that actually implicate themselves or president Bush and vice-president Cheney. Maybe, at some point, they will propose some serious, constructive reform - on taxes, entitlements, war, and civil rights.When they do, I'll take the tea party movement seriously - and even support its message. But right now its message is a farrago of fear, fanaticism and fantasy.
The fringe of any political group is, by definition, out of that group's mainstream; what distinguishes the Far Right fringers is how frequently they serve as a source of "news" for the Drudge/talk radio/Moonie Times/Fox axis of disinformation. "The Tea Party Takeover" at Mother Jones observes how Michelle Bachmann's teabagger rally shows that the GOP "has fully embraced the conservative movement's most extreme elements:"
...what was most noteworthy was that the entire House Republican leadership was also in attendance--and their rhetoric was just as over-the-top as some of the protesters. House Minority Leader John Boehner declared the health care bill the "greatest threat to freedom I have seen." [...] Standing in front of them was a protestor who carried an enormous sign that read, "National Socialist Health Care--Dachau, Germany 1945" over a large photo of a stack of naked bodies piled up at a Nazi death camp.
That sort of over-the-top lunacy supports Paul Krugman's observation that "the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit." Sadly, his citation of Richard Hofstadter's classic The Paranoid Style in American Politics, is becoming increasingly relevant.
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