Buying Your Own Hype

The Teabaggers are revolting, sir!

A founder of the "tea party" movement said Wednesday he had a warning for Republican state leaders: Back conservative candidates or else other states will suffer the same backlash that toppled Florida's Republican Party chairman this week.

"We are turning our guns on anyone who doesn't support constitutional conservative candidates," said Dale Robertson, who operates TeaParty.org out of Houston and helped start the movement nearly two years ago.

He declined to say which states are next on the tea party's hit list. He said party leaders in those states would be warned privately, but the movement's wrath "will be very clear publicly" if they don't listen.

It's funny watching this mini-Limbaughs huff and puff and threaten to wreck the GOP unless they get who they want, when they want it. (And the Dems are supposed to be spineless cavers.) Blue Girl has a great take on the continuing Hoffmanization of the Republican party:

For their part, the national republican party is trying to put an unfractured face forward. A spokeswoman for the RNC, Gail Gitcho, insisted that it is the Democrats who are "suffering from a fractured party," and the wedge is healthcare reform. "Republicans are unified and have the momentum after the 2009 elections and going into 2010," she said. "The grass-roots movement is strong and organic, which makes us well-positioned for the midterms."

Hmmm. That's a bold assertion for a party that won two off-year governors elections against weak candidates who would've had a hard time mustering a winning percentage if they ran unopposed.

The election that really mattered, the New York 23, they lost. Huge. They ran a lunatic, pushed the moderate Republican out of the race and the Democrats took the seat for the first time since the end of the Civil War. They always omit that bit of inconvenient reality when they crow about taking the Governorships in Virginia and New Jersey. But the "liberal" media never asks the obvious follow-up question "what about the New York 23?"

The answer to that is that our "liberal" media is too busy trying to find a way to equate the Teabaggers to progressives with the goal of legitimizing the Wingers and bashing the Dirty F'ckin Hippies, proclaiming that nothing is different between the two...and isn't the center great?  Obama should be more centrist...