It's A Long Hard Climb, Boys, But I Swear To Ya: The Sea Of Mediocrity Is Just Over Those Mountains.

Doyle McManus, "Is the tea party over?" January 5

LEMME ask you: do you look around at US America and see anything real? It's a goddam landslide of crappy merchandise, crappy values, greed, shit-for-brains, guns n' penises, 19th century backwoods religious mania which was already theologically out of touch in the Age of Steam, and food unfit for mammalian consumption. And the whole thing is driven by the utterly nonsensical idea that technology moves us eternally forward and solves every Problem before it becomes Troubling, so we can just do whatever th' fuck makes us money. (Exempting, of course, the 80% of our fellow citizens who think a Magic Jewish carpenter tells them they're right about everything.)

"Well, by golly, I believe that America is exceptional, and I'm not apologizing for it!" is Mitt Romney's campaign. And he's the electable one.

Y'know, I look at the fucking parade of non-entities on cable "news", and on the remedial teleprompter-reading class the local stations begin every night at five, and I find it hard to forgive the twenty-something professional hairdos, but I do understand that an utterly self-fixated, disposable, money-is-all-that-matters culture is all they've ever known. It's not an excuse for living your life in professional vapidity; I have no idea why any of these people wanted to go into "journalism" as opposed to any other outlet for egomania. But the blame for the condition of their industry belongs back in the 70s; they inherited it.

But how th' fuck can you wake up in the morning and find yourself Wolf Blitzer? How th' fuck do you get to be 71 years old and Tom Brokaw, still donning a prop trench coat to add your profound speech impediment to the coverage of the Iowa Fucking Caucuses? (Because The Battle for Twelve Delegates in the Search for a Presidential Candidate Under a Steaming Pile of Brain-Dead Grifters just wouldn't have the same gravitas if it didn't pull Tom in from, I'm guessing, a book tour.) How do you not simply go on air some night and howl like an ill wind from the Kingdom of Tortured Souls?

How much better can ya eat?

What possesses a man gone to gray in the coverage of politics to write this:

A year ago, the tea party movement looked like an irresistible wave sweeping through the Republican Party. Anyone who hoped to win this year's GOP presidential nomination, it seemed, would need to embrace tea party activists' stringent demands for smaller government, lower taxes and deep cuts in spending.

I know we've been over this before , but 1) like the Teabaggers weren't Republicans in the first place, and 2) a known astroturf operation from the get-go to boot, which 3) echoed the Republican party's stringent demands for smaller government, lower taxes and deep cuts in spending for the past thirty years, leading to 4) a decidedly mixed bag of election results resulting in the installation of a couple of wingnuts in the US Congress, instead of the wingnuts who would have won in those districts otherwise, and 5) the addition of Joe Miller and Christine O'Donnell to a national pantheon already full to brimming with the likes of Sarah Palin, Joe the Plummer, and Chuck Norris.

It is only in the Press in which those ideas are granted the status of Grand Philosophical Concept, and not Deceptive Sales Practice.

The tea party has changed the political landscape in ways that are likely to last for a while. Every Republican candidate, for example, at least claims now to be a fiscal conservative.

Yeah, its a Jim Rockford 180 from John McCain's "I'm A Wild-Eyed Tax and Spender" campaign of four years ago.

And it's not really the tea party's fault that its favorite candidates, Bachmann and Perry, stumbled. Bachmann, who founded the Tea Party Caucus in the House, never found a way to turn that into a qualification to be president. Perry, whose resume was strong on paper, proved so inept in televised debates that he couldn't remember which Cabinet agencies he wanted to abolish.

This is like saying you can't blame Jehovah's Witnesses when the people who knock on your door have no understanding of primate evolution.

According to the "entrance poll" sponsored by news organizations, about a third of those who voted in the GOP caucus pronounced themselves "strong supporters" of the tea party; of those, 30% said they voted for Santorum, 17% for Gingrich and 16% for Paul.

But then, you can't blame the Teabaggers just because Teabaggers don't seem to understand what they stand for, right?

Romney tied with Perry for fourth place among strong tea party adherents. In fact, it was Romney's first-place showing among non-tea partyers that made him the statewide winner — by just eight votes.

Sure, he won, but only because other people voted for him.

That divide mirrors the fragmentation of the tea party itself. It's always included a mix of libertarians (Paul voters), social conservatives (Santorum voters) and older Reagan conservatives (many of whom were Gingrich voters).

In other words, a wholly-unexpected, new phenomenon in Republican politics. Whose agenda was sweeping the party just one year ago, minus the libertarian and social "conservative" parts.

That's the biggest reason, when real votes were being counted, that Romney came out on top of the Republican field: His opponents split the remaining votes so many ways.

By the way, for those of you keeping score, it took McManus exactly 80 words to go from "30% identified themselves as Teabaggers" to suggesting that the 75% of the vote Romney didn't get consisted of Teabaggers, 47% of whom voted for Santorum or Gingrich, apparently for the same reason that people in a Baskin-Robins order "Double Maple Peanut Butter Swirl" when they really wanted plain vanilla and are in fact allergic to peanuts. Too many choices.

How 'bout we put it another way? How 'bout we note that the modern flavor of the Republican party brand has been trading on an ugly negativity since the 1950s: Red baiting, anti-Civil Rights, anti-labor, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-sex, anti-science, ahistorical, Xenophobic, and wrapped in international paranoia. All of this, of course, cover for the same old Republican Money party we've had since the Gilded Age. It's worked, to the extent is has, to get Republicans elected. The only other thing it's accomplished--going back six Revolutions--is to convince what was once the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to run screaming from social spending, tax increases, and Defense Dept. cuts. That, and packing the Supreme Court with more religious sinecures than the Vatican.

So, yeah. Revolt on, you Teabaggers! Iowa's done your whittlin' for you. Now find yourself a True Small Government "Conservative" out of what's left, and get back to the business of doing Businesses' business.