I think the only group of people that don't see this 'teabagging' bullshit for the corporate sham it is are the actual protesters.

The republican party has officially been taken over by right wing extremists. I used to joke that the only difference between a republican and a klansman was the Armani suit.

No more. They are no longer even attempting to conceal their outright hatred. Fucking scary. It won't be long until there is another Oklahoma city event, you can count on that.

perhaps being able to talk like this keeps children and small animals safe from these clowns.

real thugs, it seems to me, won't be quoting the likes of pretty boy Pitt in a grade B movie about testosterone poisoning.

The first rule of project mayhem is you do not talk about project mayhem.

There. It´s out of the way. Continue.

Spoiler alert - at the end of "Fight Club" we learn that the main character (Ed Norton) is insane, and Tyler (Pitt) is his delusional alternate personality. Seems to me Mackowiak is being a little overly candid.

That and when Norton's character does in fact talk about Project Mayhem with local law authorities they pin him down, yank his pants off and try to remove certain parts of his anatomy...

they started like Romeo & Juliet, but they ended in tragedy.

In death, members of Project Mayhem have a name. His name was Robert Paulson.

Great movie. I'm afraid the right-wing tea bagger has it a little backwards. If Tyler Durden existed, he would be on the DHS watch list for left wing terrorists, since he was anti-capitalist.

I wonder if Mackowiak realizes the character he idolizes was nothing more than the psychotic projection of a mentally disturbed insomniac who simply got bored with his life?

Now, Mackowiak's piece concludes that we'll see the results of the Project Mayhem-like "revolution" during the "2010 midterm Congressional elections."

I'm starting to see this CYA as a trend among inciters. Representative Bachmann did the same thing, as if calling for violence is excused by a half-hearted wink, wink, nudge, nudge in closing.

I'm appalled, but not surprised, by the violence espoused by right wing writers, talkers, and politicians these days. It's galling that they wear it so openly on their sleeve and disturbing that no one seems to care.

It is unfortunate that their gleeful calls to violence will likely be repeatedly realized, as we have already witnessed, before the majority of us stand up and take noticed. The right wing seems populated with nothing more than children who harbor immature dreams of those who disagree with them meeting violent ends.

Oh, great. People always have to rush to give away the plots of the brand-new, just-out movies for me before I get a chance to see them.

And so many people can spend all of a weekday attending rallies because...

...Obama done took their jobz!

Great. And all these people are heavily armed. And bought all the ammunition.

Just for the sake of history, one thing that is annoying about these tea protests is the misunderstanding of what the American Revolution era tea parties. The protest was about "taxation without representation," not the relatively modest amount of the tea tax. The American Revolution was about democracy and freedom,not low taxation for the elite.

So---if the tea-baggers morph into tea-mayhemists, will they protest being shot at by the FREAKING UNITED STATES ARMY when they start talking about blowing stuff up? Will the anti-tea-bagging members of the NRA start lobbying their respective Congress-critters for their 2nd-Amendment right to climb into their lovingly-preserved World War relics and train their rifles on the tea-baggers from the air? Will the various militias finally discover that the real enemies of America are the tea-baggers and their GOP masters, and find themselves psychologically driven to slaughter tea-baggers by the bushel?

Will someone finally devise a price structure for the value of a tea-bagger-skin purse, or a pair of tea-bagger-skin shoes, or a tea-bagger-skin lampshade, or tea-bagger-bone scrimshaw art, or anything else that borders on the mentality of Mengele?

Because if someone in authority doesn't get their act together and shut this stuff down---and right quick---then tea-baggery and counter-tea-baggery will, in its logical conclusion, lead to these very things.

Although, the thought of holding a freshly-de-fleshed skull in my hand while paraphrasing my good and noble friend Willie the Shake (Alas, poor Beck; I knew him, Horatio) does have its appeal. A macabre appeal, perhaps---but an appeal all the same....

SPOILER ALERT HERE, DON'T READ FARTHER IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FIGHT CLUB AND PLAN TO.

As a matter of fact, I haven't seen it either. But I hear from someone who has that it has quite a kicker of a surprise ending, in which the entire Fight Club, "Operation Mayhem" and even the very existence of the Brad Pitt character turn out to be a total figment of a nerdy little guy's Walter Mitty-like imagination. How appropriate an analogy is that?!?!?!

For a BS sham, there has entirely too much coverage here, on the radio, and every other place. Can you give it a rest already, it's becoming inescapable.

This is the most media coverage of a sham EVER. Will someone have the balls to let it go already. It's getting the coverage of a celebrity DUI and I for one am really tired of the hype.

Well, I've been a slave to duty today, so I'm just now checking out the coverage of the little tea parties, and I gotta say: This is one pathetic-looking bunch of people. Soft, hunched, toothless, gray...their faces etched with years of hostility and bitterness. These are very angry, very confused folks with no hope of ever getting it; all they know is that it's The Others' fault. Sad.

I think Fight Club is a great analogy for the GOP. Remember that Tyler Durden is a fictional carrier that comes out of Ed Norton's semi-delusional mind. The GOP: "Just like a sociopathic delusion!"

These voices of the right-wing (some well-known, others not so) who are echoing the call to violence in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways in every way possible are, in my opinion, hoping one of their looney-tune fringe listeners heed their call and take it upon themselves to be an hero. They stoke the fires while some worthless toadie does the dirty work for them. Assassination would be a badge of honor. Domestic terrorism to rescue the country from demons. When it happens, and it will, they will be backpeddling so fast it'll make your head spin. But maybe not as they seem not to have a conscience.

Sorry - I got so wound up I even forgot my name!

Presumably, he's (Mackowiak) referring to changes through legitimate political means, not using violence to disrupt the elections. -- Steve Benen

Whatever makes you think so? Are you suggesting that Mackowiak doesn't know English? Because, I have yet to see one single definition of "mayhem", which doesn't suggest blood dripping and splatters of gore everywhere.

They want to blow up banks? Then shut up and let them. This is better than the mental-defective bomber in Conrad's The Secret Agent. One of those sad sacks is bound to accomplish something useful. At the very least blowing up banks will facilitate markdown of distressed assets.

"You morons! You're running around with ski masks, try to explode things up, what did you think would happen?!"

God, Fight Club is the greatest movie ever.

Anyhow I will say that I think the world would be a better place if all banks (credit card companies in the movie, since its set in Wilmington) were to cease to exist.

Oh also, FUCK Rosie! She revealed the ending on her talk show specifically so people would not go to watch it.

Enough bad stuff can never happen to her.

With any luck, at the conclusion of today's Project Mayhem all the teabaggers will realize that they are delusional effs and shoot themselves in the head.

Oh, and I'm looking forward to hearing the Pixies.

The Tea Baggers are getting together, Mackowiak explains, to voice their outrage at "the Obama administration's confiscatory level of taxation."

John Cole nailed it. The reality is that if McCain had won and did exactly the same things Obama has done there would be no "tea parties".

There is a reason every face at these "tea parties" is white.

There is a reason the "tea parties" are limited to people on a steady diet of Fox and Rush.

What they are protesting is the the Republicans lost. They are protesting that the majority of America doesn't like their party anymore.

They are protesting that a nigger is in the white house.

I think the MSM is actually catching it pretty well-- the teaparties are mostly anti-Obama rallies, sustained by people who voted for McCain and are mad that the GOP lost all their power last fall. Now the teabaggers claim they all care about deficit spending, about the government having too much power-- where the hell have they been the past 8 years??!? Most disingenous protest movement EVER. The whole thing is a sham and a big game of pretend. It's pathetic.

I love how protesting is suddenly OKIYAR. If you are a liberal and you're protesting, say, killing people in the middle east, then you're nothing but a dirty, anti-American hippie who should "get out." It's bizarre.

It's not bizarre, it's typical hat-switching, looking for any excuse to trash a guy who they know deep down in their hearts really is the right guy for the job. They are ashamed of themselves but in a typical "daddy drank and smacked me around" dysfunctional mindset they now lash out at the ones who will help them the most. Sad, really, but these people need help- the selfsame gov't that is trying to cut Joe the Plumber a break is too busy gnashing it's teeth.

SPOILER ALERT

the entire Fight Club, "Operation Mayhem" and even the very existence of the Brad Pitt character turn out to be a total figment of a nerdy little guy's Walter Mitty-like imagination.

Only one of the three items mentioned is a delusion, but nonetheless perfectly analogous to wingnutters.

It's a great movie, actually, and has nothing to do with a Fight Club, except as a plot device. Not that wingnuts ever understand anything beyond the surface.

Bring 'em on. I am personally armed and ready to shoot right wing wackos at any time.

What do you call an unarmed liberal? A detainee.

One of my history professors in college said that all the tea dumped into Boston Harbor rotted and created a miniature ecological disaster. Stank for months.

""[I]f you go around analogizing yourself to terrorists, then you don't get to be shocked and outraged that the Department of Homeland Security might think there will be a problem with fringe members of your organization."

Unfortunately, this seems to be true only if you're "of color" or young, white and have long hair.

If you're a Republican, DHS just brushes you off with a "there they go again" nonchalance.

One of my history professors in college said that all the tea dumped into Boston Harbor rotted and created a miniature ecological disaster.

I hope your history prof also explained that the Boston Tea Party was organized by tea smugglers who were pissed off that England had *LOWERED* taxes on legally sold tea, undercutting the smugglers' tea smuggling business.

Hey, lighten up. we're talking the Little Segretti's here. Their version of imploding bank buildings is a smoldering bag of boo-boo left in front of a drive-up ATM.

More danger signs.

The thing that strikes me about the use of such explicitly militant language by actual figures within the Republican establishment is that all it would take is a single Timothy McVeigh* for these people's political careers to be over.

It worries me that this doesn't worry them.

*Do they really think anyone without severe obsessive tendencies is going to waste his time trying to figure out how to assassinate a President? Oklahoma City is more likely. Dead children again.

I'm Canadian, so just asking here: is there legislation, some 'truth in broadcasting' law, that would stop right wing radio from just making up stuff? Discussion is one thing; demagogery is another. What laws were used to squash left wing protests since the 70s? And, where does hate speech legislation meet freedom of speech rights?

Canada tends to legislate the nutters into a corner, or underground. Don't ask me about CSIS and the RCMP as they both have a lot to answer for. But, so far, we've managed to deal with the imported KKK, home grown neo-nazis and Quebec separatists, and we don't have the same kind of right wing radio as the feds control who can get a license to broadcast. I'd be banging on my MP's door demanding change if some bunch of right wing crazies were allowed to spew hatred over the radio. I wouldn't want my kids to hear that any more than I'd want them looking at porn sites.