I read with hope various things like this, but I still think the Dems are going to get crushed in Nov (due to enthusiasm gap, historical trends, etc.), and the Rs will be seen as invincible by the lazy media.

it is interesting to see the 'socialistic' tendencies in the Repugnant party critiqued and outlined so well by the neanderthal tea-baggers... so much attention has been given to the 'socialism' of the Dims...

it's too bad that the 'socialism' of the big media is such that we've lost the ability to truly understand and acknowledge the complete senselessness of these "new foot-soldiers." A simple two-hour documentary comparing them to the behaviors of the incessantly demanding typical two-year old human would prove enlightening to many.

"The tea party movement needs to insist that candidates believe in the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage."

A standard the christian right fails repeatedly to adhere to;>

I am starting to wonder if there is at least one similarity between those fundie foot soldiers of the right and our Progressives. In the case of the fundies, the GOP has asked for years, "Where else would they go?". The GOP took them for granted and gave them very little in return. In the present case of our Progressives, it appears Rahm Emmanuel and the DNC is asking the same about us and occasionally tossing out a bone or two and asking us to keep fighting for them.

Er, "are asking".

So....the old religious right fanatics are being replaced by new small government fanatics who are also old? Win-Win.

berttheclock- I would say yes and no, and in ways that don't make me happy.

On the one hand, the US Christian right, does not really have a similarly vocal and influential counterpart anywhere else in the OECD (a proxy for "places I might ever want to live"). The US "progressives" would be comfortably in the middle of most of the OECD, neither left nor right, and their policies are empirically proven to work pretty well.

On the other hand, compare their influence on US politics. It's hard to say, both groups are more or less marginalized. On the one hand we have all sorts of picky craziness associated with abortion, on the other hand, we DO have social security and medicare. But do we have a national abortion ban sufficient to prevent upper-middle-class women from getting abortions? Nope. Do we even get serious consideration of national insurance, demonstrated to work by Canada? Nope. So, beats the crap out of me.

The older I get, the more I've decided that people are just crazy. There's an article in the NYTimes today, on people who refuse to realize that they have been scammed, and instead concoct ever more fantastic conspiracy theories to explain why the world does not conform to their beliefs. There's the Keyes-vs-Obama 25% craziness experiment. We've got persistent birthers and truthers. There's even, in something as mundane and objective as bicycle tire width and rolling resistance, a general certainty that tradition must be correct (pay no attention to a video-recorded experiment showing otherwise).

It does seem to me that there's a lot more crazy on the right, and has been for quite some time. I think their success depends on leveraging old-style tribal and/or lizard-brain thinking (something that we bred to be attracted to, if you believe in evolution and natural selection :-) into modern situations.

And into this dynamic you articulate well Mr. Benen comes one Glenn Beck. Anyone got popcorn? -Kevo

There is also an inherent contradiction in the TeaPartiers support for states rights. Namely, do states have the right to regulate gun ownership? I suspect they will argue that the states have the right to regulate behavior of its citizens, but not to abridge their gun ownership rights.

The Taliban religious right and the crypto-anarchist teabaggers do have one interest in common -- their shared, vitriolically-expressed hatred of progressives and the progressive agenda. And they will close ranks to defeat that agenda. And yes, they ARE on the march. In contrast, the Democrats have been doing their level best to stamp out the last few lingering embers of enthusiasm among their base. Enthusiasm gap, anyone?

And the old-school religious fundies will start calling the new fiscal responsibility crowd 'elitists' because they want to talk about hard things like numbers and stuff in 3...2...1...

Schadenfreude. I has it.

The worst strains of the modern GOP are manifiest in their purest form.

One are the social conservative who can be a bit more polite in large groups when not they are Westboro at a soldiers funeral or picketing at an abortion provider. They obsess over god, gays, and abortion to the exclusion of other issues.

The other is the Tea Party groups who are so loud and rude they border on class-less boors with some who don't often seem to far from the KKK. They don't seem to obsess over God, gays, and guns to the degree as the social conservatives but instead obsess over the budget - something that wasn't a problem with Bush 43 was in office.

Both have been and are used by the party apparatus of the GOP but are too stupid to realize the party apparatchiks only care about their issues as far as it gets them elected and keeps them in office. Generally most congress critters want them to donate time and money and vote but to just shut the F**K up.

They'll kiss and make up long enough to fight the election together. Punching hippies and general tight-whiteyness will be common objectives enough.

dr2chase@10.59a- could you either link to that article you're talking about in today's NYT or give some key words. It sounds very interesting!

TIA

I am getting very tired of hearing that the "right wing" or "conservatives" or the "Tea Partiers" are opposed to government spending,or want to ratchet back government.

It is simply not true. No republican senate, house or president has ever proposed a smaller budget. The tea party people are the most hilarious versions of this, social security recipients demanding smaller government. My favorite was a woman in her mid forties, interviewed by TIME's Jay Newton Small who was retired, on SS disability.

They are either lying, as with Dick Armey, breathtakingly incoherent, or simply nuts. But they do not oppose government spending, and it is a mistake to characterize them as doing so, no matter what they say.

The Teabaggers are nothing new. They're simply the GOPer base. These people didn't suddenly appear -- they're the ones who afford the GOPer candidates with their votes since time immemorial.

So some of them aren't "social conservatives". Again, so what else is new? Just like it isn't only unions that do phonebanking and canvassing for the Dems, it's not only the religious-based groups that do this for the GOP. If you were dying to help John McCain in the previous election, there were more ways of doing it than in some church basement.

Of course, if you want to start a whole new media narrative about a new cultural phenomena based on America's frustration with Washington, this would be the way to go.

I would have loved similar coverage of equivalent groups on our side circa 2003.

Tea partiers vs. fundies in a smack-down? Oooh...this is gonna be great!

An interesting post, but I absolutely disagree with one assumption in Ben Smith's piece: the idea that the religious right respects Obama personally and does not want to demonize him, as opposed to those mean old Tea Partiers. Bullshit. It's the religious right types who push the birther narrative and imply Obama is the antichrist in WorldNut daily. Smith shouldn't be so credulous.

the la times had an article the other day discussing how the religious right is attempting to put a pro-faith spin on the teabaggers' small-goverment rhetoric...

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/11/nation/la-na-social-conservatives12-2010mar12

Looks as though many Tea Baggers are looking for more than just State's Rights. They are looking for Counties Rights - In the PNW, most of them keep trying to form groups to secede from various counties, most of which have a large community which they consider to be far too liberal. Drive out of Seattle or Everett, WA, or Portland or even the lower portion of Oregon and the upper NW portion of Washington State and you will see many signs demanding the right to form new counties. A large portion of Tea Baggers in this region belong to the Constitution Party. Not much different from the groups forming in Eastern Washington and Idaho. Remember some of them who attended a Tea Party outside Clarkston, WA and clapped when some lady wanted Senator Murray to be strung up ala the scene from "Lonesome Dove". Most of these believe they have the right to break away from any state or county to form their own self-regulated bunker.

Don't let the wigs, tri-corner hats and colonial costumes fool you: The teabaggers are the Bush dead-enders re-branded. It's always possible to find a handful who aren't entirely devoted to repressing gays and banishing the theory of evolution from sciences classes, but it's pure cherry-picking.

I was at a town hall meeting last summer that got crashed by these clowns, and they're the same Republican boneheads who were all for exploding the deficit to enrich the wealthy and fund an unnecessary war. They didn't have a problem with government spending as long as it was a white dude signing the checks.

I agree with the comments that this clash between social conservatives and libertarians is pretty much a made-up narrative. We've been waiting for this break-up for DECADES and it hasn't come. Why? Because even though both sides of this would-be schism disagree on the particulars, they still have a common enemy and - even more importantly - a common epistemology. They're BELIEVERS. Libertarians are as ardent in their faith as any Baptist. It's just that their credo comes from Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand.

It's sad that liberals pay twice for being tolerant and complicated. We are not designed to be implacable zealots so much as ironic observers. The enthusiasm gap between the zealots and ourselves comes down to that. We just can't be spoon-fed crapola and regurgitate on cue.

If Oklahoma wants to fix their high divorce rate, maybe they should consider legalizing gay marriage. Massachusetts has one of the lowest divorce rates in the country.

Er, the recent "Tea Party Convention" in Nashville was loaded with Religious-Right types, from Roy Moore on down. Obviously, it didn't represent all Tea-Partiers, but it represented a good chunk of people who think they are. I think the problem is that it's a really amorphous movement and so far defined by what they're apoplectic about rather than what they're for. Thus the Ben Smiths can cherry-pick their favorite TPers and issues and pretend the others don't exist.

phoebes-in-santa fe:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/business/12norris.html
"Dealing with Fraud by Denial"

Thanks, dr2chase@7.43!

Steve: "Given Oklahoma's extremely high divorce rates, many in the GOP consider this a worthwhile, "pro-family" effort, while nearly as many Republicans believe marriage is a personal matter and none of the state's business. The argument is almost entirely an intra-party one, with GOP officials disagreeing about what the government can and should do."

Well, I can only offer the Oklahoma GOP the wisdom of my late grandfather, a lifelong and loyal California Republican who was a former state party chair during the Eisenhower years, and who would gladly and freely share with other party members the five simple words that summed up his personal creed, whenever such subjective matters would arise in the context of their political discussions:

"Mind your own goddamned business."

But then, my grandfather's GOP doesn't exist any more. He was a former bank president who was very conservative on fiscal matters, but he had the heart of a social liberal.

In his 96-year lifetime, he marched for civil and voting rights for persons of color, advocated in the business community for labor's right to organize and bargain collectively (which he saw as a natural curb on corporate executive and boardroom excess), supported a woman's right to reproductive freedom of choice, and believed in the clear separation of state and church.

And if Grandpa were alive today, he'd no doubt be giving his fellow Republicans hell for their continued intransigence on civil rights and fairness for the GLBT community (just as he did during the last two years of his life, whenever the then-new subject of gays in the military came up), and for their own failures to acknowledge their own ibherent fiscal irresponsibilty since the Reagan years.

" the Rs will be portrayed as invincible by the corporate media in another push to create such a reality by self-fulfilling prophecy (as they have done in every election for at least two decades now)."
Posted by: Dems lose huge in 2010 on March 13, 2010 at 10:10 AM

"Smith shouldn't be quite so obvious in his deceitful attempt to portray the Christianists as less insane/evil than they clearly are."
Posted by: Matt on March 13, 2010 at 12:39 PM

FTFY.
x2.

"The tea party movement needs to insist that candidates believe in the sanctity of life and the sanctity of marriage."

I'm just going to savor that quote slowly. I sincerely doubt the tea party movement will obey this pompous old fart.