Buckdog

The tea-party hobbits...That was John McCain who made that speech, wasn't it?

Of course, being the WSJ, it's a pretty horrific article in other respects.

CK ... McCain was quoting the WSJ article.

P library guy ... I think the fact that the WSJ is going after the Teaparty movement says a great deal. What everyone is missing here is that there is a huge fracture in the Right in US. The Teaparty is playing chicken with the economy. Mainstream - nonTeaparty GOP Reps have played along with them beyond the comfort level of traditional Republicans.

Oh, quite true--there's definitely a fracture there and it's interesting to see it.
But it makes me wonder which side we should be hoping to see win. Note that the WSJ article can basically be summed up "Look, if you want to *really* trash the welfare state, and *really* eliminate taxes for the wealthy, you have to be tactically smarter about it!" So who should we rather see win among our enemies--the idiots or the cold, calculating manipulators? The idiots won't listen to reason, which is a weird kind of strength. But the manipulators have a better chess game.

The whole split thing is odd also because the Tea Party was created by elements of the mainstream right. What you have is the difference between propagandists and people who bought their propaganda, some of whom now have power of their own. Now you get the old line right saying "Whoa! You're not supposed to actually *believe* all that shit, you're just supposed to use it!" But it's not working well because a lot of that propaganda was in effect designed to inoculate not just against inconvenient facts but against rational thought itself. So the Tea Partiers aren't listening to reason a whole lot, and people like David Frum are all "We have created a monster!!"
It's kind of funny.

I think we can watch the 2 GOP factions slug it out without actually hoping for either side to win. Clearly the idiots (teaparty) are the more immediate threat. Hopefully the GOP will actually split into 2 separate parties .. dividing the Right would be good for everyone.

My take is that the so-called tea party is composed of mainly deluded Republicans who fancy themselves creating a new American revolution and transforming the US into a theocracy. It'll never happen but meanwhile what we're seeing with the budget crisis is their fantasy and paranoia writ large. I'm convinced that the majority of them are willing to plunge the world economy into yet another trough with little regard for the millions of Americans that will be affected. They won't be recorded as heroes but as traitors for causing a catastrophe that could have been easily avoided with a little common sense.