Meanwhile, in Louisville

MANIFESTO

Matt Taibbi continues to show his harpooning prowess in a brutal jeremiad anent the Tea Party. Among his points:

At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them.

and

The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.

The rest of it — the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade — will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives. It's all on display ... in Kentucky, the unofficial capital of the Tea Party movement, where, ha, ha, the joke turns out to be on them.

Beyond the fact that I wish I could write this well, I think Taibbi pretty much has it nailed: The Tea Party "movement" will turn out to be a one hit wonder, and, once the 2010 elections have passed, its backers will no doubt go back to their selfish evangelical America-is-for-white-people existences.

Anyway, the article is fabulous and highly recommended.