If the Dems were a party of Alan Graysons instead of a pack of gutless weasels, they could take advantage of "Tough Times for the Tea Party"

What if Dems had loudly and proudly fought back?

"It's been a long time since the media took their job as guardians of democratic discourse this seriously. Let's hope it's the start of a new trend."

-- Sara Robinson, in a new Campaign for America's Future

blogpost, "Tough Times for the Tea Party?"

by Ken

Our friend Sara Robinson is back with this follow-up of sorts to her important CAF post earlier this month, "None Dare Call It Sedition," in which, as I pointed out here, she identified what the loudmouth doody-slingers of the Far Right (apparently the only kind of Right that's allowed in the U.S. today, unless you count the Far, Far Right and the So Far Right It Almost Comes Out the Other End) are engaged in as sedition -- the "crime of creating a revolt, disturbance, or violence against lawful civil authority with the intent to cause its overthrow or destruction." Sara insisted it's time for prosecutors to be prosecuting sedition, and as an immediate practical objective, "We need to start talking about this for what it is, and calling it out whenever it happens."

"We are a fickle people, ruled by a fickle media," Sara begins the new post. "It's astonishing how much national opinion can change in just a week or two. And if you don't believe me, just ask the Tea Party." And she proceeds to catalogue the woes endured by the Teabaggers in "a rough couple of weeks," including:

* the disappointing turnout for the third Teabagger express bus tour. ("There is, absolutely, such a thing as overexposure; and the Tea Party seems to have finally achieved it. Reporters coming out for the third time around were no longer distracted by the novelty value of costumes, firearms, and signs -- and thus more likely to start looking at little deeper at who was there and what they were actually saying.")

* strong indications of Fox Noise "backing off on its commitment to the movement." ("This is a costly blow. If the Tea Party loses the amplification provided by FOX's full-throated noise machine, and the day may not be far off when the Tea Party might is nothing more than a bunch of old ladies in gloves and hats, sitting around drinking, y'no, tea.")

* the media finally picking up -- "somehow, somewhere" -- on the Teabaggers' seditious intent. ("Quite a few journalists and their editors made the resolution that this was something that responsible news professionals shouldn't be feeding into, and decided not to spend any more bandwidth on it," leading to the quote I've planted at the top of this post.)

* fuller understanding of what a peculiar and relatively small demographic the Teabaggers actually are, including their strong racist component.

* widening and hardening of the split between the Teabaggers' Palinist "corporatist wing" and the Paulist libertarians.

* TPM Muckraker's documentation of the financial role played by slimy Koch Industries in funding what we've always known was a basically astroturf rather than grass-roots movement.

All of which has "politicians are backpedaling away from the Tea Party's seditionist rhetoric at a speed that ought to qualify them for the next Summer Olympics."

Elected Republicans aren't thrilled by the prospect of facing primary challenges from the Tea Party, which are starting to take shape here and there. GOP leaders are realizing that if the Tea Party candidates win those challenges, they've got almost no chance of winning the general elections and keeping those seats come fall. And almost every other pol with any sense is getting some mileage between themselves and the Tea Party's more rebellious excesses, out of fear that they'll be seen as standing too close for plausible deniability when the next act of right-wing domestic terrorism occurs.

Now this is still far from the end of the astonishing crusade of lies and delusions that has engulfed nearly half the country since the disintegration of the Bush presidency, as all the GOP rats abandoned all those sinking ships of state. But it shows how misleading the screaming noise of the Right-Wing Noise Machine can be, and how thin the support it claims.

Which makes me wonder about the stock response of Democrats, as typified in that shameful WaPo pollster op-ed the other day, urging Dems to "boldly" flee to the gutless, principleless center and pray. One thing you have to give the Right credit for as it took over political dominance of the country in the post-Reagan years: Its champions weren't afraid to take stands and let voters know about them.

Just review the dozens of House and Senate races Howie has reported on in these last several months, where Democratic pols and, even worse, party officialdom (often including the White House) is consistently have fallen over one another racing to be the first to sound indistinguishable from "Just Say No" Republicans. As Howie keeps showing us, all over the country there are Democrats who believe in real Democratic values willing to take the plunge into serious campaigning. The problem has been that, in almost every case, their party does't want anything to do with them.

Can you imagine what the Dems might even yet do in November if voters knew that they believe in something -- that is, something other than self-preservation?

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