Yesterday Rand Paul Attributed His Victory To The Power Of The Teabaggers-- But It's A Power Based On An Entirely Fictitious, Paranoid World View

Two good friends, John Amato and Dave Neiwert, have a new book coming out in two weeks, Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane. I haven't read it yet... but I feel like I did because Amato talked to me about so frequently when he was writing his chapters. Yesterday he and Dave did a guest column at the Washington Post as a preliminary to the release of what is likely to be an important link in the current political discourse. They've identified 10 of the biggest fallicies teabaggers are laboring under, in large part due to the careful Republican propaganda offensive from shills like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Shawn Hannity, Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs, Michael Steel and lou Dobbs. Although this is only the tip of the iceberg, here are the top 10 "beliefs" of the teabaggers that are provably untue:

1. The birth-certificate conspiracy. Reality: Not even official birth certificates from Hawaii, newspaper clippings from 1961, and the testimony of state officials will convince the true-blue Tea Partiers. Which is why WorldNetDaily’s Joseph Farah lectured the National Tea Party Convention for an hour about the “truth” of the birth-certificate story.

2. Death panels. Reality: PolitiFact named Sarah Palin’s Facebook invention its “Lie of the Year,” and the belief was thoroughly exposed as a falsehood by every news network (even Fox). Yet Palin still insists that the panels exist somewhere in the health-care reform bill that was signed into law, its actual language notwithstanding.

3. Obama is a Muslim/Socialist/Fascist. Glenn Beck’s fantasy of the week - one week Obama was a Socialist, the next he was a Communist, then a Fascist. Then it was on to Marxism and Maoism-- was avidly adopted by sign-bearing fans at Tea Party gatherings, who sometimes shared Beck’s confusion by just calling Obama All of the Above. Reality: Give us a break. Obama’s self-evident cautious centrism, embodied by his health-care reform package stripped of a public option, as well as his more recent embrace of a limited offshore drilling program, has infuriated liberals in his party-- but it hasn’t stopped Tea Partiers from denouncing the president as a radical anyway.

4. Obama is going to take away our guns. Well, the NRA managed to scare a whole lot of people into buying up every gun and piece of ammunition in sight the first year or so after Obama’s election. And at least five police officers died because the suspects they were arresting feared Obama was going to take away their guns. But Obama not only has adhered to his promise not to address gun-control issues, there hasn’t been even a breath of it from his administration. Which, of course, just makes the paranoids that much more paranoid: It’s proof that he’s really up to something.

5. Obama is raising our taxes. Reality: Obama lowered taxes for 95 percent of working Americans in his first year in office. But, you know, he’s a liberal Democrat-- and for true-blue right-wing folks, that ALWAYS means a tax hike.

6. Fascism is a left-wing phenomenon. We can thank Jonah Goldberg-- with a big assist from Beck-- for the popularity of this one, even though Goldberg’s thesis has been demolished and angrily dismissed by academic historians. It’s especially come in handy for Tea Partiers with Obama-as-Hitler signs, who are not impressed by those pointy-headed professorial types anyway.

7. Global warming is a hoax. So Sean Hannity assures us, citing the Climategate brouhaha -- which was itself shown largely to be a hoax of its own. Meanwhile, the world’s ocean levels keep rising, and glaciers and the polar ice cap keep receding-- regardless of the endless words thrown up denying that they are.

8. Some 16,000 new IRS agents will enforce the new health care reform act by throwing you in jail. Reality: The IRS is actually only increasing its spending in the coming budget year as it normally would-- but some Republican operatives decided to figure out how many positions its increased budget would buy, and came up with 16,000, a figure that then became gospel on Newt Gingrich’s lips. According to the same mythmakers, this nonexistent new army of health care police was going to start throwing people in jail if they failed to buy health insurance-- though in fact, the only penalties contemplated for such failures are fines and taxes.

9. Two million people were at the 9/12 March on Washington. At the culmination of a monthlong promotion (highlighted by a national Tea Party Express bus tour) by Beck and Fox News, about 70,000 people gathered on the National Mall on September 12 to protest. Beck cited an erroneous early report that over a million had shown up. Later that grew to be two million, the figure now commonly cited by Tea Party leaders as evidence of their tremendous numerical force.

10. The Tea Parties are a non-partisan, broad grassroots movement. Sure, if by non-partisan you mean rabidly paleo-conservative, to the point of even dismissing Republicans, and by grassroots you mean fake populism organized and whipped up by the most popular cable-news network on television, with a heaping helping of corporate financing.

Tea Party folks and their defenders also want to believe that they’re just ordinary Americans who want to be serious about helping their country. But it’s pretty hard to fit that description when you embrace plain old nuttiness.