Just like Leonard Pitts does nearly every time he puts fingers to keyboard, Eugene Robinson shows himself here to be utterly clueless:
The overhyped tea party phenomenon is more about symbolism and screaming than anything else. A “movement” that encompasses gun nuts, tax protesters, devotees of the gold standard, Sarah Palin, insurance company lobbyists, “constitutionalists” who have not read the Constitution, Medicare recipients who oppose government-run health care, crazy “birthers” who claim President Obama was born in another country, a contingent of outright racists and a bunch of fat-cat professional politicians pretending to be “outsiders” is not a coherent intellectual or political force.Fat-cat professional politicians? Really? I seem to recall exactly those people being a target of the tea partiers' ire. And where are these lobbyists and tax protesters? Tea partiers actually pay their taxes; they only protest taxes to the extent that they're too high.I guess I shouldn't be surprised that some Beltway media slimeball like Eugene Robinson would choose to tar the whole movement based on the attitudes of a few that the movement as a whole chooses to disavow, but that doesn't make him any less wrong, and it doesn't make him any less of an asshole. As far as him saying they're not a "coherent intellectual or political force," well, that's just him whistling past the graveyard. If the tea partiers weren't a coherent political force, then there wouldn't be so much media attention directed on them or energy spent on making them look worse than they really are. As for the intellectual part of it -- well, I really don't think an intellectual midget like Robinson is the least bit qualified to make that assessment.
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