Notice how whatever a label proclaims about how good this product is good for you, the stuff inside is mostly chemicals and "by-products"? That's true of plenty of manufactured foods on the market and has been true for decades. Now it's true of an entire political movement.
Dana Milbank lists the actual ingredients of the canned "populist", "anti-elitist" movement called the "tea party."
"The elite's fear and loathing of the tea party movement is rooted in the recognition that the real change is only now coming," writes Tony Blankley, the conservative commentator who exempts himself from the elite label even though he worked for the speaker of the House and now toils for a prominent PR firm. The Tea Party, he wrote, will "constrain the elite's economic and cultural hegemony."
Oh? Who will do this constraining of the elite's hegemony? Why, people such as the Tea Party's Senate candidate from Alaska, Joe Miller (Yale Law School); and from Kentucky, Rand Paul (Duke Medical School), and from Colorado, Ken Buck (Princeton University).
And who will be helping these anti-elite elites get into office? Well, there's FreedomWorks, a Tea Party outfit run by Dick Armey, the former Republican lawmaker whose last job was with a big lobbying firm. His deputy at FreedomWorks is Matt Kibbe, who worked for none other than the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
There's also the Tea Party Express, the creation of longtime Republican consultant Sal Russo. A colleague at Russo's consulting firm pitched the Tea Party Express idea as a way to boost the company's bottom line. According to an internal e-mail intercepted by the New York Times, it came from a "desire to give a boost to our PAC and position us as a growing force/leading force."
The guy who put together the Tea Party "Contract From America" previously worked on Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign. Another Tea Party group, Americans for Prosperity, has been lavishly funded by the billionaire Koch brothers.
A movement of the plutocrats, by the political professionals and for the powerful: Now that's something Tea Partyers should be mad about.
They're not mad. They're in the spotlight, they're selling, they're raking in the profits, and they're loving it!
