These Tea Parties are going to be a ball

Much ink has been spilled regarding the “grassroots” anti-tax Tea Parties being held today all over this great land of ours. It truly is a people-powered awe-inspiring movement of ordinary citizens combating the tyranny of the Obama Administration. Or not. The brilliant Thomas Frank explains:

Unless it rains today, thousands of average people will stand up across the land, declare their mad-as-hell-ness. Look for folks to holler for lower estate taxes and a replacement for Sarbanes-Oxley. They will put on three-cornered hats, wave "don't tread on me" flags, and imagine that they are channeling the spirit of Tom Paine as they do their part to ease the troubles of the economy's winners.

And Fox News, which plans to cover the tea parties, will no doubt hail this plastic populism as the realest kind of social uprising, a movement that is the rightful expression of this year's discontents.

[Snip]

The conservative movement, too, has long been a master of this maneuver. From the days of Richard Nixon to those of Sarah Palin it has described itself as a rebellion of Middle America against elitist liberals; as a nation of Joe the Plumbers rising against interfering bureaucrats.

It has little patience with traditional populism of the anti-big-business sort. Looking around on the Web site of the D.C. pressure group FreedomWorks, for example, I came across a denunciation of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's "small-minded populism" written in January 2008 by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, now FreedomWorks's chairman. Mr. Huckabee's offense was his claim to favor "Main Street, not Wall Street," thereby implying, Mr. Armey sputtered, "that the interests of the two are not in alignment. . . ."

And when Dick Armey suggests that Wall Street is the one that's really down with the common people, you'd better believe it. The man is plastic populism to his styrene soul. According to his bio, he was the main author of the "Contract With America," and his group, FreedomWorks, is one of the chief promoters of today's tea parties, where a presumably more broad-minded populism will be rolled out, a version in which Wall Street and Main Street are always in alignment, and only Pennsylvania Avenue is capable of being out of step.

This is faux-populist outrage at its very finest and if there is a more cynical and craven operative than the oh so aptly named Dick Armey, I know not whom. John Cole at Balloon Juice has posted David Schuster’s hilarious rant on Armey et al. entitiled “Teabag Mouthpieces” (that was the actual chyron from MSNBC). Too funny.