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CNN has for the last year or so brought more and more of these Tea Party and right-wing ideologues onboard as contributors (Erick Erickson, Dana Loesch, Will Cain, are a few of the others). And for the most part they've behaved themselves on-air enough not to cause major controversies or headaches, even while their outside activities are among the most bitterly partisan around, or in the case of Loesch, just plain noxious. And we remember the blatant pandering with the so-called CNN/Tea Party Express Debate last September. So when CNN began to have Amy Kremer of the Tea Party Express on regularly it was probably only a matter of time before her true colors would show themselves.

This morning Soledad O'Brien called Kremer out for a series of tweets she made recently. Kremer was unapologetic, but she didn't look too happy about it.

Huge difference between @mittromney & @barackobama is tht Mitt luvs America! We need a president that luvs this country! #RNC2012 #GOP2012

— Amy Kremer (@AmyKremer) August 31, 2012

This deliberate strategy of trying to paint President Obama as "the other" should have ended with its failure in 2008, yet it persists in the constant refrain of dog-whistles we hear from these people: 'Marxist', 'Foreign', 'Muslim', with the sickness of Birtherism and the like. Republicans don't seem to care if they're seen as bigots anymore either, and in fact many have publicly embraced it.

Perhaps CNN has, inadvertently, done a public service by giving these bigots a more mainstream platform than they'd enjoy on Fox News but by continuing to pollute the public discourse we are all the poorer for it.

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As we already saw with the "class act" of Dana Loesch's husband Chris and Fox contributor Steven Crowder and their sorry, racist excuse for what's supposed to pass for a "rap" video, the real wingnuttery at CPAC this year was with the panel segments as opposed to just the general contempt for liberals and horrid policy prescriptions being offered by the headliners.

Case in point, this panel as described by the CPAC web site -- Tea Party versus Occupy:

Unlike their leftist counterparts in the “Occupy” movement, Tea Party activists do not need to be paid or coerced into advancing their ideas, free market activists said during one of the closing panels at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Dana Loesch, Editor-in-Chief of BigJournalism.com, told audience members that progressives operate from a false assumption that says Tea Party activists will not demonstrate without offered some kind of inducement. In reality, she said, they actually describing themselves. Occupy members who were demonstrating outside of the CPAC conference in D.C. acknowledged that were being paid $60 to be there.

“It always amazes me how progressives think that conservatives can’t get organized or demonstrate without getting paid,” Loesch said. “They do it for free because they believe in it.”

Amy Kremer, chair of the Tea Party express, said that the movement she was identified with has more staying power because it has the right ideas. By contrast, the “Occupy” movement has resorted to unsavory tactics and has already lost credibility with the American people.

There's a bit more there, but they somehow forgot to mention this gem from panelist and Americans for Prosperity Pennsylvania State Director Jennifer Stefano:

STEFANO: The one thing I get asked is, what is the difference between the tea party and Occupiers... but I always say one thing. If you're standing in a room and you're not sure how to separate the tea partiers from the Occupiers, do one thing. Raise an American flag. The tea party will stand and put their hands over their heart and pledge to it while the Occupiers deficate on it.

I find that really humorous since the only person I seem to remember being proud of "dropping trou" lately, was her cohort on that panel, Dana Loesch.

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Fox's Megyn Kelly brought on the Tea Party Express Chairwoman Amy Kremer and the ACLU's Mark Sawyer to discuss the crowds at the recent GOP debates where people there were cheering for the number of executions Gov. Rick Perry carried out in the state of Texas, and for Ron Paul's position that somehow churches and charitable organizations could manage to take care of someone who is sick and doesn't have insurance, with a few in the crowd being so crass as to yell “Let him die” when asked Wolf Blitzer's hypothetical on who pays when someone finds themselves in that situation.

Naturally, Kremer said she was very offended by the cheering for allowing an uninsured person to just be allowed to die and said this about those that yelled out at the debate:

KREMER: Well Megyn, first of all I'd say that the people that yelled that out were not “tea party” activists. They were hecklers. You know, we do not, the “tea party” movement does not focus on the social issues whatsoever. And when you're talking about, you know, capital punishment and then the question that Wolf Blitzer asked, you're talking about two different aspects there. And we just don't go there. Focusing on these issues is not going to turn the economy around. It's not going to pay down our debt and deficit, put people back to work, and that's not what we're focused on. I have in the last couple of days tried to find out who yelled that out, because I want to know. It wasn't fair to the rest of the people from the audience. And I can tell you when it happened we all turned around to look and identify who it was, because we were appalled at that behavior. It was absolutely unacceptable.

Okay, fair enough that no one knows for sure who the people were who yelled out the “Let him die” statement. That said, Kremer doesn't actually know whether this was some self-described “tea party” activist or not, does she? I don't think it actually matters all that much though because her group which is nothing but a bunch of AstroTurf-ers looking out for the interests of big business and the insurance companies among others may not be crass enough to say out loud that their political position is to just let the uninsured pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and if they were not fortunate enough to have insurance, they're probably going to die, the end result if the same. When this woman and her ilk get on board for single-payer and quit looking out for the interests of their corporate masters, I'll believe that any of them have a charitable bone in their body. Until then, she should be considered nothing more than a spokesperson for the Koch brothers, big pharma, the insurance companies, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and any of the rest of them that are sponsoring her so-called "movement."

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Andrea Mitchell again allowed the Tea Party Express' Amy Kremer to come on her show and paint herself as some sort of representative of a grass roots movement when as I noted after the last time Mitchell had her on the air, that's a bit of a stretch to put it kindly.

MSNBC and CNN who both try to paint themselves as being either "liberal" or "balanced" in their coverage unlike Fox who just doesn't even care what their viewers think, have both continually tried to paint these astroturfers as somehow being "grass roots" and not tied to the hip with the big monied interests that support the GOP, or that anyone should care about a word they have to say, with the exception of Rachel Maddow who's actually done a very good job of calling them out.

Without giving the viewers some background on who's writing checks to support these groups, people like Mrs. Greenspan should quit lying to their audience and letting them believe that it's just everyday citizens organizing that are supporting this astroturf movement that Kremer claims to represent.

We've got real protests going on around the country in America and around the world that our media ignores on a daily basis because of how fed up most people are with our political leadership. Unless you watch a program like Democracy Now, you don't know about most of them.

In the mean time, someone who was married to the man who did countless amounts of damage to our economy is allowed to come on the air and interview a woman who is from a fake grass movement and ask her what she thinks about our current field of GOP primary contenders, as though voters should care one iota what this woman thinks about anything or that she somehow actually has the interests of most of those voters she pretends to represent at heart.

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Andrea Mitchell brought on the Tea Party Express's Amy Kremer to discuss the ongoing fight over a budget deal and whether there might be a government shutdown and painted this gal as some sort of "grass roots" activist. This is the same woman who was sued by the Tea Party Patriots, as TPM reported, for her involvement with the Tea Party Express and them being overly tied to the GOP.

The woman rattled off every GOP talking point on the budget to the point where it may as well have been a Republican pol up there reciting the lines. I'd just like to thank Andrea Mitchell for helping the Republicans with their astroturf rebranding effort here in trying to paint this woman as some kind of spokesperson for the working class. Bravo Andrea.

These wingnuts in the "tea party" are clamoring for a government shutdown and the Republican Party has allowed for the extremists and the TeaBirchers in their midst to completely take over the party. If they really want a government shutdown over their political ideologies I think they're going to see a huge backlash from the electorate once those that don't pay much attention to politics start seeing layoff notices, their paychecks not showing up, tax refunds not coming back and a host of other things that are going to affect real people's lives in really harmful ways.

I really don't understand how the Republicans allowing the fringe of their party to highjack it during this debate does them any political favors.