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If anyone now believes that the Tea Party movement is some third party movement based on frustration with our two-party political system, and that it will send candidates to oppose even the Republican Party, is a fool.

Sarah Palin made that plain in the Q&A after her Tea Party Convention speech:

Palin: The Republican Party would be really smart to start trying to absorb as much of the Tea Party movement as possible.

Without Fox News, the teabagger "revolution" would have been a minor blip on the conservative Richter scale, but because Roger Ailes saw a golden opportunity to lash out at a newly elected and highly likable black president in a hateful fashion he jumped in--feet first.

Knowing that the media are too lazy to properly put them in context, and being able to hide behind them to cover his ass, Ailes put his weight behind them. As disappointed as liberals and progressives are in the Obama administration, Fox News ginned up the Tea Party protesters and gave them a huge media platform to help wield the blade that issued a tiny cut at a time. Knowing the economy would not bounce back, it's not a surprise that Americans would not be happy with the Democratic party, but the level of vitriol and hatred helped to it initially began with a blog post from a republican voter who knew conservatives were in trouble of being a bad memory for a while.

The Bill Kristols of the right have always longed for a right-wing populist movement that could make headway in America, but they also have believed they could firmly control them. That's why Dick Armey was dispatched with boatloads of cash, along with other right-wing billionaires, to pump in the necessary cash to keep it percolating.

A.C. Kleinheider opines:

Beginning Of The End: Sarah Palin Hijacks The Tea Party Movement

The tea party movement is dead. The one I was familiar with anyway. Judson Phillips held it down and Sarah Palin drove a stake right through its heart live last night on C-Span in front of an unsuspecting audience.

Sarah Palin didn’t give a tea party speech last night. She gave a partisan Republican address. It was a purely political speech designed to position her for a presidential run in 2012 or 2016. Period. She wasn’t there to celebrate the organic nature of a movement she had nothing to do with creating. She was there to co-opt the name and claim the brand as hers. And she did.

The movement, that came to be officially recognized almost a year ago but whose roots go back further than that, has been snuffed out and replaced in the public mind. The movement that began as a people’s movement of angry independent, libertarians and conservatives will now be thought as the movement of people like Palin, Dick Armey, Judson Phillips, Mark Skoda, etc. Essentially, a wholly owned subsidiary of the “Official Conservative Movement” and the Republican Party.

Sarah Palin is no independent voice, but a GOP politician. The Republicans need to co-opt the movement completely in order to capitalize on them, because really most of the movement is based on the ideology of arch-conservatives who will never vote for anything that is progressive. Indeed, a lot of what drives them is the hatred of all things progressive. See Glenn Beck as only the most recent and glaring example of this.

Carl Cameron described the teabaggers on Fox yesterday as people who support the Constitution and conservative values. Yep, that's about right.

Bloggers on the left can try to align themselves with the Tea Partiers, but it will only happen on issues that will not otherwise endanger votes being taken away from conservatives. You won't see Grover Norquist do anything that would jeopardize his long-term strategy of "defunding the left" and turning every voter against progressive values. And he's more than happy to use progressives as props to achieve that. It's really that simple.

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[H/t Heather]

One of the key points President Obama made in his back-and-forth with House Republicans seems to be really sticking in the craw of the right-wing pundit class:

Obama: I mean, the fact of the matter is that many of you, if you voted with the administration on something, are politically vulnerable in your home base, in your own party. You've given yourselves very little room to work in a bipartisan fashion, because what you've been telling your constituents is. 'This guy's doin' all kinds of crazy stuff that's going to destroy America!'

Bill Kristol, yesterday on Fox News Sunday:

Kristol: First of all, I agree with the president. I think he's been doing all kinds of crazy stuff that risks destroying America. But the good news is, a lot of it's been stopped.

Of course, he's not actually agreeing with the President -- but he certainly is proving his point, isn't he?

Indeed, it points up that it isn't just Republican congressmen telling their constituents that Obama is a radical black Marxist/fascist/nihilist out to destroy America. It's the entire right-wing pundit class -- most of all, nearly the entirety of Fox News and its talkers.

If anything, the congresscritters are just taking their cues from Fox and aping the talking points that flow out of the fetid imaginations of people like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Bill Kristol.

And as long as that's the case, well, we wish the president lotsa luck in getting Republican Congressmen to behave any differently.

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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News' Brit Hume that the Senate race in Massachusetts is a referendum on the Democrats' health care reform legislation. "Massachusetts is going to be a very, very close Senate race. Regardless of who wins, we have a referendum on the national health care bill. The American people are telling us please don't pass it," McConnell explained.

Following the interview with McConnell, other Fox News pundits spoke up to agree. "The voters are aware it's a national referendum on the health care bill and Obama big government liberal programs," said Bill Kristol.

"It's a referendum on health care and the Obama agenda," agreed Charles Krauthammer.

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Bloody Bill Kristol on Fox News Sunday claims that "the stimulus isn't stimulus" and says it's just resulted in more debt and says if the President "stops doing foolish things at least we can get some kind of recovery". Of course Bill has never found anything "foolish" about more military spending or worried about the debt we've incurred from it for that matter. We can always bankrupt the country to drop more bombs on poor people's heads, but heaven forbid not to get people back to work.

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Bloody Bill Kristol thinks that the embassy closing in Yemen "has been a victory for Al Qaida". No Bill, the neocons like yourself taking over the U.S. government giving them excuses to fuel extremism has been a "victory for Al Qaida". Bill was also not done crying about the Underwear Bomber being "lawyered up" and not being tortured in case there's more information we could have gotten from him. So nice to see Kristol has absolutely no faith in our criminal justice system.

WALLACE: Bill, is that -- as Brit frames it, is that the issue, that it’s a choice between getting tough or doing things, whether it’s on decisions about Guantanamo, decisions about criminal defendants, that may appeal to the rest of the world and that -- and the Obama administration is coming down on one side of that?

KRISTOL: I’m not even sure it appeals to the rest of the world, of course. I don’t think the rest of the world would be shocked if we treated him as an enemy combatant in -- consistently -- consistent with President Obama’s rules of interrogation -- no enhanced interrogation techniques -- but still try to interrogate him.

Mr. Brennan said to you that we are very worried that there are other Abdulmutallabs out there. This Abdulmutallab was there for four months. He might know who the others are. He might know their names.

We let him lawyer up, and right now he’s probably thinking, “Gee, maybe I could use that information to bargain with to get a reduced sentence.” That’s what Brennan seemed to indicate when he kept talking about how, “Well, we’re going to work with his lawyers, and we have some incentives to offer him.”

But this is operational intelligence in real time, and we are not treating it as a war. I mean, if this -- incidentally, when he said there’s no smoking gun, this is the smoking -- he is the smoking gun. Right?

His father comes, gives the CIA station chief in Africa his name. He -- a month later, he goes to Yemen, says he’s in Yemen. He’s in Yemen. He’s with this cleric whom we’re monitoring in Yemen, trying to kill in Yemen, Awlaki, who’s the same guy who’s been in touch with Major Hasan.

He goes to an airport using his own name, no disguise, no alias, buys with cash a one-way ticket to the U.S.

HUME: No luggage.

KRISTOL: No luggage. That -- he is the smoking gun. And frankly, for Mr. Brennan to say, “Well, no smoking gun,” that itself shows a kind of not-serious-about-the-war mentality.

And I would add one last thing. Closing the embassy in Yemen last night -- I mean, I don’t -- you know, no one wants State Department officials to be put at risk and all that, but that is a sign of weakness.

Closing the embassy? We can’t protect our own embassy in Yemen, a place we have Special Operations forces, a place we say we’re working with the government on the front lines of the war on terror, and there’s a terror threat and we close the embassy? That’s a victory for Al Qaida.

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Buddhism is inferior to Christianity when it comes to forgiveness of sins, according to Fox News pundit Brit Hume. Tiger Woods should turn his back on Buddhism and become a Christian to be forgiven for cheating on his wife, Hume told Fox News' Chris Wallace Sunday.

"The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith," said Hume. "He is said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of redemption and forgiveness offered by the Christian faith. My message to Tiger is, 'Tiger turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world.'"

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In typical fashion, Bill Kristol is upset that the attempted air plane bomber is 'lawyered up'. I guess he thinks law enforcement would have a better case against him if they just hurried up and tortured the guy. That'll help get him convicted Bill! Idiot.

WALLACE: Well, obviously, we were just plain lucky that this guy's device, explosive device, didn't work.

But, Bill Kristol, what does the Christmas Day terror attack tell you about the continued efforts of our enemies to try to strike the U.S. homeland?

KRISTOL: Well, they are our enemies, and we have to understand that it's a war. And what most worries me -- what most worries me about the reaction to the attack is we're still treating it as a law enforcement matter. The FBI is investigating. He's been arrested. He's been read his rights. In the Washington Post late yesterday afternoon, after the news was already coming out about the Yemen connections and stuff, a law enforcement authority was quoted as saying authorities are operating on the theory that he acted alone.

We so desperately want not to believe that we have to deal with this as a global threat from Al Qaida and that we need to act against the key nexuses of Al Qaida, such as in Yemen, that we hope these guys are just acting alone. But he wasn't acting alone.

[...]

WALLACE: You know, it's interesting, Juan, because it does come out today -- we find out that he had a visa because he was a student in London. I guess the visa had lapsed.

He applied for a new visa in May because he said he was going to take a course. Somebody there checked out and said, "You know what? That course that you're talking about doesn't exist. It's a bogus course." They didn't give him a new visa. And somehow one wonders if that should have been in his file.

WILLIAMS: Well, I think it was in his file. It's how we know it. But I think that the big issue...

WALLACE: Well, I think they know it from the British authorities now.

WILLIAMS: Right, but I think that one of the -- the big issue here is that he went on this list in November, the same time that his father went to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria.

So the question is then at some point should he have been advanced to at least the no-screening list, which is about 14,000 people. And you know what? We don't know. It looks like they're going to ramp up a lot of this now. Sort of the horse is out of the barn, or however you say that phrase, to try to go after people at this level.

But to me, it doesn't seem fair to start, you know, all these political recriminations. Jennifer says the White House is very aware that that kind of criticism is coming. But it seems to me at this point it's a bunch of finger-pointing and a bunch of politics in Washington.

The real thing is we have hardened America as a target. And despite that, what we're seeing is an increase in these so-called -- and here I disagree with Bill Kristol -- lone wolves, people who are...

INGRAHAM: We don't know yet.

WILLIAMS: ... as a result of...

WALLACE: We don't know -- we don't know that.

WILLIAMS: No, I think we do know that.

WALLACE: How do we know that?

INGRAHAM: No, we don't.

WILLIAMS: I think what we know is...

WALLACE: We don't know if he was in Yemen or not. Where did he get...

WILLIAMS: No.

WALLACE: ... the PETN?

WILLIAMS: Clearly -- look.

WALLACE: We don't know any of that.

WILLIAMS: I think what we know at this point -- all that we know is that this guy had not spent any large amount of time with Al Qaida. He may have visited Yemen at...

INGRAHAM: We don't know that.

WILLIAMS: ... one point. That's about it. And he may have been given the PETN and a small amount...

INGRAHAM: Well...

KRISTOL: That's enough time to possibly...

WILLIAMS: OK.

KRISTOL: ... kill -- this is the problem. This is precisely the problem. This guy has been lawyered up. We don't know anything. One reason we don't know anything -- he's not being treated like an enemy combatant. He's not being interrogated. We're not finding out everything we could know about Awlaki.

This is an ongoing attack -- enemy attempt to attack the United States, and we're treating it as a one-off law enforcement case.

Transcript via Lexis Nexis.

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Bill Kristol pretends the Republicans ever had any desire for bipartisanship and recites the tired old talking point that there was no outreach to Republicans on the stimulus bill, even though the bill included tax cuts put in to appease Republicans. And as our own Jon Perr noted this week, the Republicans have absolutely no desire for bipartisanship.

So what does Bill Kristol turn to as proof that the Republicans care about bipartisanship? They supported the troop surge in Afghanistan. What a great example Bill -- being willing to send more troops for cannon fodder. I guess Bill forgot about their recent stunt where they were willing to delay defense spending to hold up the health care bill.

WALLACE: Bill, do you think Republicans bear any responsibility for the -- I must say, I think the tone of this town is as bad, if not worse, than ever. Do Republicans bear any responsibility? Or is this all on the president?

KRISTOL: I think it's mostly on him and on his top aides, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod. And it goes back to the stimulus. They could have had -- believe me, they could have split the Republican Party and they could have split conservatives on the stimulus. Everyone agreed the government had to do something.

I would have supported a moderate stimulus. And you know, 25 -- when I talked to Mitch McConnell before the year began, I said, "What do you expect to happen in the stimulus?" He said, "I assume Obama will get 80 votes. The country's -- the economy's falling off a cliff. We're not going to stand in the way of a package of tax cuts and infrastructure improvements if it's reasonable."

He let Pelosi and Reid and the Democratic Congress write the stimulus package. It made it easy for Republicans to oppose it. As Laura correctly says, Republicans feel they were right to oppose it substantively, and they certainly haven't paid a price politically.

I think that was the sort of the mistake he made at the beginning that made it very easy for Republicans to decide both substantively and politically it's right to oppose Obama.

But Republicans have been bipartisan. What have they supported the president on? On Afghanistan, one of his toughest decisions, increasing troops there. And Republicans, to their credit, have not played politics with that and have supported him.

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TPM caught this clip from back in April with a prank call to David Brooks on Washington Journal and think it's the same man who called Sen. John Barrasso this week and claimed he was a teabagger who was afraid his prayers for Sen. Robert Byrd to die before the health care bill vote had backfired and something happened to Sen. James Inhofe instead. The above clip is from Washington Journal Dec. 22, 2009. Here's the clip from TPM with the call to David Brooks.

I think I found another clip with the same man. I knew that voice sounded familiar. Although this call was from Florida, I think it's the same person. I think I've heard him on there a few other times but haven't found any of the other clips. This is from March 29, 2009--Bill Kristol Doesn't Think He Owes Anyone An Apology For Hyping WMD Lies on Iraq.

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Listen to all three and let me know if you think it's the same man.

Zina Saunders: Kicked to death

Pushing Rope: Florida GOP appointed officials use "pancake and waffles" code in emails to avoid Sunshine Laws? Were the pancakes served with carbon dioxide? Yum.

Wait. Is Bill Kristol getting his column ideas from Wonkette? I guess they're Not Part of the Problem.

It's been a rough year for Tiger Woods, but he's still bringing home at least one more trophy. Congrats!

And speaking of awards, Susie Bright is a Golden Dukes judge this year: "the Dukes honor excellence in public corruption, betrayals of the public trust, and generally shameless behavior." You can nominate your favorites at her comment thread here.

Mike's away this weekend. Round up by Blue Gal.

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From Think Progress--Kristol: Obama’s Nobel Speech ‘Lays The Predicate For The Legitimate Use Of Force’ Against Iran:

Since President Obama delivered his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech last week, Bill Kristol has been arguing that it is somehow in-line with his neoconservative philosophy and that it vindicates President Bush’s “global war on terror” that he wholeheartedly supported.

[...]

“The satisfying purity of indignation,” as Matt Duss noted, is “a wonderfully succinct description of the simplistic and destructive ideology that drove George W. Bush’s foreign policy, and which Bill Kristol is still trying heartily to convince himself and others hasn’t been discredited.”

Continue reading...

Transcript via.

WALLACE: After a series of speeches overseas in which he apologized for past American actions, President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize this week with a strong statement of the positive role the U.S. has played in the world.

And it's time now for our Sunday group -- Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, Mara Liasson of National Public Radio, former State Department official Liz Cheney, and Juan Williams, also from National Public Radio.

So, Bill, the president chose an interesting time and place to make this speech, before an audience -- accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, of course, before an audience, I think it's fair to say, of European leftists. He defended the use of force and said that the U.S. is not the problem with the world.

How significant a change in the president's world view?

KRISTOL: It could be pretty significant. It wasn't the speech the Nobel Peace Prize committee expected him to give, I think, when they awarded him the prize entirely for being not George W. Bush. And he gave the most Bush-like speech of his presidency.

Those who -- what did he say? The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. That's a very elegant and strong statement of the fact that you can't just want peace.

Continue reading »

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What hath Republicans wrought?

Sure, they believed, as John noted the other day, that when they were unleashing what Bill Kristol likes to call "guided populism", they were in fact opening the gates for right-wing populism. And now they're looking not only at a a phenomenon much more popular than the standard Republican brand, but a movement that is about to swallow them whole.

And the Tea Party organizers -- notably the Astroturf outfits that originated the Parties, such as FreedomWorks and Americans For Prosperity -- are making that perfectly clear. Two spokesmen for those groups -- Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks and the AFP's Tim Phillips, went on Hardball yesterday and made this explicit:

MATTHEWS: Matt, how about third party? What about the Tea Party? Sarah Palin is kind of hard to read. She is fascinating. Let‘s face it, we‘re all fascinated with her, because she‘s exciting as a political figure right now. But she‘s talking third party. I mean, she answered the question of Lars Larson. Maybe it just came to mind, but she said, yeah, I might go third party, something like that. Would you guys knock off an incumbent Republican by going third party? You know how the vote splits. Split the right, the Dem wins.

KIBBE: The better way to do it is to take over the Republican party. Frankly, that‘s what our goal is. We need to replace the Republican establishment with fiscal conservatives that are actually willing to cut spending.

All this talk about a "third party" is just so much smokescreen. What's actually happening is that the GOP is fast becoming a full-fledged right-wing-populist entity. Which means that the latent extremism lurking out on the right's fringes for so many years is becoming its new lifeblood, such as it is.

Funny thing is, as Matthews managed to point out early in the segment, not even the Tea Partiers' supposed hero -- Ronald Reagan -- can live up to their standards:

MATTHEWS: Has there ever been a strong conservative president, for example, in your lifetime or anybody—your grandfather‘s lifetime? Who do you look to as a good role model for the tea party people?

KIBBE: Well, obviously, Ronald Reagan is the closest thing we have.

MATTHEWS: What did he do in terms of fiscal policy?

KIBBE: Oh, he—he said that we shouldn't spend money we don‘t have, and he said that the government shouldn't get involved in things that it‘s not very good at doing.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Yes. Have you ever checked the numbers with Reagan?

KIBBE: Well, I understand. I understand...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: The national debt went from under $1 trillion to $3 trillion. He did more to increase exponentially the size of the debt of any president in history.

And he's your role model.

KIBBE: Well, President Obama is...

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: No, I'm asking you. I have asked you one president that you can look up to who was good at tea party politics and ideology.

KIBBE: Right. Right.

MATTHEWS: If it's not Reagan, because he clearly didn't do it, who do you look to? Coolidge? How far do you have to look back?

KIBBE: I think we need to find somebody that can meet that standard.

MATTHEWS: So, nobody has recently?

KIBBE: No, certainly not.

Ah well. Blowing off cognitive dissonance is a special teabagger trait. It just adds to their "insane" mystique.

Republicans may have thought these guys had their backs. But now they're looking with increasing worry back over their shoulders. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind, dudes.

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Bill O'Reilly opened The Factor talking about the new Rasmussen poll that says that people would vote for teabaggers over republicans. Tea Party Tops GOP on Three-Way Generic Ballot

Running under the Tea Party brand may be better in congressional races than being a Republican. In a three-way Generic Ballot test, the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds Democrats attracting 36% of the vote. The Tea Party candidate picks up 23%, and Republicans finish third at 18%. Another 22% are undecided.

This is really bad news for Republicans/conservatives. Bill Kristol loves right-wing populism just as long as they can be controlled, but now the problem is that the conservative elites can't control them.

The teabaggers must be driving Kristol's Straussian beliefs crazy. A good mob is a controlled mob that is led by conservative elites who are the only people truly qualified to lead society. Gingrich knows not to take his findings too far because teabaggers are already mad at him, so he immediately praises the teabagger Queen, Sarah Palin. BillO tries to say that Palin is as inexperienced as Obama. Sure, Bill, whatever you say. But back to Newt.

Gingrich:.. I think Going Rouge could in fact take Palin to a third party, the challenge is historically third parties are protests. They're not a path to power. And as you pointed out the first effect of a third party in 2012 would be the re-election of Obama and would be the survival of Pelosi as Speaker of the House, you now, maybe in perpetuity.

O'Reilly: I don't think so, I think Pelosi maybe booted out of there next November, that's how bad things are.

Gingrich: but she might, she wouldn't be if you had enough third party candidates (garbled) splitting the opposition.

O'Reilly: The earliest a third party could be viable is in 2012.

Newt is going to have a really tough time trying to convince the teabaggers to join up with the GOP establishment because they want to control it. When conservatives reached out to the black helicopter/militia crowd, they put their possible comeback in the hands of insane people. Take that, Bill Kristol!

Here's how Bill Kristol views the teabaggers, via pg 46 from the "Gang of Five."

Only elitist, brilliant men like Bill Kristol are allowed to lead people. Real Americans are but sheep to be herded and controlled to do what their elitist elders tell them to do. What a horrible and disgusting philosophy to live by, but that's Kristol and his crew for you.

You can pick up Nina Easton's book here: Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Ascendacy

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Countdown's Worst Persons segment for Nov. 16, 2009 with winner Bill Kristol, for arguing that we should just skip Nidal Hasan's trial and just go right to the execution. Runners-up Steve Doocy and Glenn Beck.

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Former Vice President Dick Cheney chose not to run for president in 2008 but his daughter suggested that he might be a good candidate in 2012. Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Liz Cheney dropped the former vice president's name as the panel was discussing President Barack Obama's decision to respect the Japanese Emperor by bowing during a formal greeting.

Fox News felt compelled to cover Obama bow to Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko after conservative blogs attacked the president. "Sarah Palin would not have bowed to the Emperor of Japan. She wouldn't have even curtsied to him," said Bill Kristol.

But for Liz Cheney, Palin wasn't the only answer to replacing a president that would dare to pay respect to a foreign leader. "You can look at the comparison and think Cheney 2012," teased Cheney. It wasn't clear if Dick Cheney's daughter was joking but the Fox panel seemed warm to the idea.

"That's all I'm going to say," she said.

Kristol, who has long been an advocate for Sarah Palin, had an even better idea. "Cheney/Palin," he suggested.

"Or Palin/Cheney. Don't be sexist," replied Chris Wallace.