The Beck Brigade

Congrats to the tea-partiers for the impressive crowds in DC today. One wonders where these people were when Bush was massively increasing debt, spending like LBJ, detaining citizens without charges and torturing them, and nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan? I guess limited government is an elastic notion. But any serious grass-roots movement against constantly expanding government is fine by me. But then you see the images and pictures and hysterical rhetoric ... and you see that this extremism and demonization of the president is as damaging to their cause as ANSWER was to the anti-war movement.

Here's a test: when you see as many posters lambasting Bush and Cheney and the GOP for getting us into this crisis in the first place, I will take these people seriously as genuine small government non-partisan conservatives and independents. In so far as they can pressure the Congress and president into taking the debt seriously in the future, good for them. In so far as they are proposing no practical solutions, and echo truly disturbing hatred of a president barely eight months in office, facing huge crises on all fronts, they are doing their own cause far more harm than good.

One more ugly picture after the jump: