On Tea-Bagging

Huhuhuhuhuhhuhu. You said tea-bagging...

Anyway, now that I'm done with Beavis, I see that Paul Krugman notes that GOP zaniness is positively ancient:

One way to get a good sense of the current state of the G.O.P., and also to see how little has really changed, is to look at the "tea parties" that have been held in a number of places already, and will be held across the country on Wednesday. These parties -- antitaxation demonstrations that are supposed to evoke the memory of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution -- have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so.

But everything that critics mock about these parties has long been standard practice within the Republican Party.

Thus, President Obama is being called a "socialist" who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.

But the charge of socialism is being thrown around only because "liberal" doesn't seem to carry the punch it used to. And if you go back just a few years, you find top Republican figures making equally bizarre claims about what liberals were up to. Remember when Karl Rove declared that liberals wanted to offer "therapy and understanding" to the 9/11 terrorists?

I've said this before, but it was Schiavo that did it for me. That was the moment when GOP kookery went into full blossom.