Sullivan beautifully summarizes the awesome ridiculousness and dishonest contradictions of the tea baggers. He concludes:
...What it looks like to me is some kind of amorphous, generalized rage on the part of those who were used to running the country and now don't feel part of the culture at all. But the only word for that is: tantrum.
These are not tea-parties. They are tea-tantrums. And the adolescent, unserious hysteria is a function not of a movement regrouping and refinding itself. It's a function of a movement's intellectual collapse and a party's fast-accelerating nervous breakdown.
It's only appropriate, then, that one of the movement's leaders, Glenn Beck, fancies himself a modern-day Howard Beale who, as I wrote in my column this week, was actually a tragic, suicidal character caught in the grips of an extended nervous breakdown, and who was consequently taken advantage of by his ratings-hungry bosses.