They Are Who We Thought They Were

The Washington Post actually does some research on the teabaggers, comes to a stunning conclusion:

But a new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.

Hey, Post? How about you tell the person who published the deluded (unedited) ramblings of a teabagger as front page news a few months back?

Oh yeah, and this:

The report released by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People argues that Tea Party groups “have given platform to anti-Semites, racists and bigots,” and have attracted white nationalists looking for recruits.

“The Tea Party movement has unleashed a still inchoate political movement who are in their numerical majority, angry middle-class white people who believe their country, their nation, has been taken from them,” it says.

The study was written by Devin Burghart and Leonard Zeskind of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which is dedicated to examining and mobilizing against racist, anti-Semitic and far-right social movements. It analyzed what it calls six nationwide Tea Party networks at the core of the movement, and concludes that leaders of all but one — FreedomWorks, a libertarian group in Washington headed by Dick Armey, a former House Republican majority leader — have raised questions about the validity of President Obama’s birth certificate.

Yeah I know it came from the NAACP, which allows media organizations to make it a NAACP vs. Teabaggers story, rather than taking a closer look at any of the hundreds of documented examples they cite.

It would also be nice if either of these stunning new revelations were occasionally mentioned during all the fawning media attention they'll be getting in the run up to the election.

I'm not gonna hold my breath.