Scary People

It is fascinating to watch Sarah Palin take on Karl Rove, Bush's political genius.  Why Rove is allowing himself to get sucked into that conflict is mysterious to me, but if Palin can take down Rove, that will certainly increase her credibility as a political genius in her own right.  Andrew Sullivan writes:

I think Palin is now the GOP leader, and has now ousted even Rove....This is a radical, cultural revolt that the elites have no way of controlling, and which they have encouraged at every turn.

What also strikes me is how O'Donnell disproves the notion that the tea party is uninterested in social issues. O'Donnell is a fundamentalist fanatic - a social reactionary of almost comic proportions. She opposes legal abortion in cases of rape and incest, opposes masturbation, women in the military and sees gays as "curable". And yet there seems no tension between her and the fiscally-oriented tea-partiers. This hope that somehow they can mean the down-playing of Christianism seems like wishful thinking to me. And the idea of these people running foreign policy on the basis of religious doctrine, Greater Israel, institutionalized torture and anti-Muslim bigotry, is terrifying.

The extreme reactionary nature of the Tea Party movement is becoming more apparent every day. Predictions of such a populist movement in response to our growing economic/political/cultural crisis have been around for a long time. I don't know a lot about Father Coughlin in the thirties, but Palin and her hordes reminds me of that. FDR was somehow able to defeat that form of populism, because he put forward the New Deal.  Will Obama?

Lord, these are scary people.