Tea partiers: Sore losers

It drives my conservative-slash-libertarian friends crazy when I say this, but I’ll say it again: The tea partiers are a bunch of sore losers. Andrew Sullivan makes the case:

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.

Right. I have a great deal of respect for genuine small-government conservatives — even though I think their utopia is unrealistic and (given the actual governance of actual Republicans) unlikely. But the idea that there’s all these people who were always angry about increased spending and increased entitlements under the Bush Administration — but kept silent until Obama pushed them one step too far — strikes me as laughable. There’s some sincere people among the tea partiers, no doubt, but it’s not really a small government movement. It’s an anti-Democratic governance movement. And while it’s certainly their right to be anti-Democratic, nobody should be under the illusion that these people are particularly principled.