From Driftglass:
They really aren't that complicated.
Because. There. Is. No. Tea. Party.
As we Liberals have said many, many, many times before —as we were saying immediately after they appeared on the national scene and were slobberingly embraced by the national media as a Totally New Awesome Shiny Object—the Tea Party is nothing more than the same, cranky, white pig-ignorant GOP base voters who have been flinging the United States off of one cliff after another for most of my adult lifetime.
The same, old (very old) coalition of bigots, fundies and assorted other proudly ignorant meatsticks (tarted up for the cameras with a drizzle of "intellectuals" and think-tank manikins and a sprinkle of a few self-loathing minorities) that have been the bedrock of the GOP since Nixon—a mob of lobotomized shouters who cheered for every treason and catastrophe of the Bush on at 120 decibels right up until he started to lose.
After which they started to become exponentially more publicly unhinged.
Then came the Black President, after which they lost their shit completely and forever.
But of course, Serious People in Polite Society are never supposed to recognize such things, so instead of doubling over in laughing when millions of Republican meatsticks put on tricorner hats and hied their fat asses down to the local Ramada Inn to rally in favor of everyone pretending they'd out for a short beer for the last 20 years or so…the Mainstream Media went right along with the scam.
As one reviled, loser wrote back in 2009, while Very Serious people like David Brooks were ooh-ing over all of these newly minted "independents" that were suddenly abroad in the land, the word "Independent" had lost any meaning at all
Nobody knows what "independents" want, because "independent" as a modern political category is a textbook example of what Kurt Vonnegut defined in "Cat's Cradle" as a "granfalloon":
"…a proud and meaningless association of human beings"
Because "independent" can mean any-damn-thing, or nothing at all.
As the same, reviled loser wrote back in 2009 as the protobaggers were figuring out where to order Gadsden Flags in bulk:
And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?
Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.
Most newly minted "independents" seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.
Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.
But they fool no one.
Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.
Actually, I got that last bit wrong: turns out they fooled a whole lot of wealthy, influential people in the press because so many people in the press got to be and wealthy, influential by being just such colossal fools.
All of which is made geomentrically more depressing when I go back to my archives and note that, yep, I sure as shit predicted this exact phenomenon 2006 during the height of the Age of Boosh:
… In five years, having voted for Bush will have become the parachute pants of this decade.
It will become the "Oh my GOD. What the fuck was I thinking?" shameful secret people will occasionally and elliptically allude to by piping up with, "well, he did good after 9/11" as schoolchildren are taught what a disaster on every front and by every measure he was, and as adults who now have to pay and pay dearly for the myriad lies and crimes and follies of George W. Bush recount his Top 100 Fuckups and bitterly laugh and laugh and laugh.
As I said, Teabaggers really aren't that complicated. They only made to appear so by their collaborators in the national media who categorically refuse to call them out by their real name.