BUSTED! GOP Owns Tea Party

I love the smell of vindication in the morning. The Tea Party has been definitively exposed as a pre-planned scheme, heavily influenced by GOP-backed PACs and corporate interests, to make tons of money by exploiting a growing and potentially significant grassroots political movement. In a project proposal draft obtained by POLITICO, The Our Country Deserves Better Committee (OCDB) basically laid out the blueprint for the Tea Party Express, how to use the Tea Party to create a self-perpetuating cash cow and as a means to gain political influence in the 2010 mid-term elections. This draft includes detailed plans such as participants, tour routes, casting calls for for political ads, fundraising, viral marketing and online grassroots support. After the OCDB's Tea Party Express went public last summer, it took in about $2.7 million in the following six months.


Far be it for me to toot my own horn but I will because I can. In January of this year I wrote "Tea Party: GOP
Lackey & Corporate Prostitute (Parts I & II)". In those pieces, I spelled out the connections between the Tea Party and GOP backed political organizations and their corporate interests. Yes, once again, you heard it first here on Smack on the Web. Much like me predicting last year that a healthcare reform bill would be passed "sometime next Spring". What was the date the final bill passed the Senate? I do believe it was March 21st - the official first day of Spring. Imagine that. As far back as last summer, as the tea party tours rolled across the country, I was banned from numerous tea party websites for simply pointing out and making inquiries about those connections. When organizers of this February's Tea Party convention were exposed as self-serving opportunists in cohoots with clandestine GOP operatives and organizations, local Tea Party organizers fell all over themselves trying to distance themselves from the very same elements I had been questioning their alliances with for months and cranked up their indignant objections to suggestions of their roles as facilitators to outside GOP influences of the Tea Party.


What will these new revelations mean to the Tea Party and particularly this November's mid-term elections? At this point - nothing as far as tea partiers are concerned I am sure. The reality, however, will be what I have claimed for nearly a year. That being, the Tea Party is going to ensure the number of seats the Republicans were assured to win this year will be significantly lower specifically because of the Tea Party. The GOP thought it only had to ride the Tea Party wave into a majority in both Houses of Congress and into state legislative and gubernatorial offices. Thanks to the Tea Party, that ride isn't going to be nearly as smooth as their GOP masters had originally planned.