It's funny to me, because they advertise themselves as a group of "All different kinds of Americans," or something, when it's mostly old white people who lean right to different degrees (all 139 or so of their candidates are Republican). Ultimately, they're just going to steal votes from Republicans (in the vein of Nader, other third parties), and put themselves back at square one.

SpraCoalee wrote:

Syd Lexia wrote: SoldierHawk wrote: It'll probably surprise no one, but I'm not a fan of the Tea Party. Although it seems to be a relatively small amount of "tea partiers" who are this way, those TPers who seem dangerously violent, racist and intolerant scare the piss out of me. I'm not a fan of the Tea Party, but the media and the President himself have gone out of their way to misrepresent the tea party as violent, intolerant, and racist. I personally don't like them because I feel that they are myopic, poorly organized, that their message is unrefined and nonspecific, and they are essentially attempting a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. They're like a group of kids who just turned 14. They want to fuck, and they want to fuck all the time. Unfortunately, they don't really know what fucking is and when they finally get the opportunity to fuck, they end up embarrassing themselves and everyone finds out about it. Also, the Tea Party is not a third party. They seem to be constantly misrepresented as such, largely because of their name. But they are the actually the Tea Party MOVEMENT, and they are a populist movement from within the Republican/Libertarian parties. I thought they were a branch of the Constitution Party?

It's complicated. Started by intellectual Libertarians under Ron Paul, the Tea Parties turned from small groups of Libertarians, to town halls screaming "Keep your government hands off my Medicare," to large groups of average dumbasses manipulated by conservative Republican interests. Tell them that Obama gave the middle class tax cuts, and they'll laugh because that hot chick on Fox told that their taxes skyrocketed. Tell them Obama has put forward legislation to reform the practices that lead to the meltdown, and they'll think that he finally stopped letting negroes get loans. In the end, this will be the same as any third party:

1) survives to an incredibly small degree, similar to other third parties, ultimately stealing votes from the right side (such as Nader taking the very-left away from the Dems).

2) Dead. Maybe it was run by the intellectuals at first, but ultimately, it's now in the hands of fat, mustachioed Midwesterners, and people who think Palin's "Smarter than she lets on." Either way, the intellectuals will see they've lost control and quit, and the public will eventually quit when they see that their candidates will end up like Rand Paul, starting out as principled anti-progressives, but ultimately puppets of the Republican party.