Watch Wolf Blitzer clean his face on Rand Paul's asshole remarks in which the newly minted Kentucky Senator gets a perfect 10.0 executing the paradigm-shifting acrobatics required to justify sustaining Bush era tax cuts: “There are no rich there are no middle class, there are no poor, we all are interconnected in the economy.” Incredible, since if that came from the Left it would read plain and simple as some sort of socialist screed, but coming from the Tea Party's de-facto leader (sans the great northern Lipstick Pig), it's populist.
Historically, the amazing thing about the midterm's “vindication” of the Tea Party, with Paul in the middle of the storm, is the inverse reflection it throws on the last great middle American populist movements of the 1880s and 90s, when the Farmers Alliance and the People's Party basically fought against the same anti-elitist sentiments, but argued from the polar opposite of the spectrum by seeking greater government regulation and collectivized farmers unions. The party faded once uniting with the Democrats, but it gave credence to future Depression era government programs, and has remained a specter of the region's latent political activism ever since. And look how it's been harnessed now.
The joke is sort of painful: The same kinds of gut-level classist reactions against the elite that were awoken over a hundred years ago are aimed at the dismantling of government support for the lower classes, and at the defense of conservative economic policies intended to maintain a status quo that has never been friendly to the poor. Lucky for us the Tea Party have arrived to assuage the perennial anger of the rural poor by letting them know they don't exist.
