Saying it out loud

People misunderestimate the Tea Partiers' role in the political dynamic. It doesn't matter if they don't get their full slate of candidates elected. What they're there to do is keep the conversation firmly anchored on the crazy end by saying and repeating fringe ideas out loud often enough to pull the rest of the conversation their way. In the headlining story at TPM this morning we find Tea Party activists embracing Joe Barton's characterization of the $20 billion oil disaster victims' relief fund as a "shakedown" of BP.

Erin Ryan, a tea party activist in Redding, Calif., said Barton was correct to use the word "shakedown."

"Wow," Ryan said. "Somebody finally said it out loud?"

Conservative talk show host Mark Williams, chairman of the California-based Tea Party Express, said the White House went too far by pressuring BP to create the fund while the Justice Department is conducting criminal and civil probes of the spill.

"I'm accustomed to mobsters behaving that way, I'm just not accustomed to it from the president, especially when he's standing there with the attorney general threatening legal action," Williams said. "Where I come from, they call it extortion."

Because there is no equally strenuous counter on the left The White House continually refer to efforts at organizing such a movement as "fucking stupid") there's no effective means at pulling back against the vigorous crazy. And so it eventually becomes more and more accepted as the default position.