Where Have All The Tea Bags Gone?

A year ago the whole country was humming with crazy. Rabid minarchists, survivalist nuts, and Christine O'Donnell had become the norm on the nightly news and there was this steady drumbeat against government doing anything, especially if it stopped the 1% from roto-rooting the last bits of cash out of the rapidly sinking muddle class.

And then... Silence.

Did I miss something? What happened to the marches of Medicare beneficiaries? The petulent dweebs hauling assault rifles to political speeches? The television career of Glenn Beck? While the Tea Party freshmen have roundly made asses of themselves in Congress, you don't see so much as a commie-nazi picket sign these days.

You can still find Tea Party faithful making noise on the internet. But that's the last refuge of spiteful losers, people with no power and no motivation to do anything about it - shut up - whereas public appearances have totally ceased. Could it be their whole "movement" was just a re-branding of the Republican Party and now, without a mid-term, their GOP masters have no use for them? Oh sure, they get a token ringside seat to the primary but it's not all that strange for the GOP to patronize fringe whackadoos while on screen.

Maybe the Tea Party never was "revolutionary" in any sense. Maybe it was just theatrics of the opposition party, trying to pass their failed policies off as new and different. It's a stupidly cynical approach but no one ever lost an election by assuming Americans aren't credulous morons.

Though if I may make a prediction - should Obama survive next year, the folks in Zucotti park won't be packing up and disappearing from the national spotlight...