Glenzilla is just wrong in this post. 

As Atrios responded -- and I couldn't agree more -- Tea Party extremism isn't an aberration from what the GOP has been; it's perfectly representative of it, just perhaps expressed in a less obfuscated and more honest form.

No, if the Tea Party had been in charge they wouldn't have passed TARP and we'd currently have 30 percent unemployment and all that entails. How can Greenwald and Atrios be so flip and unserious? In my opinion it's because they have become thoroughly embittered for various reasons and they enjoy being hyperbolic.

George H.W. Bush raised taxes and paid for it. The Tea Party will never raise taxes. In her book the Dark Side, Jane Mayer discussed the various conservatives who fought Cheney and Addington over checks and balances on the executive branch.

What makes things confusing is that the Tea Party is essentially astroturf, a corporate and rich person-sponsored entity and not a grass roots phenomenon. (To the extent it has been grass roots, I would bet it's because the unemployment rate is at 9.5 percent. And the crazies always come out when there's a liberalish President.) Granted, the Republican party has been extreme in its opposition to Obama, that is refusing to compromise on anything. For example, they refuse to compromise at all about confirming Obama's nominees to the Federal Reserve or Elizabeth Warren or Dawn Johnson to the OLC, etc. Since Obama won the election, he should be allowed to govern. That's how democracy is supposed to work.

Glenzilla and Atrios don't know how to make distinctions. Either that or they just dishonestly refuse to. For example like other anti-war types they can't distinguish between George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. Partly it's an overreaction to the conservative right and partly it's because is some way they're spoiled and refuse to acknowledge the stakes.

Glenzilla says

A Washington political/media culture that rolls out the red carpet for every extremist Bush official is now suddenly offended by these Tea Partiers' extremist views?  Please. 

This is his target. Plus moderate liberals who see some value in Senators like Collins and Snowe even though the Maine Senators along with mainstream Democrats went along with the most egregious Bush administration post-911 policies.

The Tea Party candidate for the Delaware Senate seat is a religious nut named Christine O'Donnell who believes "homosexuality is an identity disorder." Glenzilla dishonestly fails to mention this which is surprising given that he is gay.

He does mention Jesse Helms:

During the Clinton years, Jesse Helms was the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and threatened the President not to go on Southern military bases lest he be killed.

Yeah but he was from North Carolina. John Ashcroft and Tom Coburn are nuts too, but this is Delaware, not Missouri or Oklahoma. Plus Helms wasn't part of a "movement," he was a lone nutcase.

Update: After some consideration I think the issue is that in back in the "bad old days" Helms atavistic views weren't as rare among the population. Whereas today, you have movies like "The Kids Are All Right," you have Hillary Clinton as a viable Presidential candidate and Barack Hussein Obama as the leader of the Free World. So it's more that the country has moved which makes the Tea Party seem more crazy relatively speaking. Glenzilla may have a point on the class issue. Establishment Republicans should know better, but then Christine O'Donnell isn't poor compared to, say, a starving Afghan, Pakistani or African.

Glenzilla and Atrios are being patronizing in other words.