shearing the sheep

Like the hordes of door-to-door Bible salesmen who used to swarm through small towns in the South and Midwest, or the televangelists who now fire up the faithful 24/7 on their own cable channels, the leaders of the Tea Party movement are parlaying the rage and fear of their acolytes into immense personal fortunes.

Rush Limbaugh's lavish and steadily growing radio contract has been a feature of this landscape since before the demeaning term "teabaggers" came into use, but he has nothing on the recent arrivals in the right-wing millionaires' club -- Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Michael Steele. It's these three that Frank Rich zeroes in on in his regular Sunday New York Times column today.

After dismissing the non-scandal of Harry Reid's remarks, now ancient history, concerning candidate Barack Obama's complexion and diction, Rich homes in on the recent careers of the movement conservatives' most high-profile leaders. He details Steele's current for-profit book tour on company time and his brazen defiance of any in the Republican hierarchy who might challenge its propriety, Palin's abandonment of the Juneau state house for the greener pastures of Fox News, and Beck's on-air flacking of gold coins sold by one of his sponsors. Rich saves his choicest revelations, however, for an exposé of the upcoming Tea Party Convention and Palin's role in it:

She recently signed on as a speaker for the first Tea Party Convention, scheduled next month in Nashville — even though she had turned down a speaking invitation from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, the traditional meet-and-greet for the right. The conservative conference doesn’t pay. The Tea Party Convention does. A blogger at Nashville Scene reported that Palin’s price for the event was $120,000.

Rich goes on to lay bare the nuts and bolts of this event, which looks like an attempt to create a sort of teabaggers' Disneyland.

The entire Tea Party Convention is a profit-seeking affair charging $560 a ticket — plus the cost of a room at the Opryland Hotel. Among the convention’s eight listed sponsors is Tea Party Emporium, which gives as its contact address 444 Madison Avenue in New York, also home to the high-fashion brand Burberry. This emporium’s Web site offers a bejeweled tea bag at $89.99 for those furious at “a government hell bent on the largest redistribution of wealth in history.” This is almost as shameless as Glenn Beck, whose own tea party profiteering has included hawking gold coins merchandised by a sponsor of his radio show.

I have to wonder whether the people who consider themselves a part of this movement realize the extent to which their irrational fears are being patronized and gamed. Are any among them the same fools who voluntarily travel to Las Vegas regularly to be separated from their money?

And lest anybody think I'm calling the sincerity of the chief ideologues of this movement into question, I'm not. I'm sure they believe the stuff they're saying, even when it's obvious bullshit like Palin's "death panels." They believe that stuff as if their lives depended on it, which quality of their lives certainly does.