tea, anyone?

So many people are writing so much about Ms. Mooseburger these days I hesitate to add another word. But after reading Frank Rich's outstanding explanation this morning of why and how she very likely will be the next president, I almost feel like I have no choice.

Like it or not, Sarah Palin is what's happening, baby.

If Michael Bloomberg decides to run as an independent in 2012, and he very well might, that would be the end of Obama and simultaneously the dawn of Teabag Nation.

We might dismiss the baggers as idiots and lunatics (and I say they're both). These are people, as Matt Taibbi points out, who get all their information from Fox News and talk radio, so everything they know about anything is totally whacked out. But that doesn't mean they can't win elections, and indeed they've already proved they can, given the right circumstances.

Sometimes during my weaker moments I suffer under the delusion that at some point Americans are going to wake up and face their real problems, and begin to resist the people and institutions robbing and oppressing them. But then I realize that we're too far gone for that -- too far gone on Hot Pockets™ and Big Macs™, too far gone on American Idol and Dancing with the Stars, too far gone to Disney World in our Cadillac Escalades -- a nation of overfed clowns.

It's the rising tide of resentment, scapegoating, and mindless violence that will win out, not the angels of our better nature. Palinistas are the vanguard of the proletariat! If you're thinking that the worst we have to offer, the lowest common denominator, can't prevail in this country, all I can tell you is that it's happened in other times and other places.

Frank Rich observes: It’s anti-elitism that most defines angry populism in this moment, and, as David Frum, another Bush alumnus (and Palin critic), has pointed out, populist rage on the right is aimed at the educated, not the wealthy. The Bushies and Noonans and dwindling retro-moderate Republicans are no less loathed by Palinistas and their Tea Party fellow travelers than is Obama’s Ivy League White House. When Palin mocks her G.O.P. establishment critics as tortured, paranoid, sleazy and a “good-old-boys club,” she pays no penalty for doing so. The more condescending the attacks on her, the more she thrives.

Palin's stupidity, petty meanness, and cracked articulation are her greatest assets. And she knows that. She may be a policy moron, but she's a political genius, and her greatest weaknesses are conversely her greatest strengths with the tribe of teabaggers now poised to step into the political vacuum left by the collapse of the Obama movement.

So where are you going to go, you with your liberal ideas and master's degree from Harvard and habit of reading the New York Times? I wouldn't advise staying here if and when this mob returns to power, 'cause they're loaded for bear and out for blood.

P.S. -- speaking as a fastidious feline, I find that guy's sign personally insulting.