Mac McClelland of The Atlantic reports on just the latest example of those in the tea parties in effect helping Obama (link). Instead of acting like grown-ups and trying to challenge - or getting others to challenge - administration officials, the tea partiers just threw a low-level tantrum. They could have elected to find smart people to take on the Obama administration intellectually; instead, venting is all they could do:

When my colleague Stephanie Mencimer notified me that some Tea Party types would be holding a rally in Houma, Louisiana, on Saturday to protest the new federal moratorium on deepwater oil drilling, I had some concerns. Namely that Tea Partiers getting involved in the issue could make it look like only crazy people are against the drilling ban down here, when in fact plenty of non-crazy people are mad that it could endanger as many as 20,000 jobs...

Things started sensibly enough... [ed.: famous last words]...

But other than that, the rally was mostly two hours of yelling about how climate change is natural--"I've never seen CO2 in the air, have you ever seen CO2 in the air??"--how Barack Obama is simultaneously trying to enslave the American population and steal from it, and how welfare recipients should have to be regularly drug tested. One speaker gave the usual "We don't need the government" speech, followed immediately by, "If the government was doing its job making sure MMS did its job, we wouldn't be here. Why wasn't the government looking down their throats?" Another speaker pointed out that we're at two wars, one in Iran and one in Afghanistan, and that if we're not careful, the president of Israel, Ahmadinejad, is going to gain enough power to take over the world.

There's a picture at the link of a couple of interesting signs, and repurposing part of a comment I left:

If [the tea partiers] were smarter and saner, they could take on establishment hacks rather than do what they're doing now: in effect help them.

For instance, presumably they have an argument for their position (presumably they wouldn't hold that position if they didn't have an argument). And, presumably, they think they know how the other side is wrong. So, because of the second, they should be able to show others how they think the other side is wrong by, for instance, finding smarter people to ask the other side questions at public meetings. The fact that they're incapable of doing that (either by ranting or by sending non-smart people to ask questions) is one major reason they shouldn't be encouraged.

P.S. Mac McClelland recently tried to scare ICE off from doing immig. enforcement among cleanup workers, in effect stabbing American workers in the back. Let's see the "yahoos" bring that up with her.