So, anyway, yesterday I watching some football game or the other, and I saw a commercial for The Amazing Race that featured this thing below:

And the first thing I thought was, “Wow. I had no idea that reality teevee could be so awesomely educational.” The second thing I thought was, “I wonder if McMegan wrote anything today?”

Unsurprisingly the indefatigable SOT was on the case where we find McMegan going Full Metal Douthat over the Tea Party. Besides the obvious stupidity and the usual lack of disclaimers about where McSuderman apprenticed back when he and McMegan were still a’courtin’ and a’sparkin’,  we get to watch as McMegan plays the ‘Intellectually Intimidating” card.

It begins with Jasper_in_Boston saying, not unreasonably:

But I’m not relying on “memory,” as there are a number of competitive elections being advertised in my media market as I write this, and I’ve noticed that mindless, incoherent “bailout” bashing is a common feature of right wing attack ads. (Which is not to that TARP was/is beyond criticism; it would just be nice if the criticism weren’t nearly always, er, mindless, incoherent, and utterly devoid of specificity).

[Here, quoting McMegan]You may disagree with them (I do) but the accusation of opportunistic (or racist) hypocrisy is not borne out.

I’m not saying the criticism of TARP is opportunistic as such. I’m saying it’s wrong — it’s simplistic and intellectually deficient, and wouldn’t be coming from Richard Nixon’s Republican Party, because in his day, Republicans tended to prefer having a financial system to not having one.

[McMegan again] I think the tea parties, like any populist movement, lack a coherent theory of how to govern a large country. But one could equally say that the antiwar protesters lacked a coherent theory of international relations. Did you think they were “unhinged”?

The big difference is the Democratic establishment was never taken over by the radicals; no really, it wasn’t. Tip O’Neil and Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy and Walter Mondale weren’t cut of the same cloth as Sarah Palin and Rand Paul and Sharon Angle and Christine O’Donell. Yes, I realize the latter group hasn’t completed it’s takeover of the GOP. Yet.

But we’re perilously close in this country to seeing one of our two major parties being taken over by a bunch of evolution-denying nutcases, and they’re already driving their party’s agenda. And this is a vastly bigger danger to the country’s well-being than some lefty fan of Western European political economy using a bit of exaggeration in his efforts to enslave the American people with free daycare and guaranteed vacation time.

McMegan responds by explaining to Jacob that he (obviously unlike Teatard faves Rand Paul or Christine O’Donnell or Sharon Angle) is some kind of Not Real American bomb-throwing fifth columnist who is also very stoopid:

You have a persistent tendency to define yourself as part of the “reasonable” sphere, which amazingly skews much farther to the left than the American polity. You are not part of the moderate center; you’re firmly on the left, and the majority of the population–even the majority of the educated, intelligent population–firmly disagrees with you.

This seems to be part of a much broader trend in discussing the tea party, where I find the ratio of sheer elitist snobbery to actual content distressingly high. Voters can be wrong without being crazy, unhinged, or otherwise worthy of disgust.

Oh, Megan…. you’ll never have to worry about that. Wrong, crazy, or unhinged you’ll always be worthy of our disgust.

It’s the one single thing in your life that you have earned.