John Hawkins is a stupid person

Intellectual Chernobyl's resident fratboy - how sad is it to set the bar at Goldberg / Brietbart and still be unable to clear it? - lets "the establishment" know that it gets 7 things wrong about the TeaTards.

1. The Tea Partiers have a radical agenda!

Nobody believes this. It is a sad, Koch-funded rehash of the last 50 years of ultra-conservatism under a new banner. Birchers -> Moral Majoritarians -> Dittoheads -> Teabaggers. Same group of idiots, same ration of horseshit for ideas.

2. These Tea Partiers don't believe in compromise!

Hawkins explains how Washington defines compromise as "giving the liberals everything they want." With Teabaggers in power (suspend disbelief for a moment and imagine it) there will be compromise, redefined as giving the Teabaggers everything they want.

3. The Tea Party is driving away moderates!

No, it's just nominating drooling assheads who can't win general elections.

4. The Tea Party is knocking off important Republicans we need in D.C.!

Put a period after "Republicans" and this is true.

5. These Tea Partiers are just Republicans who will fall in line once the GOP gets power again!

Fall in line with whom? The sane members of the GOP? I'm sure the 'Baggers will be perfectly willing to John Hawkins Compromise with whoever is in power.

6. These Tea Partiers don't understand how politics works!

The Hawk allows that "there are plenty of people at Tea Parties who aren't all that hooked into politics" and "it's fair to say that some of the candidates the Tea Party has backed have turned out to be duds." He goes on to argue that "establishment" Republicans (Crist, etc.) do not understand politics. Having punted the question of whether Teabaggers understand politics, he moves on. That said, Things Tea Partiers Do Not Understand is the longest book in the English language and, when translated, will give Remembrance of Things Past a run for its money.

7. These Tea Partiers just want to say "no" to everything!

Hudson Hawk explains:

Right now, our country is like a car that's heading toward a cliff at 100 mph and the people in charge want to simultaneously speed up and cut the brake lines. Are we supposed to say, "Why don’t we meet you in the middle? Cut the brake lines, slow it down to 55 mph, and we'll stop all our backseat complaining about that cliff. Deal?"

In other words they say no to everything and will continue to do so until everyone perceives politics through the same paranoid, reactionary lens. Or to put it more poetically:

Put a balanced budget amendment, term limits, and a repeal of Obamacare on the agenda and watch how quickly Tea Partiers say "yes." But, until we get the barrel of the gun out of this country's mouth, we have to keep saying "no" when we're asked for handfuls of bullets.

Kind of an odd analogy from a group of people who spend a substantial portion of their time hand-loading ammo in their basements. I mean, who else do we ask for bullets?