Andrew Sullivan has an excellent take on the Tea Party movement.

From The Daily Dish:

The last week has seen a lot of analysis of the Tea Party Movement. It's a Republican rump, according to the NYT, and a national majority, according to Pat Caddell. My view is that it's so amorphous that you can slice it any which way. A minority of Americans seem enraged by the Obama administration in ways that are hard to explain. But many Americans also retain a healthy distrust of government and debt (even though they keep voting for lower taxes and more spending). They have a real point. Over the last decade, it is surely evident that big government has come back with a vengeance. And one has to grasp that part of the tea-party anger is pent up from the Bush years. Most of the rational tea-partiers accept that the GOP has been as bad - if not worse - than the Democrats on spending, borrowing and the size and scope of government in recent years. They repressed this anger during the Bush years out of partisan loyalty. Now, they're taking it all out on the newbie. It's both fair and also unfair.

It's fair because Obama is a liberal who believes government can and should help the poor and disadvantaged and has proven it by providing access to insurance for the working poor. But it's unfair because Obama's fiscal and governing record is massively distorted by the impact of the bank meltdown, the steep revenue-killing recession, and the stimulus. Until its last months, the Bush administration could claim no such excuses for its awful debt-management. The big Bush jumps in discretionary spending, the big leap in entitlements under the unfunded Medicare D program, the long nation-building wars put off-budget, and the huge claims for executive power dominant in the first term: all these are far more damning to my mind than Obama's pragmatism in grappling with an economic collapse or even the healthcare reform, which at least formally claims to reduce the deficit and pay for itself (unlike Bush's Medicare-D). Even the protests at the manner in which the health reform was passed are disingenuous. The Medicare-D process - involving holding the vote open for hours and brutal arm-twisting on the floor of the House - was far, far more cynical and brutal.

And this is why, despite my own deep suspicion of big government, I remain unmoved by the tea-partiers. Their partisanship and cultural hostility to Obama are far more intense, it seems to me, than their genuine proposals to reduce spending and taxation.

You know I was just thinking last night, right before I dropped off to sleep, that if a movement similar to the Teabaggers had emerged during the early years of the Bush administration that I might have been at least interested enough to have read their brochures and even possibly to attend one of their rallies.

But if that group had also decided to call themselves the Tea Party I would have NEVER been able to take them seriously, as it would have shown an incredible lack of historic perspective and demonstrated a terminal case of ignorance on their part.

However if they had chosen another, more palatable, name I might have been able to hang out with them in their protests against the Bush administration's government expansion, their illegal wars, the dumbing down of our eduction systems, the suspension of habeas corpus, and the fact that they were spying on citizens of this country.

Yet if I had managed to go along with the movement at least that far, on the day that I saw signs calling Colin Powell a N****R I would have been finished with them.  The same would hold true if I found myself standing next to somebody whose sign, or rhetoric, called for the overthrow of our government.  Or if there were signs and protesters calling for violence against George Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell,  Donald Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, or any other members of the Bush administration. If I saw those signs, and realized that the other protesters did not find them offensive, I would have known I was not standing among people who shared my values. I would have simply walked away despite the fact that, on many issues, we were in agreement.

The facts are that those sentiments course through the veins of the Teabagger movement, and to me that makes any salient points they might make suspect.  If hate for Obama is their primary motivator, than they are not a "movement", they are a mob.  And mobs are forces of destruction, not forces for construction.