George,

The "Mad As Hell" Tea Partiers remind me of the crowd coming under the influence of the con man "Professor" Harold Hill in the old Broadway musical, "The Music Man." Hill needs a straw man to divert the townspeople away from his real intentions...to fleece River City by selling the good folks musical instruments and band uniforms. His straw man is a pool table, convincing the folks that only music can save "Billy, Johnny, Freddie and Ted" from the corrupting influences of a pool hall.

As corporations in America fleece the folks by lobbying for greater tax breaks, subsidies, and, for example, cutting timber on public land at a fraction of the value, or grazing cattle on public land at a cost that is laughable or tearing off the tops of mountains for coal while polluting streams and endangering the folks below--they invent "straw men" like the Spotted Owl or the Snail Darter--suddenly the people are told their "needs" are being subverted by environmental groups protecting a bird or a useless tiny fish! It isn't difficult to understand the simplicity of the argument, especially given the power of lobbyists and the immense corporate resources to influence the public.

Many, if not most Americans, have little patience for abstract thinking.

Watching Sarah Palin haranguing the "faithful" at their "for profit" putsch, the Tea Party convention at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee...I can't resist the thought of Professor Harold Hill.

Single mindidly they .hang on every word of her provocative "red meat" diatribe.

All nodding "that's right"!

Keith Olbermen comments that it is like a family gathering, they all look alike....all white and all mad!!

And ALL DUPED!

Sure, on the surface, they seem to have good reasons, bank bailouts, obscene bonuses, reckless gambling with other people's money, but they also fail to see the bigger picture, what got us here in the first place!

Most of them are disenchanted Republicans, who overwhelmingly supported the Cheney/Bush regime, that gave us eight years of laissez faire government--totally unregulated reckless leveraging, incomprehensible greed, corruption, and disastrous wars funded by China while keeping tax cuts in place for the most affluent.

The irony is, these Tea Partiers probably suffered more than many and now they see a straw man in the personage of an African American president and the deceitful rabble rousers like Grover Norquist, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, former majority leader Dick Armey siezing an opportunity to take the focus off the the eight years of Right Wing misrule with record deficits, record foreclosures and skyrocketing unemployment that left the nation struggling and an administration inheriting an "emergency room" of problems!

Though they are deceived and misled, they are dangerous and the media seems to revel in their anger and protests. The nation seems ripe for the "Know Nothings" to get a foothold and have a far reaching influence giving us more unscrupulous opportunists, and furthering the goal of the likes of Grover Norquist and his ilk to "drag government to the bathtub and drown it."

Harry Tenney (Electronic mail, February 19, 2010)