Has the Moment Arrived?

I wrote about a month ago that the nascent "tea party" movement, not warmed-over socialism, represented real "change" in this country and we would know if this movement had legs when "anguished and furious denunciations of it, decrying it as 'neo-fascism' (or the like), begin appearing in the New York Times and left-wing blogs." We may be getting there.

Jane Hamsher and Oliver Willis are probably asking “Who the hell are this Tea Party bunch? Where did they come from?” I’ll tell you who they are, Jane and Oliver. They’re your worst nightmare: they’re small-governmenters first and party-loyalists second.

UPDATE: As if on cue, Paul Krugman of the New York Times weighs in.

But here’s the thing: the G.O.P. looked as crazy 10 or 15 years ago as it does now. That didn’t stop Republicans from taking control of both Congress and the White House. And they could return to power if the Democrats stumble. So it behooves us to look closely at the state of what is, after all, one of our nation’s two great political parties.

One way to get a good sense of the current state of the G.O.P., and also to see how little has really changed, is to look at the “tea parties” that have been held in a number of places already, and will be held across the country on Wednesday. These parties — antitaxation demonstrations that are supposed to evoke the memory of the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution — have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so.

(It behooves me to thank Riehl World View).