I have to say I'm glad David Barstow at the NY Times wrote about the real core of the Tea Party movement being a revival of the militia movement, but it's very annoying too. David Neiwert and I have been writing on this subject ever since Fox News helped launch this extreme conservative coalition into action. The Villager elders all saw it too, but were afraid to put them in proper context. Barstow at least gives them some "official" cover to finally start calling them out.

Tea Partiers may say they are an independent movement, but their values are arch-conservative, and in the end it still benefits the GOP and their corporatist owners. A new CNN poll shows that 87% of them would vote for the GOP if there was no nobody endorsed by the Tea Party movement in their district.

Michael Steele met with 50 Tea Party activists for over four hours the other day because the GOP is very nervous that they would actually start a third-party movement and splinter the vote. If the Tea Party activists were serious, they would run their own presidential candidate in 2012.

Greta Van Susteren interviewed Amy Kremer, a Tea Party activist (who doesn't like the Birthers unlike Palin) about the Steele meeting and she made clear that the Tea Partiers were working strictly with the Republican Party; it hadn't crossed her mind to talk to the Democratic Party, too, until Greta asked her about it as a signal that they were, you know, truly cough cough *nonpartisan* cough hack.

As you can see in the video, Michael Steele was all worried that the Tea Partiers would be concerned that the meeting was about the GOP co-opting the Tea Party movement, which he assured them was far from the truth, as indeed it was. This was kinda like a sea lion assuring a transient killer whale that it had no intention of eating him.

Meanwhile, Andrea Mitchell interviewed another of the Tea Party leaders at the meeting, a woman named Lisa Miller, and she essentially said, as have many others in the Teabagger movement, that they actually want to take over the GOP. No ifs, ands or buts:

Miller: The Republican Party, based on its platform, has much in common with the Tea Party, but local and state parties don't necessarily reflect those values anymore. And so we're going to have to retake, if you will, the Republican Party, as opposed to the Republican Party absorbing us.

If the DNC held meetings with a liberal activist coalition that said the GOP are Nazis, traitors and not born in America, the media would be going crazy, and Fox News would be calling them psychos. (We remember the Senate condemnations of MoveOn.org for daring to criticize Bush's Iraq War general and for a supposed "Hitler ad" it never produced.)

Here's more on the meeting:

Around 50 leaders representing 30 Tea Party groups met with Steele and other GOP advisers to talk about strategies and the importance of conservatism in the 2010 midterm elections.

"The chairman believes it is extremely important to listen to this significant grass-roots movement and work to find common ground in order to elect officials that will protect these principles," RNC spokesperson Katie Wright told the Washington Post.

Not all Tea Party activists supported the meeting, however, as Talking Points Memo reported:

In an email to TPMmuckraker, Robin Stublen, another Florida-based Tea Party activist who has argued previously against working with the GOP, warned of "a back door attempt by the RNC to put their 'stamp' on the movement that welcomes all conservatives regardless of political party."

Oh, they aren't extremists. I mean, wanting to hang Patty Murray is quite normal, isn't it?