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Sunday 7 February 2010

In sum, Sarah Palin loyally supports virtually every policy that defined the uniquely disastrous Bush/Cheney first term. The “tea party movement” depicts itself as some sort of novel and independent force in American politics, and the establishment media — which patronizingly equates far right extremists with “real Americans” and is petrified of accusations of “liberal bias” — plays along. But exactly the opposite is true. It’s just an appendage of the Republican Party: more dogmatic and boisterous than party leaders would like, but nonetheless devoted to the purest of partisan goals of restoring the same GOP to power that ran the country into the ground over the last decade. All of the GOP leaders whom this movement seeks to empower are the same ones who subserviently supported almost every Bush/Cheney policy for eight straight years. As is true for Palin, Fox News is this movement’s primary sponsor because Fox, which craves a return of the Bush years, knows that the “tea party movement” will promote that goal by re-imaging the destroyed GOP brand into something fresh, pretty and new. Hardened GOP loyalists like Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol, National Review and Sean Hannity are perfectly at home in the “tea party movement” because its principal effect is to empower the standard right-wing GOP politicians and policies they’ve long craved. Glenn Greenwald

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