This past Thursday in a Capitol Hill hotel ballroom, the group Tea Party Patriots marked its fifth anniversary with a event that featured speakers such as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. On Friday, Daily Kos writer Hunter celebrated the occasion in his own way with a post containing plenty of snarky comments about what was said at the gathering.
For example, after quoting a story from CNN.com's Political Ticker blog which noted that "many speakers...hit back against the charge that the tea party has racist elements," Hunter sniped, "If your anniversary commemoration needs to be punctuated by repeated assertions that you're not racists, you're probably doing something wrong."
But it was Hunter's big, venomous finish that was of the most interest:
...I do not think we will be hearing much from the tea party on their tenth anniversary, or their twentieth, so this is probably as good as it's going to get. Wrecking the government as political statement has lost a bit of its luster, and the budget deficit as national crisis will last exactly until the Republican Party retakes the Senate or the White House, whichever comes first, suddenly disappearing again the moment we have a new tax cut to push or a new war to fight. As of yet, we have had more racists rise from the tea party movement than intellectuals, although there may still be hope that a future National Review might arise from the mess in a longer-lasting effort to combine both...
