Catharsis

Ross Douthat, a writer for the Atlantic who recently accepted a job as one of the tame house-conservatives at the New York Times, took the kind of condescending line toward the Tea Parties that we’d expect from someone whose right-wing bona fides consist mainly of having once gone skinny-dipping with Bill Buckley.

Hello, Mr. Douthat, permit me to introduce you to R.S. McCain.

A few things the Tea Party Movement has accomplished:

1) It has reminded millions of normal, hard-working, middleclass people, born to the American promise of freedom and opportunity, that they have a voice, and that they can and should make it heard;

2) It has opened the eyes of those same people to the fact that they are not alone, that untold millions of their fellow citizens share their belief that the economic crisis is not so great as to justify a permanent shift in the balance of power between the private and public sectors, nor is the crisis more threatening to the future welfare of their families than the remedies which have been proposed to resolve it;

3) It has put another nail in the coffin containing the stinking remains of the legacy media’s “objectivity”;

4) It has rattled the cages of a few blue-dog Democratic politicians (and more than a few Republican fence-sitters) who needed to be reminded that they weren’t elected because their constituents wanted socialism.

Not a bad day’s work for a gaggle of “wacky extremists.”