Teabagger claims Palin and the GOP "hijacked" tea party

[ProSense]

Quote of the Day: Has the Tea Party Movement Now Been “Hijacked” by Palin and the GOP

Posted by JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief in Politics.

Our political Quote of the Day comes from a must-read-in-full column by Nashville Post Politics’ Kleinheider on the Tea Party movement, Sarah Palin and the GOP. Here’s the first part of his piece:

The tea party movement is dead. The one I was familiar with anyway. Judson Phillips held it down and Sarah Palin drove a stake right through its heart live last night on C-Span in front of an unsuspecting audience.

Sarah Palin didn’t give a tea party speech last night. She gave a partisan Republican address. It was a purely political speech designed to position her for a presidential run in 2012 or 2016. Period. She wasn’t there to celebrate the organic nature of a movement she had nothing to do with creating. She was there to co-opt the name and claim the brand as hers. And she did.

The movement, that came to be officially recognized almost a year ago but whose roots go back further than that, has been snuffed out and replaced in the public mind. The movement that began as a people’s movement of angry independent, libertarians and conservatives will now be thought as the movement of people like Palin, Dick Armey, Judson Phillips, Mark Skoda, etc. Essentially, a wholly owned subsidiary of the “Official Conservative Movement” and the Republican Party.

This new tea party bears no resemblance to the one that began a year ago as a reaction to the collapse of our financial system and the subsequent bailout. That movement of ragtag and unorganized libertarians, independents and conservatives was something new and unique. An authentic protest movement angered not just by the new President, Barack Obama, who had presided over the bailouts but the president who started the ball rolling and whose incompetence had led to the crisis in the first place, George W. Bush.

AND:

For over a year the media has struggled to try and define just what exactly the movement was. Now they have a definition.

Sarah Palin.

AND:

The fact that Palin even has the temerity to position herself as a leader in the movement (and despite her protests that’s exactly what she was doing) is offensive to any student of very, very recent political history. Palin, as mavericky and rogue as she likes to paint herself, was the Vice-Presidential nominee of the Republican Party in 2010. She ran with John McCain and defended the Bush legacy. A project she continued last night in front of a faux-tea party audience.

Here's a better definition: lunatics