People who join the tea party are people who are angry because they used to be middle class, and now they are something lower than that.
The Tea Party was engineered.
It was engineered by the people who stole, to direct the anger away from themselves and toward their own enemies.
It makes me sad to know that we are all spending actual energy to defeat the people in the Tea party, when those people should be fighting WITH us.
These people are scared, and they are scared enough to reject science, and they are scared enough to reject their own senses of right and wrong.
How many times have I heard Tea Partiers say that things should "go back to the way they were before the 60s changed things"? This is a time when they were young and they believed that the world was filled with happy white people ready to receive the next great age.
The people in the Tea Party, the followers, deserve our compassion because we will need them, if we are ultimately to be successful.
I'm sorry, I'm not very eloquent.