And raises a lorgnette with trembling hands and wonders “Who are these people?” And then scurries back into the safety of his cubicle and tries to explain it all to his readers, who promptly break out in an epidemic of pearl-clutching in the resulting comments not seen since the days of Margo Dumont and the Marx brothers.

Of course, since this is David Brooks, the NY Times token “conservative” * whom I sort of visualize as being kept around the august premises of the NY Times as a live exhibit in an upper-crust menagerie – a sort of miniature, well-clipped, tamed and polished pet buffalo, neutered and well-housebroken, so that everyone else can look at him and coo “Oh, so that’s what one of them look like . . . really, they don’t appear all that dangerous, do they, Pinchy?”

Yeah, he’s a real expert on tea parties, and the people who run them, having noted magisterially from his high balcony that, well, yes – there are an awful lot of people down there, who appear to be a little upset, and oh- the horror – they are not being led by . . . well, anybody, let alone the best people . . . and well, what do they know? The poor dears, how can they really cope, without one of the well-educated, well-heeled, well-known and duly anointed to lead them? Oh, the horror – where is my fainting couch and my smelling salts! They actually have the nerve to think they can think for themselves!

And the comments get even more insulting, although I should be used to it now; the same old, same old – just a bunch of old white people, racist to the core, tools of the Republican Party, Beck & Limbaugh-worshipping, barely-literate, drooling, sister-humping, gun-loving morons, all they have is unfocused anger . . . oh, and a new twist: apparently the Tea Partiers are the new incarnation of Weimar-era Nazis – and we all know how all that worked out, don’t we?

Of course, this would have to be the same day that NPR posted an antimated cartoon which combined ignorance and insult to such a degree that the comment thread has now coalesced into a mass so dense that it threatens to sink into the earth’s core and emerge out the other side . . . of course, at a guess, a portion of the commenters are outraged Tea Party sympathizers who floated in on a link from Da Blogfaddah, and the rest are NPR regulars, a large portion of whom think that Garrison Keiller – evidence to the contrary – is razor-sharp cutting edge and still funny. Basically, another heaping helping of the above. SSDD**, as the saying goes. Or maybe just SS, different sclerotic old media dinosaur with delusions of detachment and adequacy.

If all you know is what you read in the NY Times, and hear on NPR, well then … you are a bit limited, I think.

All righty then – here’s the scoop, Brooksie. And Pinchy and Muffy and Buffy, and all of the rest of you wanna-be aristos with three last names and an Ivy degree. By all means go on believing all the tripe displayed in the comments on these two items. Go on believing all that balderdash about moronic, directionless, Nazi-like racists. Do, please – it’s what your chosen dispensers of news have fed to you, either explicitly or implicitly, through laziness or chosen ideology over the last year or longer. Pass over any evidence to the contrary. Ignore anyone who points out in a small, still voice that the Tea Party people are small-government, fiscally responsible constitutionalists, of all colors, and religious persuasions, and that many of them are doing a sudden crash course in political activism at the local, nuts’n’bolts level. And that yes, they are angry – but not ignorant, and not unfocused.

That flaccid little pink thing which they may very well be handing to you all after the next mid-term election? That will be your ass. Try not to look too surprised – the pleasure will have been all ours.

* Viciously skeptical quote marks
** SSDD – Same S**t, Different Day