Meghan McCain disses the Tea Parties as a bunch of racist old people, Palin as a hypocrite.

Meghan McCain is about to be attacked by the lunatic right for her comments regarding the Tea Party Conference. She started by talking about Tom Tancredo's dreadful opening speech, when he stated that voters elected Obama because they couldn't spell "vote" in English and called for literacy tests before voters were allowed to vote.

It's innate racism, and I think it's why young people are turned off by this movement," McCain retorted on The View.

"I'm sorry, but revolutions start with young people, not 65 year old people talking about literacy tests and people who can't say the word 'vote' in English," McCain added.

McCain, a self-described "progressive Republican," criticized Palin's assertion that President Obama could get himself re-elected to a second term if he launched a war against Iran.

"You should never go to war unless its the absolute last circumstance," McCain said.

As for Palin's defense of Rush Limbaugh for using the word "retard" after calling for White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's resignation over the same word last week, McCain said it was a symbol of "exactly what is wrong with politics today.

"We can't placate and say Democrats can say one thing and Republicans can say another thing," she said.

McCain added that the rhetoric coming from the Tea Party movement and from Republicans like Palin "will continue to turn off young voters, and anybody who says different is smoking something."

She is bang on the money, but they will turn on her just as they turned on her dad.

The Tea Party movement is now no longer an independent protest group, Sarah Palin saw to that. Her speech to their convention aligned this supposed protest group with the far right wing of the Republican party and, most importantly, herself.

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.

There was nothing in Palin's speech which would have appeared out of sorts in any speech by George W. Bush; indeed, in many ways, her speech was a call for the same kind of policies which the US explicitly rejected at the last election.

There's nothing new here. If anything, it represents a demand for even greater allegiance to the Bush/Cheney mindset, for a more purist and even less restrained version of the national security insanity, civil liberties assaults, massive increases in the rich-poor gap, control of Americans' lives through "social issues," and endless wars which the Republican Party has long rhetorically claimed to embody. Other than a Medicare prescription plan here and an immigration reform plan there, from what Bush/Cheney orthodoxies do they dissent? None.

This movement is nothing more than the Republican Party masquerading as a grass-roots phenomenon. In 2000, the GOP found a cowboy-hat-wearing, swaggering, "likable" Regular Guy spouting "compassion" in domestic policy and "humility" in foreign policy to re-brand itself in the wake of the Gingrich-led branding disaster. Sarah Palin and the "tea party movement" are just the updated versions of that, the re-branding in the wake of the Bush/Cheney-led image disaster. They're every bit as extremist, radical and dangerous as the last decade revealed standard right-wing Republicans to be, but the one thing they're not is new or innovative.

Palin has hijacked the Tea Party movement and exposed it as nothing other than a bunch of very sore losers who are greatly annoyed that Obama is in the White House.

They are, as Meghan McCain states, engaging in "innate racism" as Tancredo's comments inarguably proved.

Fox News can fall over themselves supporting this movement, but then, they supported the Bush regime, which is why they find the Tea Party movement so appealing.

It's the same old thing in brand new drag.

Tags: Meghan McCain, Tea party convention, Palin, Fox News