NEWT, MEET THE TEABAGGERS

The teabag phenomenon is a contagion, not a movement. A movement, after all, involves collective action, while the teabaggers are against collective anything.

Their views are shared not through propaganda but by osmosis. And what wonders me is that such unmitigated individualists should think so much alike!

Of course, there are differences in the ranks. Some haven't thought it through all the way. Some would draw the line somewhere. I'm interested in the purest/most extreme of the lot. The rest are just traitors waiting to defect.

The true baggers represent themselves as being in the tradition of the Boston Tea Party, whence comes their tea connection. But the Boston guys were against taxation without representation, while the teabaggers are against both taxation and representation.

How can anyone represent a person who is wholly individual and acknowledges the reality of no community? And representation refers to government, which they hate and consider illegitimate.

The teabag thing is about atomization. They don't quite say that openly. But it's there.

And it is revealing how far the right-wing landscape has changed in a few years. It used to be that nobody was in better standing as an all-out rightist than Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House. But now Newt has lost his ear for the music. He keeps blundering egregiously.

Half the time he sounds like a very smart and alert fellow. The other half he sounds like an angry bigot. That has always been the case with him. What he has never sounded like, however, is a teabagger.

He backed Ginny Scozzafava in the New York 23 Congressional race over teabagger Doug Hoffman, a terrible career move. And just recently he advocated Republicans and Democrats working together. He might as well have praised the Communist party!

The ironic thing is that Newt embodies the perfect narrative for appealing to the baggers. This is a man who actually shut down the government of the United States under Bill Clinton. He ought to be a great hero on the bag scene, maybe the greatest: surely greater than Sarah Palin, whose only baggist virtue is that she quit as a governor.

If he wants the GOP presidential nomination - and he does - then Newt had better channel his inner teabag and start hinting that he looks favorably on the abolition of the Federal government. Same goes for former senator Rick Santorum, who recently endorsed a rather centrist candidate for Pennsylvania's Republican gubernatorial nomination over a way-out-there-in-right-field one.

When reactionaries like these are suddenly seen as too moderate, it ain't your old man's GOP anymore.