A couple days ago, I quoted a bit from Dana Milbank's column, where he showed that Tea Party honcho Dick Armey's historical knowledge is less than firm:

Dana Milbank catches Dick Armey attempting to lecture on American history, and brings his A game snark:

All across the country, Republicans are fantasizing about a gigantic electoral tide that will sweep out deeply entrenched Democratic incumbents this November. In their telling, this deep-red surge will be so forceful as to dislodge even legislators who don’t look vulnerable now, securing GOP control of both houses of Congress.

But could this scenario really come to pass? That will depend, in part, on what type of Republican Party the Democrats are running against in the fall.

All across the country, Republicans are fantasizing about a gigantic electoral tide that will sweep out deeply entrenched Democratic incumbents this November. In their telling, this deep-red surge will be so forceful as to dislodge even legislators who don’t look vulnerable now, securing GOP control of both houses of Congress.

But could this scenario really come to pass? That will depend, in part, on what type of Republican Party the Democrats are running against in the fall.

Here's one thing about the Tea Party movement everyone can agree on: It's confusing. With decentralization as a core value, the Tea Party phenomenon can seem like a baffling collection of individuals and organizations, often divided against each other. But with its first national convention now underway in Nashville, and as Tea Party groups gear up for campaigns around the country, it's time we met the movement's main players. Herewith, a handy guide.

KEY DATES IN THE MOVEMENT

WASHINGTON--It is 2009's quiet story--quiet because it's about what didn't happen, which can be as important as what did.

In this highly partisan year, we did not see a sharpening of the battles over religion and culture.

Yes, we continued to fight over gay marriage, and arguments about abortion were a feature of the health care debate. But what's more striking is that other issues--notably economics and the role of government--trumped culture and religion in the public square. The culture wars wentinto recession along with the economy.

Tea Party: The Documentary Film, chronicling the movement from Bush’s bailouts to 9/12, probably won’t be coming to any theaters near you. It “premiered” last night in Washington’s Reagan Center, with Astroturf instead of a red carpet and tuxedoed anti-tax types instead of shining starlets. The producers haven’t secured a distribution agreement, and are relying on word of mouth and their website to promote the DVD (a perfect Christmas gift, at only $19.95). That’s fitting, certainly, for a movement that bills itself as the ultimate people-powered phenomenon: Who needs official channels, when you’ve got a couple wealthy, impassioned supporters?

“This whole thing was financed by American Express,” the Atlanta ad man Luke Livingston told me after the screening, patting his pocket. “My American Express card.”

Back in April, Livingston says, he knew that the tax day tea parties popping up all around the country would eventually lead to some sort of protest in Washington. So the financier—whose clients range from Chick-fil-A to Bob’s Carpet Mart—teamed up with local talk radio host Joel Foster, and found six activists to track as they worked their way up from smaller events to the big March on Washington in September. Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks promoted the release at watch parties around the country, conservative luminaries including Jim DeMint and Joe Wilson headlined the D.C. rollout last night, and the movie landed on Rachel Maddow—the kind of buzz many studios couldn’t pay to get.

The 77-minute film, like Glenn Beck’s video trailer for the 9/12 Project, opens with an apocalyptic vision of storm clouds in Washington, as Democrats and Republicans sign checks to keep big companies from going under. Frighteningly high numbers for stimulus line items scrolls across the screen, as drums boom and writing on parchment goes up in flames. After that opener, though, the tension lifts: This is a hopeful story, after all.

About 20 minutes into my sit-down with House Minority Leader John Boehner, I am overcome by the desire for a drink. Scotch, maybe. Or a bone-dry martini, extra olives. It’s not that the Ohio congressman is shaping up to be confrontational or unresponsive or in any way unpleasant.

Frank Rich really lit into the Republican Party yesterday:

a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war.

a G.O.P. killing field

confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama

WASHINGTON--Is there room in the Republican Party for genuine moderates? Truth to tell, the GOP can't decide. More precisely, it's deeply divided over whether it should allow any divisions in the party at all.

That's why the brawl in a single congressional district in far upstate New York is drawing the eyes of the nation. Conservatives are determined to use the race to prove that there is no place in the party for heretics, dissidents or independents.

Sunday's Washington Post featured a story about FreedomWorks, the Dick Armey-run anti-redistributionist lobby. Unsurprisingly, FreedomWorks turns out to have a large poster of Ayn Rand in its reception area.

From Politico's report on tea parties and right-wing activism, including Dick Armey's FreedomWorks:

Some people keep talismans in their wallets to remind them of those they love: a romantic letter, a set of dog tags, a family picture. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has such a token--but it's to remind him of the people he hates.

Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ...

If you were a gun-control supporter last spring, life was sweet. Al Gore and Bill Bradley were climbing over each other trying to prove their devotion to the issue. After a rash of school shootings, President Clinton was taunting the National Rifle Association ("I'm just trying to keep more people alive"), and Democrats had practically shut down Capitol Hill in a push for meaningful gun legislation.

One legend, most likely apocryphal, says that the word lobbyist was coined at Washington, D.C.’s Willard Hotel--where politicos and powerbrokers would linger in the hotel lobby in an attempt to schmooze and sway President Ulysses S. Grant. Whatever their origins, lobbyists have become a permanent fixture of the Beltway scene. With a raging debate over the influence of corporate and special interest (especially in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court case), TNR took a look back to a piece written by senior editor John B.

As activists on the right gather this week in Washington, D.C., for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), TNR has dipped into our archives to bring you a look back at some of the forces that have shaped the GOP. Before Thomas Schaller wrote his famous tract Whistling Past Dixie: How the Democrats Can Win Without the South, TNR contributor Michael Lind wrote an impressive account of the Southernization of the Republican Party. Pegged to the Republicans' Contract with America and electoral landslide in 1994, Lind compiled an impressive, comprehensive history of the decline of northern, Nelson Rockefeller-style Republicanism and the rise of a new crop of Southern GOP leaders. “Is there a way out of this?” asked Lind. “The construction of a national, political and social response to the Southern coup will require a long, and difficult, period of sustained effort. But it can only begin if Democrats--and those few principled Republicans who are left--actively contest the claim of the Southern-dominated GOP that it now speaks in any way for a new American majority.” With the conservative movement gaining momentum and some commentators predicting a Democratic walloping in 2010 akin to that of 1994, Lind’s piece is essential reading for those who want to understand the past, present, and future of the GOP.

When the new Republican Congress was sworn in last January, the South finally conquered Washington. The defeated Democratic leadership had been almost exclusively from the Northeast, the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, with Speaker Tom Foley of Washington, Majority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri and Majority Whip David Bonior of Michigan in the House, and, on the Senate side, Majority Leader George Mitchell from Maine. The only Southerner in the Democratic congressional leadership was Senate Majority Whip Wendell Ford of Kentucky. By contrast, all but one of the new leaders of the Republican Congress hail from a former state of the Confederacy: Speaker Newt Gingrich is a Georgian, House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Whip Tom DeLay are both Texans and Senate Majority Whip Trent Lott is from Mississippi. Only Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas remains as a fossil of the era in which the GOP was a party of the Midwest and the Northeast that seldom received a Southern vote. Strom Thurmond, the 1948 presidential candidateof the segregationist States' Rights Party, the so-called Dixiecrats, is now chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee--a grim irony, inasmuch as the integration of the armed forces was one of the reforms that inspired Thurmond to bolt from Harry Truman's Democratic Party in the first place.