Tea Party Movement Shattering?

The Politico digs up enough stories of internecine fighting amongst the loose bunch of organizations supposedly responsible for, or furthering in specific locations, the Tea Party movement to generate a semi-convincing trend story that argues the movement may be "losing momentum."

While the sort of petty conflict the story highlights between your Tea Party Patriots and Tea Party Express and Tea Party Nation, (your People's Judean Front and People's Front of Judea…), are worth noting (and unavoidable in politics), I'd say that an idea (which I think is a more accurate description of the whole orbit of actions and groups lumped in as the "tea party movement") that can still gather 4,000 people to a Texas rally, as the story notes, isn't worth writing off yet.

More important than which particular organization involved in the movement grows or triumphs is what this newly energized mass movement pissed off at D.C. will end up standing for. Alas, that a planned February National Tea Party convention will have bailout-supporting warmonger Sarah Palin as a star is an alarming sign that what had promise as a mass anti-state movement will descend into personality cult anti-Democratic party populism.

Matt Welch's excellent first person account on the varied and interesting promise of the Tea Party movement as shown at its huge September rally in D.C.