What have we learned so far about the tea baggers? They don’t believe President Obama was born in the United States. They think Obama’s impeachment is overdue– after less than three months in office. They have no idea what the 1773 Boston Tea Party was about (taxation without representation).

Doug Powers, writing on Michelle Malkin’s blog, explains that it’s not the tea baggers who are insane, it’s The Government!

Think about the monumental efforts in both time and intellect that are wasted in order to satisfy insane government demands.

I attend the tea parties as a way of showing that it saddens me to know that people who might have otherwise cured a horrible disease, designed grand buildings, created art and music, invented a car that runs on kumquats that people actually want to buy, expanded their businesses, explored the farthest reaches of the universe or had more time to devote to charity are now spending most of their energy trying to figure out a way to write off their lawnmowers as dependents.

Kumquat cars? Listing your lawnmower as a dependent? All perfectly rational in wingnut land. Remember, this is a rant about a THREE PERCENT tax increase only on incomes of $250,000 a year or more– that doesn’t even take effect until 2011, when the Bush tax cuts will be allowed to expire on schedule.

Malkin herself proclaims that the April 15 tea bagger events are not being orchestrated by “Beltway GOP swamp creatures”– quite the opposite:

Untold numbers of protesters are as sick of GOP capitulation and Beltway Republican cravenness as they are of Democrat wealth redistributionism. The left-wing conspiracy theorists give Beltway GOP swamp creatures far too much credit. They couldn’t have pulled off hundreds of protests over the past month and hundreds more to come if they tried. There are individual fiscal conservatives in Washington who have carried the torch. But tax protesters have been very vocal that the Republican party establishment is in so many ways a part of the problem, not the solution.

Of course, in reality these are astroturf events heavily backed by the Faux News Channel and corporate lobbyists based in Washington. As Think Progress points out:

The principal organizers of many of the local events are actually the lobbyist-run think tanks Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Works, and Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions. The groups are heavily staffed and well funded, and are providing all the logistical and public relations work necessary for planning coast-to-coast protests.

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias comments that the tea bagger movement is “incredibly stupid”:

Part of the underlying absurdity of this, however, is that it’s just so transparently silly to be pouring so much time and energy into trying to make Barack Obama appear unpopular when he’s not unpopular. There’s such a thing as opinion polling and it can answer this sort of thing pretty conclusively…