Tea & Crackers: Rolling Stone Sips at a Tea Party

The pre-Obama Tea Parties were peopled by young anti-war types and libertarian intellectuals who were as turned off by "W" and Rove as they were by liberals and Democrats

But Tea Party 2.0's Rand Paul "is now sucking up to the same Republican Party hacks he once campaigned against…he has changed his mind on bailouts and abortion and American interventionism." — Matt Taibbi

ROLLINGSTONE Sep 2010 | It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin—who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate—is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York…

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