Remember when this whole tea-bagging thing started and it just seemed too silly to gain momentum? Well who's silly now, comrade Liberal Doubtevski? All indicators say that this snowball of unfocused populist rage is just going to keep rolling until someone's getting ice down the back of their coat.

Peep this article by Christopher Beam over on Slate about Michelle Bachmann's anti-reform freedom SuperBowl. While the real heart of the article is the fact that top-tier Republicans are stoking a fire they don't really control, there's plenty of other details to get your hands wringing. Like this paragraph:

Some of [the attendees] dressed for the occasion. Before the speeches started, a man in a death costume grabbed a bullhorn and introduced two protesters dressed up as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Each was bound in chains and their clothes were spattered in blood. Baby dolls hung upside down from their chains. Around each wrist they wore bracelets made of what looked like small plastic fetuses. "Whyyyy?" moaned the Pelosi character. "Why did I kill the babies?" Nearby, Nancy Murphy of Annapolis, Md., complained that they were making the rally look bad. "We want you to write about this," she said, indicating the rest of the protest. "Not about that." Indeed, many protesters were still livid over media coverage of the 9/12 protest, particularly the phrase teabagger. "Do you see anyone here with nutsacks on their face?" said one man to me.

Or this excerpt from actor, Jon Voight's, speech:

"President Obama has his own obsession with trying to ram this health bill through and create a socialist America," he said. "We as freedom-loving Americans must not be scared into Obama's radical Chicago tactics. His agenda is not for the poor. It's solely for his political gain. His lies and propaganda are all very blatant, shown to us by those who exposed ACORN, which is as corrupt as all the president's czars."

Nice little cluster of fear-mongering buzzwords there. Which legacy will Jon Voight's family have a harder time living down: his career as a conservative talking head or his co-starring role in David Zucker's An American Carol?

Don't cry for me, Angelina!