Dispatches From The Fringe.

I've written several posts (here, here & here) about the so-called "tea parties" that popped up in various U.S. cities after CNBC gas-bag Rick Santelli's staged anti-stimulus rant.

The Village Voice routinely writes about the reality-challenged lunacy of the right-wing blogosphere, and has a great piece this week about both the sparse Tea Party turn-outs and a reported back-story to what their shepherds have claimed is a "grass roots" movement.

Of course, given that right-wing talk radio listeners and conservative blog readers believe every word they hear on the radio and then love to read it regurgitated on right-fringe blogs, they probably believe that, too.

From the Village Voice:

Rightbloggers had a big project last week: A series of "tea parties" across the country to protest Obama and his stimulus bill, inspired by comments by CNBC's Rick Santelli (and, it has been suggested, by some rightwing pressure groups).

The results were not a great success, at least in the objective terms rightbloggers long ago abandoned. With some notableexceptions, the tea parties were very small, as even supporters' photos revealed. They ranged in attendance from healthy hundreds in St. Louis to four souls in Boise, Idaho. In contrast, even a wholly unrelated single pro-immigrant rally in Phoenixdrew thousands of protesters this weekend without the assistance of a CNBC shouting head or the message discipline of rightwing bloggers.

The best you could say for them was that they happened. Rightbloggers were the main publicists for the 40-odd rallies, and may be encouraged to have gotten even a few thousand widely-spaced conservatives to make signs and stand outdoors for a hour or two.

But that doesn't matter: these rallies were not meant to sway ordinary citizens, who probably barely noticed them, but to assuage the hurt feelings of true believers out there in the blogosphere who will be delighted to hear that, in this Age of Obama, even a small number of people who believe the same things as they do stood in streets and parks and yelled in loud voices, as we reported from the New York tea party, to accuse Obama of socialism, communism, and fascism.

Read more here and here.