Amy Kremer, Tea Party Express' Director of Grassroots and Coalitions, sends this what's-good-for-the-goose-ain't-at-all-good-for-the-gander fundraising email:

I am so mad right now....

This is all a political ploy - as was proven yesterday when it was revealed that the Obama campaign team organized the protests, provided the buses, and ran 15 phone bank centers to pressure union members to attend these mob scenes.

And today we found out why as liberal columnists revealed that the plan here is to destroy the tea party movement - to manufacture a fake response to the tea party movement that is louder and more effective, so that liberals can win policy wars in state legislatures and Congress, and manipulate the political environment so they can win in the upcoming 2012 elections.

Rather leaves you breathless, does it not?

When FreedomWorks and Koch Brothers funneled Alps of cash to tea party organizations -- to "win policy wars in state legislatures and Congress, and manipulate the political environment so they [could] win in the [2010] elections" -- we were calmly informed that financial muscle marrying grassroots virtue was merely the American Way.

But forget the hypocrisy. As a political staple of both sides, it balances out, so it's unimportant. What concerns is that Tea Party leaders and, my guess, all the little tea partiers tagging behind genuinely believe that they and they alone possess the legitimate right to protest and "win policy wars" and "manipulate the political environment." Because they are America. The publicly unionized are not. Or at least they're not 100 percent Americans, as the tea partiers are -- and that epithet resurrects a lot of really nasty American history.

By itself, in this Wisconsin instance, this concerns. But more concerning is the emerging pattern within the tea party movement specifically and the right in general: their reflexive assault on the legitimacy of any political opposition. Pluralism, compromise, debate -- indeed, the entire notion of honorable Americans conscientiously disagreeing with other honorable Americans -- all are delegitimized and promptly dispatched as unAmerican.

They had best get a grip. Americans tolerated that sort of intellectual despotism for too long in the middle of last century, but this isn't 1950s America any longer -- a decade whose pseudoconservative overreachings nearly killed off American conservatism for good.