Timothy Egan takes a look at the fire breathing Tea Partiers and finds them as duplicitous/confused as the people they claim to hate…

…polls in key primary states show that people who describe themselves as Tea Party members support Mitt Romney,Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

Each of the front-runners, in obvious ways, represents what the Tea Party hates. Romney, as is well known, is the founding father of Obamacare — the law requiring people to get health insurance, pioneered by him in Massachusetts. He supported the huge bailout of Wall Street, which passed all that downside capitalistic risk on to the rest of us. Hooray for the socialist from Bain Capital!

After 30 years at the fetid waters of power, Gingrich, of course, is the ultimate Washington insider, and he took $1.6 million from government-sponsored Freddie Mac, which Tea Partiers blame for the housing collapse.

And Santorum, during his 16 years in Congress, never met an earmark he could not support, from a bilingual health care studies program at a college in his home state to the infamous Bridge to Nowhere. Critics of big spending say he has requested more than $1 billion in earmarks during his time at the trough.

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