This from The Washington Post….  These ten myths come from authors of a new book: John Amato and David Neiwert get quite worked up over this notion, especially as it applies to the conservative right. In their book, “Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane,” due out in June from PoliPoint Press, the authors explore the false stories they say are propagated by figureheads of the right such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs. Here they identify 10 beliefs of the Tea Party movement that they say are provably untrue. Amato is founder of Crooks and Liars, a progressive weblog. Neiwert is editor of the weblog Orcinus.

And David Brooks, telling the story of a fictitious “Ben,” explains why ordinary, hard-working folks are attracted to the Tea Party…

But these days, the political center is a feckless shell. It has no governing philosophy. Its paragons seem from the outside opportunistic, like Arlen Specter, or caught in some wishy-washy middle, like Blanche Lincoln. The right and left have organized, but the center hasn’t bothered to. The right and left have media outlets and think tanks, but the centrists are content to complain about polarization and go home. By their genteel passivity, moderates have ceded power to the extremes.

So when Ben looked around for leaders who might understand his outrage, he only found them among the ideological hard-liners. In Arkansas, he saw a MoveOn candidate, Bill Halter, crusading against the bailouts and the spoils culture. On the right, he saw the Tea Party candidate Rand Paul crusading against runaway spending and debt.

Ben wasn’t naturally an extremist sort of guy. He didn’t live his life for politics or go in for the over-the-top stuff he heard on talk radio. But he did have some sense that the American work ethic was being threatened by debt and decadence.

It was going to take spit and vinegar to turn things around. So he voted for one of the outsiders. This is not time for a tinkerer, he figured. It’s time for a demolition man.