Ten years too late, Junior Goldberg discovers that Bush was a warmongering, big-spending wastrel after all. He also pretends that conservatives didn’t complain during the Bush years, so their awakening now is “delayed.”

Junior, however, still snoozes. And Politico piles on, calling the Tea Party’s taxpayer outrage “overblown” — relying, of course, on a GOP troughdweller who is shaking in his boots.

He ought to be. In my home state, the GOP establishment is pushing former senator Dan Coats to run for the seat of Evan Bayh. Coats hasn’t lived in Indiana since the 1970s, and he has been representing huge lobbying clients whose sins will undoubtedly be plentifully purveyed around the state — after the primary. I still remember the ebullient Coats on the senate floor some 20 years ago, celebrating the victory of his son’s high-school team in the state championship — of Virginia!

The Tea Partiers seem to me to be what Phyllis Schlafly calls a “third force, not a third party” — like the pro-life movement (tired of forty years of betrayal), libertarians, and disgusted Republicans. On that score, Junior heard it right at the Tea Party he attended: “we won’t be fooled again.” And that means that the GOP is not the natural beneficiary of the widespread anti-Obama sentiment among voters. In my travels, I hear a more prevalent axiom: “Throw ALL the bums out!”

The Best of Christopher Manion