I did not opt out of the Christian Coalition newsletter mailing list that someone unknown signed me up for some months ago. It helps to keep an eye on what the other side is up to. The Aug 5, 2011 issue includes the following scary observation:

“Critics and supporters of the Budget Control Act … agree that the Tea Party now controls the agenda in Washington D.C. As one who attended Glenn Beck’s Tea Party event last August — along with over a half million other Tea Party supporters — when looking at the hundreds of thousands of families near the Lincoln Memorial on Washington D.C.’s Mall, I realized that those families represent the large majority of the American people, as anyone with any kind of commonsense would.

Why in particular do I find this scary?

• Open admission that The Tea Party (not even an official political party) controls the actions of our legislature. This group is a powerful vocal minority, arguably smaller but richer than the 1980’s “Moral Majority.”
• Lack of fact checking: The attendance of the Glen Beck event is well established by several independent sources. They range from Beck’s hopeful “300,000 to 600,000” and Michelle Bachman’s “at least a million” to several actual counts from aerial photos between 60,000 and 87,000.
• The massive innumeracy that equates “thousands of families” with “large majority of the American people.” Please divide several thousand by hundreds of millions and show that this is somehow more than half.
  87,000 / 330,000,000 = 0.00026 or somewhat less than a majority, however you massage it.
• The implication that the openly theocratic ideals of the Tea Party are somehow related to common sense. Even Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” argued against a government supported by the church (as is England’s).
• And in totality, the tone that says that the oddball ideals of this group are somehow mainstream. They seem hopeful about Lenin’s maxim that a lie told often enough becomes the truth. And the Christian Coalition is all about The Truth.