Gateway Pundit Celebrates Bennett's Loss, But STL TP Still Afraid to Take on Blunt

Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft triumphantly wrote on Saturday that the tea party had claimed the "scalp" of incumbent Republican Senator Bob Bennett in Utah after Bennett was eliminated from the GOP nomination. Hoft directed his readers to a post by Glenn Reynolds, where Reynolds framed the vote as a victory against the "Washington elite."

Yet here in Missouri there's a Republican Senate primary between the quintessential Washington insider Roy Blunt and genuine conservative Chuck Purgason, but the St. Louis Tea Party is unwilling to get involved in a race they could easily swing in Purgason's favor. The tea party had earlier threatened Blunt if he didn't endorse NY-23 candidate Doug Hoffman, saying that they would "vote him out," and "come at him with so much heat he wouldn't know how to handle it," but Blunt ignored them and ever since the Tea Party apparently remembered where their bread was buttered. It's worth noting that Roy Blunt does not even come close to living up to the Tea Party ideals of small government, having voted for both Cash for Clunkers and the Wall Street Bailout.

Tea parties around the country are very different. In some parts of the country, they are even led by people interested in changing the Washington D.C. excesses that almost all Americans agree are a bad thing. In St. Louis, however, they talk a big game but ultimately are interested only in electing the same old GOP establishment and scoring some brownie points with that establishment. They talk trash about the D.C. insider in Utah, but tremble before the one in their backyard.