NOT Breaking: Astroturf St. Louis Tea Party Leadership Supported Roy Blunt

As I've been saying for a while, the astroturf St. Louis Tea Party leadership, initially formed via a collaboration between Fox News and Americans for Prosperity (funded by the Koch family, one of the wealthiest families in the world) solidly supported Roy Blunt in the Republican primary despite the fact that 28 other Missouri tea parties refused to endorse Blunt and a poll of their own members showed that 64% supported Purgason as opposed to only 25% supporting Blunt. This would not necessarily be news, except for the fact that the tea party was completely disingenuous about their support of Blunt. They refused to sign a letter with 28 other tea party groups merely stating that they did not endorse Blunt, and then offered up a bogus excuse as their justification. They also wrote several posts defending their decision not to support "an ideologically pure candidate," although they weren't willing to come out and say that they were referring to the Blunt/Purgason race.

Basically, the St. Louis tea party leadership was trying to pretend to be neutral in the primary, all the while supporting Blunt. And then, when the primary was over, they planned on immediately jumping in and saying "well, Blunt is more conservative than Carnahan, so we should all unite behind him," without acknowledging that they did nothing to push for a candidate that actually supported their stated values. Bill Hennessy couldn't even wait for the dust to settle to show his enthusiasm for the TARP and Cash for Clunkers voting Blunt, and was wearing a Roy Blunt sticker at the Ed Martin watch party:

This was further confirmed in the Post-Dispatch today in an article by Tony Messenger, that refers to St. Louis tea partier Jim Durbin as follows:

St. Louis blogger Jim Durbin, who like many of his local Tea Party cohorts backed Blunt but stayed quiet about it.

This, I think, completely underscores the astroturf nature of the St. Louis Tea Party Leadership (which, as the poll indicates, is not necessarily responsive to their membership's wishes). While on the one hand pretending to be ideological purists who represent something "new and different," they in reality spend their time arguing that everyone should support a Washington D.C. insider Republican claiming "that's the best choice we got," without making any attempt to actually pick a candidate that would fit their "new and different' claim. As I've said many times, the St. Louis tea party is different from many of the others around the country. The leadership of our tea party is full of opportunists who want nothing more than a return to the George Bush years and to improve their status of getting booked as pundits. They only take advantage of the people who actually believe in conservative ideological purity, and use those people to bolster their own careers.