Charles Blow of the New York Times informs us that the Teabaggers are ever so smart, neener.

Big-city liberals and their blogging buddies love to paint Tea Partiers as yokels with incoherent candidates and language-mauling signs. (Some have even dubbed their misspellings and grammatical gaffes “Teabonics.”) On some level, this may be true. But there is also a certain hypocrisy to these taunts.

The unpleasant fact that these liberals rarely mention, and may not know, is that large swaths of the Democratic base, groups they need to vote in droves next month — blacks, Hispanics and young people — are far less civically literate than their conservative counterparts.

Gosh, a Main Stream Media columnist sneering at “big-city liberals” and “bloggers.” How novel. A “contrarian” stance. Daring. Bold. Exciting. Not at all a tedious compendium of crusty idées reçues, which is to say, the column is not at all redolent of the decades-old lumpy wisdom-farts that have long stiffened the corduroys of smug Main Stream Media geniuses who think it’s Daring Bold and Exciting to recite wingnut horseshit, chapter and verse.

(Adjusts monocle, flecks imaginary dirt-flecks off shirt-cuffs, snorts arugula snifter.)

Blow is being an ass, though. In three ways, at least. Foist, “Tea Baggers” constitute a self- selected class of individuals; “blacks, Hispanics, and young people” do not, so the premise of the column is, for openers, from any scientific purpose, inane. Though it is nice to see the backhanded acknowledgment that the Tea Baggers are overwhelmingly white and old. I guess.

Suckund, here is some of Blow’s “evidence”:

according to a poll released this week by the Pew Research Center, 42 percent of blacks, 42 percent of Hispanics and 35 percent of voters ages 18 to 29 years old don’t even know that Democrats have a majority in the House?

Like it’s somehow unforgivable not to know that Democrats have a majority in the House. I pay close attention to this shit, myself, and for the past four frickin’ years I’ve been asking myself, “the Democrats have a majority in the House? Really?”

I mean, it’s not like from a “help the base” perspective you’d have fucking noticed.

Turd, well, Steve M:

I wouldn’t argue that the problem with teabaggers and their candidates is what they don’t know. The problem, as the saying goes, is what they do know that just ain’t so.

Which would be stuff like that Obama is a socialist, that Sharia law is usurping the Constitution, that climate science is a Hoax, and that they are not a bunch of rube-class suckers.

There is a difference between not-informed and half-informed, which is also, usually, the difference between ignorant and insane. And there is not a single Tea Party Tenet that is not half-informed and also insane.

But hey, they have a Major “News” Network egging them on, so they deserve to be taken precisely as seriously as, say, Paul Krugman. This is called “balance.”

(NB: Video not related to content of post. I just like Q-Tip.)