And by “shocking” we mean “not shocking at all.”

Tana Ganeva, a fantastic writer at AlterNet and an enlightening follow on Twitter, has an interesting tidbit about the so-called “Tea Party” in the wake of their convention and their rabid display of force over the the CPAC event earlier this week. While the media loved all over CPAC and gave top billing to the radical right and its growing cancerous effect within the Republican Party, they were very busy in the halls of their convention proving exactly how unfit they are to lead anyone, much less their own movement, much less the national government as a whole.

Aside from some topics that I’ve mentioned already, specifically the fact that a lot of the Tea Party rage is your standard white male privilege protection, Ganeva points out that – predictably – the people who are so angry about the state of the government are the people benefiting from the old-boy, privileged system the most:

According to a new CNN poll (via TPM), a majority of respondents who had donated to a Tea Party group or participated in a Tea Party event were male, white, and identified as Protestant/Other Christian groups.

…So real, genuine Americans seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.

None of this should be especially surprising. Most poor people scraping by in terrible, low-paying jobs — or with no jobs — probably don’t have the time to don three-cornered hats and scream about communism.

But there has been an MSM tendency to trumpet the movement as an eruption of populist rage by those crushed in the financial crisis. “Populism” liberals just don’t grasp, of course, because they’re all elitist and stuff. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to reconsider our use of the word “elite” so it at least slightly correlates with things like money and privilege.

Yeah, that’s pretty sad, but again, entirely predictable. The media has been using the word “populist” in so many different ways that it’s difficult to really understand what the word means. When it was about enforcing new rules on Wall Street, the media termed it “populist rage.” Now again, when dealing with an extremely vocal but very certainly a minority group of rich white men trying to change their image to be “one of the people,” they’re using the term again when their agenda is anything but populist.

[ Shocking: Tea Partiers Mostly Rich, White, Christian Guys ]
Source: AlterNet