Glenn Beck Tells His Tea Party Minions to Quit Wearing Stupid Outfits and Carrying Stupid Signs

Because the outfits are why everyone thinks you’re crazy.  Yep.  Uh-huh.

The Tea Party is desperately trying to package itself as a serious political party and to hide the more fringe elements.  The Tea Party muckity mucks know that the normal Republicans, Democrats, and independents do not stand with the idiots who think that dressing like Ben Franklin is the best way to get their message across, or the asshats who think that carrying racist ass signs is cogent political discourse.

Racist? What you say? US? No. Where’d you get that idea?

::eyeroll::

As the Asshats on the Right coalesce around their candidates — we love the Tea Party! we never didn’t love the Tea Party! — they are also undergoing an image makeover.

For example, as soon as Christine O’Donnell won the Delaware primary on Tuesday, her website was scrubbed. Before the primary, one could peruse O’Donnell’s personal history and some of her (nutty) political positions.  Now if you click on her website, it’s just one ginormous donation sign. I reckon that a kinder gentler O’Donnell will soon burst forth from cyberspace. She will be folksy.  She will be winky.  And, of course, pictures of her with a hunting rifle will soon surface. She’s a real American, y’all!  It’s Palin 101.

It’s also Sharron Angle 101.  O’Donnell is borrowing a page from the Sharron Angle playbook – as soon as Sharron Angle won the Nevada primary, she  scrubbed her website of all the whackadoodle political stances which her campaign managers think are too extreme for moderate folks. Harry Reid recovered Angle’s website and published information from her pre-primary website on a website of his own called The Real Sharron Angle:

It’s beginning, people. After a brief period of confusion and infighting, the Republicans have pulled all the wanderers (like Karl Rove) back on to the reservation. The GOP is fully backing these candidates and are hoping to whitewash these candidate’s extremely conservative and borderline ridiculous political views in order to sway moderates and independents who are none to pleased with Pelosi, Reid, and of course Nobama.  But in order to help with the whitewashing, the Tea Party needs to calm down its base.

Here’s Olbermann on Beck’s message to his followers on how to Be Taken More Seriously.  It starts with blaming the left –  (They are judging you by your signs and stupid teabag hats – not on the content of your character!  ::paging Dr. King!::)

And thus the normalization of crazy begins:

I’m saying that maybe it’s time to lose — oh, I don’t know — the Statue of Liberty costume, you know?

Maybe no more dressing up, you know, with Abe Lincoln or, you know, putting the foam finger on your head or something like or the “Obama is a socialist” T-shirt. You might want to put it back in the drawer and let me explain why.

[...]

It’s very important that you understand the image — the image. Do what you want to do, but when you dust off the Statue of Liberty costume and wear it to a rally, guess who gets plastered on the front page of the news? You. And this is a problem.

I was in Seattle about a year ago and there were 10,000 people there. And as I was leaving, I saw somebody who was wearing a Statue of Liberty outfit. And I thought to myself, that’s going to be the one person they pick — just to make you look like you’re crazy. Guess what was in the Seattle P.I. the next morning? That one person.

[...]

And as much as my daughter says, “Dad, I don’t care what people say about my clothing” — well, other people do. Other people do. Don’t give the media even a chance to typecast you.

His voice is so creepy, isn’t it?  ::shudder::

I’m putting on my tinfoil hat.

[via Wonkette; via The Blaze]