I had a laugh over the weekend at the naivete of a tipster who sent me this link as evidence that liberal mobies were planning to crash the tea party rallies. Obviously, the site had to be a clever PR ploy set up by tea partiers themselves to create plausible deniability in case any fringers make trouble this week. If some far-right crank shows up with an “Obama = Hitler” sign, no problem: TPers could simply point to the website and say, “Aha, he must have been a leftist infiltrator trying to make us look bad.” Thus would every last questionable sign at the rallies immediately become suspect. For that reason, surely, surely, the website couldn’t be a bona fide attempt by actual liberals to encourage mobyism. No one could be that stupid.

Or so I thought.

Jason Levin, creator of http://www.crashtheteaparty.org, said Monday the group has 65 leaders in major cities across the country who are trying to recruit members to infiltrate tea party events for April 15 — tax filing day, when tea party groups across the country are planning to gather and protest high taxes.

“Every time we have someone on camera saying that Barack Obama isn’t an American citizen, we want someone sitting next to him saying, ‘That’s right, he’s an alien from outer space!'” Levin said…

Levin says they want to exaggerate the group’s least appealing qualities, further distance the tea party from mainstream America and damage the public’s opinion of them.

“Do I think every member of the tea party is a homophobe, racist or a moron? No, absolutely not,” Levin said. “Do I think most of them are homophobes, racists or morons? Absolutely.”

So fantastically idiotic is this that I toyed with the idea that Levin is a tea partier under deep, deep cover as a left-wing halfwit. Nope: The boss emeritus has been digging around and he appears to be legit. He did initially try to hide the fact that the website was registered to him (the Freepers smoked him out), but what I don’t understand is why he’d put the site up in the first place. A false-flag operation is effective only if it’s secret; the way to do this logically would have been through word of mouth or left-wing message boards that are off the mainstream radar screen. What am I missing here? How does this not end up completely backfiring by letting tea partiers blame the left for incendiary material at the rallies?

Be sure to follow the link to Michelle’s post and read about her encounter with a swastika-toting liberal at an early rally. They’ve done this before; they were just smarter about it then.