Via Sharp Elbows, an encounter from yesterday’s rally in St. Louis that you’d better watch here, as you surely won’t be seeing it on the news. After all the hype over the CrashTheTeaParty idiot, I figured we’d have a treasure trove of pics and videos this morning of liberal agents provocateur stomping around in SS hats. Nope: This guy’s pretty much it (and in fairness to lefties, he may be the real deal). In fact, aside from a few progressives who showed up with signs that were less incendiary than snarky, the Great Tea Party Infiltration was a rather epic fizzle.

To be sure, a handful of obvious crashers engaged in some mostly non-confrontational back-and-forth with tea party activists at a Thursday evening rally that drew thousands to Washington’s National Mall near the Washington Monument. And some less overt crashers subtly mocked activists from amidst their ranks at both the evening rally on the Mall and an earlier event at Freedom Plaza near the White House. And there could have been other infiltrators who evaded immediate detection.

But activists and organizers interviewed by POLITICO said the mischief was nowhere near as widespread or disruptive as they feared earlier in the week, when a wave of attention focused on a website called CrashtheTeaParty.org that encouraged liberals to pretend to be tea partiers, attend rallies and voice fringe sentiments to marginalize the movement (the website appears to have been stripped of most of its content Thursday)…

And a group of five American University students, who were on average probably at least 25 years younger than most attendees at the FreedomWorks rally, waded through the crowd with signs ranging from the direct and challenging (“Embrace the state”) to the satirical (“I have a sign” and “Loud noises”) to the malapropically mocking (“No $ 4 educatoin. I don’t wnt it”).

“We’re really just more protesting for the sake of humor,” said Thomas Bollerman, 19, of Ridgefield, Conn., who identified himself and his cohorts as part of a Protest Club at American.

Bob Owens calls it “the crash that burned.” As for incendiary signs carried by tea partiers themselves, I invite you to scroll through HuffPo’s gallery of the 30 most “outrageous” placards spotted, where you’ll encounter such heart-stoppers as “No Taxes for Tyranny.” I’m tempted to say that we’ve turned the corner on the tea-party racism meme — Jon Stewart even mocked the media last night for blowing it out of proportion — but that political weapon is too useful to the left to ever be laid down. Like the kid in the second video below, they know what they know.

Update: Via JWF, the Sacramento infiltrators went for broke.