Take note, tea partiers: They talk about you like a dog.

Democratic operatives are ablaze with excitement over the victory of two particularly dubious Tea Party candidates in Tuesday’s Republican primaries, envisioning smoother paths to victory in the races for governor in New York and United States senator in Delaware. But for voters of all stripes, Tuesday’s primaries should illuminate the growling face of a new fringe in American politics — and provide the incentive for level-headed voters to become enthusiastic about the midterm election.

Republican leaders have to decide if they want the tiny fraction of furious voters who have showed up at the primary polls to steer them into the swamp for years ahead. They have a chance to repudiate the worst of the Tea Party crowd and show that they can govern without appealing to the basest political instincts. So far, they have preferred to greedily capitalize on the nuclear energy in the land without considering its destructive effects…

For both parties and certainly the broad swath of independent voters, defeating this new crop of Tea Party nominees has become imperative to avoid the sense of national embarrassment from each divisive and offensive utterance, each wacky policy proposal.

The New York Times’s idea of bipartisanship: Democrats and Republicans joining hands to crush conservatives. It’s a comfort to know that snotty, tone-deaf, self-parodic pieces like this will not only persist but flourish as we get closer to election day, thereby ensuring fresh supplies of motivation for Republicans to turn out and utterly destroy the left at the polls. In fact, maybe this is how we should start measuring Coons’s lead over O’Donnell in Delaware. Right now, I’d say we’re maybe four more snide Times editorials away from an upset. Can they push her over the top? Odds are long but not impossible!

Via Right Network, here’s left-leaning Time scribe Mark Halperin following Chris Matthews’s lead in offering a little strange new respect for the tea party. Enjoy this now because, like I say, by election day the media daggers will be out.