There’s more than one reason to keep the Tea Party protests from getting co-opted by the Republican Party. First, some of the Republicans in Congress deserve the ire of protesters, having frittered away the majority by spending like Democrats between 2001-6. Matt Mackowiak provides another reason. Just when we’d had enough of snickering “teabag” references, along comes a Republican consultant to draw an analogy between these peaceful political protests and a fictional group of domestic terrorists (via Dave Weigel):

The Tax Day Tea Party can be viewed through the prism of two divergent analogies.

Regular Americans can relate to the nationalistic story of Sam Adams, Paul Revere and others in the Sons of Liberty dressed as American Indians in a nighttime shipboard raid to dump British tea into Boston Harbor.

But there’s another analogy.

The coming revolution is akin to “Fight Club,” the 1999 film that follows the struggles of day to day life for a regular guy who starts an underground fight club as radical and not terribly productive psychotherapy.

As Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, says in the movie, “Fight Club was the beginning, now it’s moved out of the basement, it’s called Project Mayhem.”

Er … thanks, Matt.  Maybe Matt hasn’t actually watched Fight Club, but Project Mayhem was a terrorist plot to blow up several high-rise buildings containing all of the credit and banking information in the world.  It was a plot to take the world economy back to absolute zero, so that we could have different winners and losers in the future.

Don’t we have enough problems with the DHS equating criticism on economic policy with potential terrorism without our own side making the same argument in our defense?