Publishing industry ready to take on the tea party

Of the four tea party books scheduled for release between August and next spring, all except one — “Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto,” by movement leaders Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe — appear likely to take a less-than-flattering approach. The other three are by authors whose prior dispatches on the tea party have come under criticism from conservatives: Kate Zernike of The New York Times, Thomas Frank, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, and Jill Lepore, a Harvard history professor and New Yorker staff writer…

An ominous tone does run through a documentary called “Rise of the New Right” from MSNBC’s “Hardball,” set to air Wednesday, which concludes with a “warning” from host Chris Matthews…

In an e-mail to POLITICO, Matthews said the tea party has helped convey a sense that “the American government is somehow attacking the American people.”

Such a world view reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of federal government, he wrote, asserting “anyone who knows how things work in Washington knows that there is not some monolith ‘the government.’ … The new right seems to argue that this is a battle between the American people and their own government, which suggests you can’t reform it, you can’t change leaders or representatives, that there is something wrong with the ‘government’ itself.”