“It [calling Tea Partiers crazy] is a way to distract from the issues,” Burchfiel said. “It’s the same thing with the racist argument: You try to paint them as racists so you don’t have to talk about the issues.”

Consumer Watchdog, a progressive advocacy group, launched a new Times Square jumbotron advertisement asking people if they’re upset with corporate bailouts, home foreclosures, insurance rate hikes, Wall Street greed and if they are “mad as hell,” but think the “Tea Party is insane,” encouraging viewers to visit their website – consumerwatchdog.org.

Court told TheDC Consumer Watchdog made an active decision to use the word “insane” in its ad and that the group could have used “nuts” too.

“Of course we actively made the decision to raise the question of whether the Tea Party is insane,” Court said in a phone interview with TheDC. “The reason we did it, again, is because we wanted to call out a provocative question in the largest public square in America.”