So the revelation in the National Journal that the 61-year-old Cornyn is collecting three different state-government pensions while receiving his federal salary as a senator (a total of $239,383 in taxpayer-funded largesse) is slightly off-message, and just a tad inconvenient, as he gets ready to run for a third term next year.

“There’s a lot of hypocrisy there,” says Tea Party pundit Erick Erickson, proprietor of the influential RedState.com blog. “I think John Cornyn is a good guy. He didn’t create the pensions model and there’s nothing wrong with getting multiple pensions. But this is the next front for conservatives: They need to pick a fight with government pensions. And it becomes very hard for people like John Cornyn to pick that fight when he’s benefiting so well from them.”…

“It’s the one area that the Tea Party groups and the Occupy groups can agree on,” Erickson says. “Politicians tend to create an aristocracy for themselves. The two groups have different ideas on how to deal with the problem, and their solutions are very different, but Republicans and Democrats both are cutting checks to their favorite groups, and sometimes their favorite groups are themselves.”