Believe it or not, those clips being shown on the news channels are not from a Saturday Night Live sketch of a comedian imitating RNC Chairman Michael Steele — that is, as we say in LA, the real Michael Steele.

It couldn’t be SNL, of course, because Steele’s speech was funny, albeit unintentionally laughable.

Trish wrote yesterday about Steele’s jaw-dropping assertion that the era of Republicans apologizing for their mistakes was over. As she said, “Was I out of the room when the Republicans apologized for the Bush years?”

But the biggest unintentional laugh from the speech may have been Steele’s
rallying cry toward the end of the speech in which he asserted that the hope for the GOP lies in the teabagging movement:

Those of you who live outside of Washington know what I’m talking about. Those of you who actually attend Lincoln Day dinners, and county party events, those of you who toil in the vineyards, spending time in communities, in diners, in barber shops, and in coffee shops where real, every day people can be found. You know it is real. You can see it and feel it.

This change comes in a tea bag! And that’s a wonderful thing.

It’s doubtful Steele thought it was such a wonderful thing when organizers of the Chicago teabagging rally in April rejected his offer to speak at the event.

And in the same way adults bow to a kindergartner’s stubborn determination to wear her princess gown to the mall, Steele and the GOP deserve credit for forging ahead with teabagging, despite having been relentlessly mocked this spring for choosing branding that is a famous frat-boy double entendre.

But if it’s true that the GOP is betting its future on an astroturf “movement” that is orchestrated by party fatcats, paid for by Republican lobbyists and promoted on hate radio and Fox News — and that uses crypto-racist messaging to rally mostly uneducated whites to protest tax increases on people with incomes over $200,000 — then Democrats, and the country at large, can rest easy.