Nearly half of the Republican Primary voters who support Sarah Palin say they are at least somewhat likely to vote for a third-party candidate if she does not win the GOP presidential nomination.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 46% of Likely Republican Primary Voters who favor Palin say they are at least somewhat likely to vote third-party if she isn’t nominated. That includes 22% who say it is Very Likely.

The teabag terror is loose. The Christian Science Monitor cites an unnamed poll with similar-sounding results and snaps a different closing paragraph in an otherwise overly-balanced story on the future of tea parties:

The ultimate arbiter of the tea party’s future may be the 2012 presidential election. If Republicans nominate anyone but Sarah Palin in 2012, a new Rasmussen poll shows, nearly half of Palin supporters would likely vote for a third party, which could, in turn, doom Republican chances of unseating President Obama.

And there you have it. She actually talked about this at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville:

She’s there to pull the window right, folks. Her husband hangs out with militia freaks in the Alaskan Independence Party; she’s steeped in John Bircher insanity; she belongs to a true-believing, witch-burning church where healing and speaking in tongues are commonplace; what part of this doesn’t sound like that Frankenstein core of the tea party that’s half libertardian and half beckerheads? That’s not based purely on the anecdotal experience of talking to dozens of them over the last two years, including at the Convention, but the words of Convention attendee Jonathan Raban:

This wasn’t a trivial issue. It’s one thing for pro-life evangelicals and secular libertarians to march shoulder to shoulder behind banners saying “Kill the Bill!” and “Oust the Marxist Usurper!” or displaying a portrait of Obama rouged up and kohled to look like Heath Ledger’s Joker in the Batman movie Dark Knight. It’s quite another to coop up the same people for three days in a hotel, where they must talk to each other through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At the march on D.C., there were T-shirts proclaiming “I am John Galt” and “Atlas Has Shrugged” alongside others that said “Obama Spends—Jesus Saves” or had the legend “Yes, He Did” beneath a picture of Christ on the cross. At Opryland, devout, abstemious Christians were breaking bread with followers of Ayn Rand’s gospel of unbridled and atheistic self-interest. The convention, designed to unite the Tea Party movement, was helping to expose fundamental differences of belief and mindset between people who, before Nashville, had appeared as interchangeable members of a single angry crowd.

For the Saturday night banquet and Palin’s speech, I was assigned a seat beside the woman who told me about people quitting a meeting because of the prayers. Had we been strangers on a plane together, we would have had nothing politically in common (she liked to refer to Obama as “the idiot”), but here we were confidential allies, in harmonious agreement about the birthers, the Marxist conspiracy, the demonization of immigrants, and the churchiness of the convention.

From this convention springeth so much wingnutery: Judson Phillips, the Tea Party Express, Breitbart fandom in the Beltway, and more. Raban later observed:

Whatever cracks and fissures had begun to open beneath our feet during the convention were instantly healed by Palin’s appearance on the platform. A great wave of adoration met the small, black-suited woman, as she walked to the microphone with a sheaf of papers. The entire ballroom was willing Sarah to transport us to a state of delirium with whatever she chose to say, and perhaps our expectations at the beginning of her speech were a guarantee that we’d leave feeling rather let down at the end.

[...]

I watched the replay of the speech on television and was surprised by how much more effective it sounded in my room than it had in life. Palin wasn’t so much speaking to the convention as she was addressing the nation, in its millions of separate rooms like mine. Her rapid, self-interrupting style of delivery was meant for the small screen, where her jokes worked better, and her banalities about policy had the pitch of kitchen-table conversation. It was far from a great speech, and I doubt if it won her many fresh converts, but it sounded a new note in her ever-surprising career: she was trying to find a “presidential” voice, and this was her State of the Union.

Oh, and there’s this observation by Dick Armey, the man who bills FreedomWorks $200 an hour to speak for the tea party astroturf network:

If in fact you take the social conservative and the economic conservative and you combine them, as Reagan did, as we did with the Contract, and resistance to the power of the state, you’ve got a happy coalition of people that can be successful and attractive to the voters. But if in fact, you go, as they did under the failing final years of the Republican majority, “We’re going to expand the power of the state in order to impose our social values on the community,” then of course, they even lost the evangelicals. They get confused by that and say, “Wait a minute, I didn’t think we were about making the government bigger and stronger and more dictatorial in our lives. We thought we were about our freedom and our liberties, and so forth.”

They basically got too aggressive on social policy and too complacent on economic policy and they were basically losing both of the two major components of their prior big tent that they had with Reagan that they had with the Contract. People got disinterested in them and disappointed in them and of course that set the stage for the Democrats to come rushing in with their big victory, mostly born out of disappointment in the Republicans.

See, the strategy is to emphasize the economy while maintaining all the culture war. It is a new identity for the Goldwater coalition. The GOP’s new “big tent” contains a strong faction therein demanding Sarah Palin or else; these are the people who gave us Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell. Moreover, in my nonformal interviews with tea party voters I find them quite willing to vote for these candidates knowing they will lose a general election.

They are utterly convinced of their righteousness. I repeat: we have seen this movie before — pass the popcorn.

“I think the majority of Americans don’t want to put up with the blue bloods,” Palin told Ingraham. “And I say it with all due respect, because I love the Bushes. “

Palin has a thing for blood. Take a red magic marker and highlight the edge of every page in Going Rogue with a reference to blood, death, meat, killing, eating, etc. Heart and breast show up frequently as well. In the space of thirty pages or so, you’ll realize the book is soaked in blood.

Blood cults aside, she’s throwing the Bushes under a bus here because among the tea party you cannot find a single person who approved of George. They will admit voting for him, but say the alternatives were worse; they will deny him three times. He’s that toxic. Up next: Sarah will tell us that George Bush was not a “real conservative.”

Details here.

ThinkProgress has a list of her statements about a third party; up til now she has taken the more popular position among teabaggers that the movement shouldn’t form its own party. But Sarah was never good at that consistent-thought thing, and she’s always eager to grow her personality cult one way or another.

Yes, Republicans, your creation will now go to war with you. Bad enough it was shouting insults and spitting on Congress members over the weekend; now it’s going to take all those RNC-supplied signs and attack you with them. But keep it up! You’re doing great!

She’s flirted with tea party televangelism; now she wants her own reality show. Somehow, it seems to me the natural end of the Sarah Palin story is a non-reality-based “reality show.” Think “John and Kate” with extra moose-hunting.

What’s sad is that she actually sees this as a step up in the world.

Of course, Celebrity Barbie has no capacity for self-examination, which is why she will never know that her sad paranoia and diva attitude piss people off. It’s the second coming of Anna Nichole Smith.

Teh Train Wreck™ continues off the rails and long past Denial Station.

The presumptive 2012 Republican nominee actually has 29% of Americans convinced she might be qualified to be president. This is the frightening result of a Washington Post-ABC poll. Did I mention that I live among an unusual concentration of such people?

The numbers are similar to Bush’s late approval numbers. So as far as I’m concerned, the Republicans can go ahead and crown her; she’s only going to say more stupid between now and then. The electorate knows what they’re seeing, but it will take time for the true believers to realize that she’s just cashing in on the ignorance she promotes.

Palin’s permanent revolution is a train wreck that left Denial Station on November 5th, 2008, and whistled past acceptance a long time ago. There will be no president Sarah and she knows it. But she would rather play queen anyway. Expect the old white men who DO plan to run in 2012 to  fawn all over her like a schoolboy crush.

Sorry about the audio quality at two points; there’s nothing I can do until such time as Teh Evil Plan™ sees fit to cut me a fat check to buy better equipment.

If you haven’t read my account of what happened as we tried to leave, you should.

Here’s the first Sarahpalooza for comparison:

Gaylord. Heh. Sumptuous digs for a "populist" movement.

Well, last night was interesting.

I needed to be in Nashville yesterday anyway, so I crashed the tea party at the Gaylord (heh!) Grand Ole Opry Hotel and Convention Center to catch as much video as possible. I went as a citizen journalist with every intention of promoting my work via Huffington Post in all probability, but in the form of You Tube video that will be available elsewhere (including, and especially, my own website).

I introduced myself as Matt Osborne to everyone who asked. No one asked if I was with a media organization, including the woman who eventually “threw me out,” until Sarah’s speech was over and I was literally leaving the way I’d come. I got silent video of convention participants and Judge Roy Moore of Ye Ten Commandments. I talked to “media colleagues” and got samples of the propaganda. Though I was refused entry to the ballroom to so much as take a photo of Sarah, I watched a little of her speech on somebody’s laptop.

After getting shots through the wide-open banquet hall doors, I proceeded to interview two participants off-camera for research purposes. I didn’t take quotes and continued introducing myself as Matt Osborne.

I say all of this as prologue to explain that I’m working on a video involving Andy Breitbart; I was hoping to run into him, but was more concerned with getting video to lay out the narrative of astroturfery and right-wing nontroversy. If you follow my posts at HuffPo or my blog, you know that these are very big areas of interest for me; they’re subjects on which Maddow has reported as well.

So just in case I ran into Breitbart, I had decided to adopt the O’Keefe method: I went under pretext. The best part is, I did not lie about these things, and still got plenty of video. As far as professional ethics go, I think I did pretty well. My girlfriend thought it would be fun to try and say she was a high school senior working on a report for her government class; she does in fact appear quite young, but she’s no professional. Nevertheless, it’s her camera.

As I said, I got GREAT video that will be ready later today (I hope), but I didn’t get to meet or see Breitbart. So I was on my way out the same way I came in (the back door leads to the Opry Mills Mall parking lot; the facility has 24-7 public access) when I was stopped by a woman who claimed to be the event’s media liaison.

She had the a sharp, angry tone of a harpy. Mind you, this woman had already caught sight of us and the camera shortly after we came in  and did nothing. When I now held out my hand and introduced myself as Matt Osborne, she asked me who I was with and I suddenly grew devil’s horns. Remember, I had already done what I’d come to do; just to find out what would happen, I said two words that may get me in real trouble:

“Huffington Post.”

I said that because (of course) Huffington Post is not a “real media organization” (while Breitbart, who borrowed the Huffington Post business model to spread demonstrable lies and paranoid racist agit-prop, was a central figure at the convention). Huffington Post alone does not get invited to the tea party. Wing Nut Daily is more “respectable.”

The harpy said I would have been treated like any other media organization if I had checked in with her, but I got VIDEO of their plan for me. No thanks — the media room was on the opposite end of the extremely large building, and reporters from other news agencies described an oppressive atmosphere.

Remember, I used public access. I took video of people already appearing on video. I didn’t tape or record interviews. As far as ethics are concerned, I’ll gladly compare mine to James O’Keefe any bloody day. Which must be why I grinned when the harpy said she should have expected as much, that HuffPo was an unprofessional outfit and I was the perfect example.

I tore a page out of the Breitbart-O’Keefe playbook and she called me “unprofessional.” Let that sink in.

Anyway: the harpy texted or tweeted someone. I did not have a press credential from HuffPo (I don’t think they have any, actually) so I began to explain that I am an unpaid blogger for Huffington Post…but she was already calling security as the words started coming out of my mouth.

The harpy said that I was to be detained and held for questioning, which was not about to happen for any number of reasons. It’s still the goddamn United States of America; I am not easily intimidated by civilians playing tinfoil god. I also found her highly offensive, so I just said “no” and turned to walk away.

Then the harpy followed me (she would follow me all the way to my car, she said). She attempted to taunt us (laughable) and hollered that we were in terrible trouble — which, in fact, we were; my girlfriend has breathing problems and was now having difficulty getting enough air.

When the harpy realized how I’d accessed the building, she took verbal offense that I had not paid $18 for self-parking. At that point I turned to her in an attempt at reconciliation; there were no grounds for arresting us, and my girlfriend was having a panic attack.

Which is the moment the harpy called the police. Irony: I was in a building full of people convinced the president was an illegitimate foreign agent bent on removing their constitutional rights.

We lost her and made a clean extraction, but there’s no video of all this — my girlfriend was so scared she thought she would drop the camera.

I will understand if Huffington Post is forced to disavow me. That’s fine; I’ll take whatever bad-boy punishment Arianna determines — and make no whimper of complaint under the lash. (Though it would be great to get some consideration from George Soros, who has yet to send me that check we’re all supposedly earning in the liberal ‘sphere.) The fact is, I haven’t made any money by being on HuffPo and that’s not what I blog there for.

The woman called herself an employee of Gaylord’s, but I have yet to confirm that and have reason to doubt it. More as this develops…

ADDING: She actually yelled a verbal no-trespass order for the entire convention center and the Opry Mills mall at my back. Boo f***ing wa wa hoo, I can’t drive two hours to pay a retail markup.

ALSO ADDING: Did you know that shutting a door is “assault?” I didn’t, until the harpy shouted this fact too. Interesting how adaptable definitions become whenever wingnuts get involved.

Also also Adding: Gaylord (heh). Turns out the great Nashvegas institution is a corporate welfare recipient.

Challenged, Palin reaches for the only name she can recall.

I am afraid Sarah Palin is going to harm herself unintentionally over this tea party convention in Nashville.

Full disclosure: I have asked several of the tea party organizations that, early on, I was supportive of to stop using my name and RedState’s logo. I think the tea party movement has largely descended into ego and quest for purpose for individuals at the expense of what the tea party movement started out to be.

That’s not to say it is in every case. I have much good to say about groups like Tea Party Patriots, but I think this national tea party convention smells scammy.

Let me be blunt: charging people $500.00 plus the costs of travel and lodging to go to a “National Tea Party Convention” run by a for profit group no one has ever heard of sounds as credible as an email from Nigeria promising me a million bucks if I fork over my bank account number.

To me, the most hilarious and telling aspect of teabagging is the self-deception necessary to believe nonsense — for example, that Sarah Palin isn’t a paranoid ignoramus bent on soaking up speaking fees. Erickson doesn’t seem to notice that his party (and it is, once again, his Republican party) has long since become a for-profit scheme.

I think the tea party movement has largely descended into ego and quest for purpose for individuals at the expense of what the tea party movement started out to be.

The “movement” was never what he wanted to imagine. Teabaggery is just the latest iteration of the same right-wing get-rich-quick scam, and that’s all it ever was.