Freshly liberated from the job of slavishly defending George Bush’s every utterance at the behest of those who fund them, conservatives have struggled in their efforts to organize an online movement sustainable past a lizard-brained explosion of unsuccessful impulse control.  Bewilderingly, all have failed.  As sort of a public service, I thought I’d use Michelle Malkin’s attempt to start a nationwide Boston Tea Party movement around Rick Santelli’s Angry White Male 2.0 tirade as an example of how to do just about everything wrong.

Movements usually develop online because there is a strong populist impulse that feels it is being somehow thwarted, and the natural leaders are those who are emblematic of that struggle and inspire trust.

There are definitely people whose lives are being negatively impacted by the downturn in the economy, who think — with varying degrees of legitimacy — that their tax dollars are being used to bail out those less worthy.

This guy has what we like to call "moral authority" on the subject:

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He’s voted against every spending bill that has ever come his way, even those he’s introduced (on the throughly consistent grounds, as far as I’m concerned, that he sponsors bills on behalf of his constituents but doesn’t believe in government spending).  You may not agree with him, but he doesn’t believe the government should be funding much of anything, and he never waivers.

This guy has none:

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The Chicago Board of Trade would be little more than a smoking hole right now if the government wasn’t already pumping $9.7 trillion into the financial system, and it’s no surprise that the White House singled out this "veteran trader and financial executive" to be the poster boy for the angry, anti-bailout crowd.  The only mystery is why Malkin did, too.

Malkin hopes that online denizens will organize meetups in their communities, galvanized by this:

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It’s already difficult to get online activists to take collective action in the non-virtual world.  The distinctly unpleasant prospect of getting up from behind one’s computer to have a  personal encounter with that is will probably not be enough to overcome those inhibitions.

But back to the "moral authority" front.  A populist movement falls apart quickly if there is not some pretense to an intellectually consistent doctrine being articulated by its leadership.  The border patrol nativists didn’t have an ideology that fell apart at the specter of cheap immigrant labor like the GOP corporatists did –  at least Malkin had that going for her.  But let’s just say the people who spent the last 8 years with knives in their teeth defending every dime George Bush wanted to spend, who never once called for any kind of congressional oversight or inquiry into war profiteering or bags of billions gone missing in Iraq, have precious little high ground in any discussion about wasteful government spending or ballooning deficits.

Granted, "everyone hates whitey" is a reliable pity party that gets thrown every time Democrats take the White House.  But eventually they all sober up, find their keys and return to that old saw about "some of my best friends."   As the unemployment checks run out and the insurance gets canceled, the kids become sick and the car breaks down, the only ones offering any answers are going to be the Obama administration.  Saddled as they are with singularly inadequate and uninspiring leadership, the Santelli/Malkin axis will will need to find more to reignite the revelry than just "bitch, bitch, bitch."