Are you defending the "tea party movement(s)" as legitimate representatives of the Conservative brand? Do they speak for you?

Reflexively disparaging my intelligence isn't really answering my query about where you stand on "it". Since you're taking the tactic of disputing even the definition of "it", we can start there. Who are all these lunatics with the teabags stapled to their hats? Why are they mocking and insulting the Founders?

The behavior of "them" (further ID pending resolution of the previous paragraph) is different from past "exuberant" expressions of legitimate political opinion. The use of false smears is essential to the definition of sedition, and the tactic has been a hallmark of the right since the backyard-fence "whisper campaigns" of the 1950s. The technology may change, but the tactics don't.

But deliberate falsehoods, while true to the intent of sedition, don't constitute a tight enough definition; the right's habitual sedition has established a high threshold of tolerance, in any case. To see what's new today, I think you have to look at whether the sedition is associated with explicit or veiled encouragement to insurrection. Can you dig up an example of a leftie going ostentatiously armed to a public function? Can you find the leftward counterpart of Lee's hero Colonel West, with his trademark exhortation to his followers to "go home and get your muskets, and fix your bayonets!". Do you think he's inviting them to go deerhunting with those bayonets?

Of course the Right was deeply threatened by the DHS study that highlighted the rise in domestic extremism and discussed the possibility of domestic terrorism...but it's real. You have to go back decades, to the Weather Underground, to find another group so obviously intent on armed insurrection against the legitimately-elected government of the United States.

People whose rhetoric is based on denying the legitimacy of the President are talking themselves into insurrection. You know it and I know it.

So, where do you stand on these guys, Tom?