When I referred to losing coherence earlier, I was using it in kind of a technical way, akin to "losing structural integrity". I continue to have a hard time putting together the pieces of your argument in a way that makes any sense.

You seem to be simultaneously downplaying the size and influence of the tea party movement while aggrandizing it size and influence; and then claim that Democrats are getting hysterical because they've noticed its size and influence. Bizarre argument.

Trying to draw an artificial distinction between tea party organizations and the movement is a meaningless exercize. Just ask the tea partiers themselves, who are quite proud of themselves for adopting the very same organizational and activism tools that liberals have been using. They suffer from organization envy, but are rapidly correcting that.

You've never taken me up on the suggestion to go look inside teapartynation.com, and that undermines your assertions. It's a "social networking site", from an outfit called "ning", and not a static/passive "brochureware" site. Its purpose is to facilitate activism through active collaboration. It sponsors a hierarchy of state and local tea party groups in subdivided portions of the whole.

It's no more top-down than the HabitableZone. I'm not leading any movement here, I'm just the janitor. There's nothing to decapitate.

I know that the existence of formal organizations undermines the claim that the tea party movement isn't astroturf, but really, is that all you're trying to defend? No question that it was born as a conscious attempt at astroturf, but hell, I'm conceding that it has grown beyond that. Maybe not nearly as large as you'd like, but it has grown, and one of the minor soap operas is the way that the original political hacks are losing control.

So what exactly are you arguing against?