A new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.

The results come from a months-long effort by The Post to contact every tea party group in the nation, an unprecedented attempt to understand the network of individuals and organizations at the heart of the nascent movement.

Seventy percent of the grass-roots groups said they have not participated in any political campaigning this year. As a whole, they have no official candidate slates, have not rallied behind any particular national leader, have little money on hand, and remain ambivalent about their goals and the political process in general.

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The Washington Post actually did the legwork to track down the tea party and it turns out that what we’ve anecdotally suspected all this time is actually true: it’s not a movement, it’s not even organized, more like an incoherent, cacophonic, amoebic mass. Worse yet, for all the needless media attention that they’ve garnered, this so-called groundswell is nothing more than a front for the usual players and dirty machinations of Karl Rove and other political sociopaths more concerned with winning the political game than actually governing.

This should be the final word on the supposed tea party, a hapless group of useful idiots who don’t even realize just how dangerous their own shortsighted stupidity really is. The millions of dollars funneling into elections this year aren’t the result of an outpouring of mad-as-hell constituents, it’s a well orchestrated, finely tuned campaign by political insiders stretching back generations. The fingerprints are all there – Rove and Dick Armey, has beens from an ousted political dynasty, continuing to pull the strings while being funded by the usual suspects of crooks and looters, foreign and domestic, now unchecked by even modest campaign finance regulation. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the supporters of simpletons like Michele “Carbon Dioxide is natural!” Bachmann are actually being funded by none other than polluter of the century, British Petroleum. Almost makes the days of Abramoff and Tom DeLay seem quaint.

The only bright side is that the tea party is already well on its way to being nothing more than the footnote in history they so rightfully deserve to be. These rubes are simply another rebranding and repackaging of the same rightwing, ultra-religious, gun-loving, anti-tax, homophobic, racist elements that seem to come out of the woodwork every election, all too happy to vote against their own prosperity to help the rich pile on their fortunes.

You can call them the silent majority, the Christian right, Nascar dads, values voters, it doesn’t matter, it’s the same people and there are thankfully fewer of them every election. The social wedge issues from just a few cycles ago aren’t working any more so Republicans had to channel the anger over an economy they destroyed (then conveniently blamed on the black guy) and high unemployment – scratch that, high white unemployment because these people never gave a fuck about years of double digit minority unemployment – into a short lived, pyrrhic victory. It gets better, though, because these people are about the furthest thing possible from a movement. They’ll disperse once the damage is done, after they realize they have no plan to lead. The future will leave them and their hate and their ignorance behind.