>
>That's a bit of an oversimplification.
>The Tea Party came alive in response the injustices of the TARP bailouts.
>Those were and remain legitimate concerns.
>First the NRA joined them and then the mainstream conservatives co-opted them with the Obamacare nonsense.
>The Tea Party in its pure form had more in common with the Occupy movement than with the repub establishment which benefitted tremendously from TARP.

TARP-related topics definitely became a galvanizing force for the Tea Party. ACA, the Stimulus, DACA, and cap and trade also fueled them. They actually existed prior to TARP, though TARP gave them a bigger voice. Their roots go back to late 2007 and it was by early 2009 that they began to stage larger formal protests.

I sympathized with the Tea Party until they broke with their own promises (of sticking to economic/govt issues) and then got involved in social issues.

It's no secret that the current administration hates them with a passion, though I think they secretly enjoy how much political cannibalism the Tea Party have caused the Republican party. The few times Obama has spoken directly about the Tea Party, he uses circular arguments about the size of the government to combat them.

On the comparison with Occupy - both were grass-root movements but that's where the similarities end. The Tea Party influenced both political parties and pressured them to do things they otherwise wouldn't have done. By contrast, Occupy never developed any real cohesion (except maybe for getting people together for weed and cocaine). Occupy's simple rallying cry was the 1%, though that itself wasn't original. Occupy did accomplish one thing -they caused much more in property damage and resorted to more criminal behavior and violence than the Tea Party protestors ever did. :)