IT'S NOT TEA IN THAT CUP. Larry Kudlow at National Review:

Obama the Alien

They must be running out of slurs, as this one is recycled from the cauldron of Dorothy Rabinowitz. The main thrust of Rabinowitz' column was that Obama is an alien because he doesn't pander like a white man true American; Kudlow's is that Obama panders plenty, but not the Republican way:

Believe it or not, with jobs falling for four consecutive months and unemployment stubbornly high near 10 percent, President Obama is out on the campaign trail bashing businesses and promoting class warfare. Huh? Oh my gosh is he off message.

He’s slamming the Chamber of Commerce for allegedly using foreign money in campaign ads, even though there’s not one shred of evidence of this.

What Kudlow means, if he means anything, is that the CoC demonstrably gets plenty of foreign money and runs plenty of ads against Democrats but claims it keeps the foreign money in a different cookie-jar from the campaign funds.

Huh (again)? Is the Chamber really a big election-year issue? Is it causing high unemployment?

In that the Chamber helps its constituent members ship jobs overseas, sure.

One of the great things about Kudlow being such a hack is that you can make a decent post just by putting in the relevant facts he leaves out. But in this column the Republican Party's second-most-famous former cokehead goes beyond the usual card tricks to remind us of what the GOP is really about.

Of course, Obama never mentions the unions, including the SEIU and AFL-CIO, and all their foreign money from their big international affiliates. Instead, he extends his own cast of villains, attacking special interests, Wall Street banks, corporations, the oil industry, the insurance industry, credit-card companies, AIG, and ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil? What did they do? Oh, they’re an oil company.

Phew. Kind of anti-business, wouldn’t you say?

I was with him on the "all their foreign money from their big international affiliates" -- oh-yeah-what-about-the-other-guy is a time-honored electioneering gambit. But in this the year of the Tea Party, isn't it a little weird to be defending Wall Street banks, credit-card companies, and big business in general? I thought it was all about the grassroots overthrowing the "ruling class." And then:

Obama then blasts millionaires and billionaires, waging war on capital and investors, too. Next he talks about getting young people, African Americans, and union members to the polls. Even more division. Even more class warfare.

It's divisive for Obama to invite these people to vote? I thought working people were the bedrock of the Tea Party movement, and all the cool kids were wearing tricorner hats. And minorities -- why, Perfesser Glenn Harlan Reynolds has a whole scrapbook of tea-partying black folk photos!

A series of investor-related polls shows how totally detached the president is from the nearly 100 million folks who directly or indirectly own stocks.

A survey conducted by Citigroup Global Markets of 100 mutual-fund, hedge-fund, and pension-fund managers...

Hedge-fund managers! OK, let's flip all the cards: While most of the tea party stuff you see these days focuses on the concerns of yahoos, neo-confederates, and people who think America went downhill when the Negroes cancelled Matlock, Kudlow's column is for the other Republican base -- the disappointed day-traders itching to get back in the game; the guys following Jim Cramer as if he were a Sherpa guiding them back to civilization; the people who think of hard work as something admirably American so long as other people are doing it for them while they measure the angles and make the big plays and otherwise work the system like they were in god mode -- which hasn't been paying off so well lately, true, but will again as soon as they get the right people in there -- that is, people like Larry Kudlow, who can be trusted completely because he wears nice suits and speaks their language and one of these days will dispense that final key of wisdom that unlocks the door to riches for them -- and they better be watching when he does!

In other words, behind the con there's always another con, and a sucker born every minute.