The Washington Post‘s E.J. Dionne has just given us a new line of attack on the Tea Party: now the movement is just a giant scam out to hoodwink the American public.

Is the tea party one of the most successful scams in American political history?… the tea party constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its numbers. …The tea party may be pulling a fast one on the country and the media.

The only one trying to pull a fast one here is Dionne–who’s playing fast and loose with the facts. More about that shortly. But first, a question: “What makes a liberal deny reality?” There can be only two answers.

Either the liberal is so blinded by ideology that he simply cannot see the truth, or the liberal’s unwillingness to recognize painful reality compels him to try to minimize it. Paul Krugman falls into the first category. A Keynesian crackhead from his salad days, Krugman believes the first stimulus was too small.

Dionne falls into the second. He can’t accept the inescapable truth that the Tea Party is here to stay. And so, Dionne does what most ideologically strait-jacketed liberals do: he minimizes. By the way, throughout his article, note how Dionne intentionally spells the movement in lower case (“tea party”), literally diminishing the group by not granting it upper case status. In comparison,”Republican” and “Democrat” get full capital letter respect in Dionne’s piece. Anyway, here’s E.J.’s “proof” that the Tea Party is fringe.

Last April, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that 18 percent of Americans identified themselves as supporters of the tea party movement, but slightly less than a fifth of these sympathizers said they had actually attended a tea party rally or meeting. That means just over 3 percent of Americans can be characterized as tea party activists. A more recent poll by Democracy Corps, just before Labor Day, found that 6 percent of voters said they had attended a tea party rally or meeting.

Dionne makes much of the fact that only 3% of the American public had attended a Tea Party rally or donated to a Tea Party organization. He conveniently fails to point out that the now stale NYT/CBS poll, published April 14, was taken well before the first wave of Tea Party rallies, which occurred in hundreds of cities all around the country on April 15th and were attended in toto by hundreds of thousands of supporters.

Second, while Democracy Corps, the source of Dionne’s second poll, claims to be an “independent organization, dedicated to making the government of the United States more responsive to the American people,” it was founded and is run by James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, the latter an advisor to, among others, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Walter Mondale, and Joe Lieberman. Pair Greenberg up with the Ragin Cajun and you get, naturally, no partiality in their poll.

Oddly, Dionne makes no mention of this Sept. 24 Pajamasmedia poll, which shows that 35% of black voters support the Tea Party. As the poll’s director, J. Vik Rubenfeld says:

Our survey found that more than one-in-three African Americans support the movement. Moreover, the data revealed that 32 percent are also likely to vote for a congressional candidate whom the Tea Party supports.”

The point is, polls are malleable and clearly for every poll Dionne can put forth to support his view, an equally opposing one can be cited to refute it. But what can’t be refuted is what Dionne’s WaPo colleague Charles Krauthammer only today termed “the big political story of the year“, i.e.,

…that a spontaneous and quite anarchic movement with no recognized leadership or discernible organization has been merged with such relative ease into the Republican Party.

Dionne attempts to paint the Tea Party as a tiny, over-exposed lunatic wing of the Republican Party. But it is really a para-Party fighting alongside the Republican Party much like a mercenary soldier fights for the side with which his financial and political interest is aligned.

If, as Dionne asserts, the Tea Party is just “a sliver of opinion” and not an enormous spontaneous force, how does he explain not only its decisive propulsion of Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, and a slew of other heretofore unheard-of candidates, to primary victories and probable November triumphs, but the existence–according to the teapartypatriots.org website–of the thousands of Tea Party groups that have formed over the last year and a half? My home state of Illinois, for example, has 91 such groups.

That’s a pretty big sliver.