Peggy Noonan Sees Tea Party "Rage"?

Peggy Noonan deplores Tea Party "rage":

http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/11/noonan-advice-to-gop-after-loss-tea-party-style-of-rage-is-not-one-that-wins-over-converts/

I think what the Daily Caller readers and I find so confusing is the vagueness of Noonan's language. She's trying to be nice and assuming that we all know what she's talking about. This assumption is unjustified. There is no single central Tea Party organization. As this web page has often observed, anybody, regardless of previous affiliations, overriding philosophy or lack of one, experience, education, or blood alcohol content, can be "the" or a Tea Party--sometimes a Tea Party of one. On many mornings, including this one, I've found e-mails from different Tea Party contacts taking two opposite sides of one issue in the same day's in-box.

Sometimes the blood alcohol content and the level of rage are pretty high, considering that most of these people are what could be fairly called conservative Republicans; some Daily Caller, Blaze, and other conservative web page comments are vile. These are not Tea Party "leaders" or spokesmen. I think most of them are just trolls. Some of the comments sound as if the people who made them may be legally insane. The ugliness of the Tea Party has not reached levels comparable with that of some of the Occupy Wall Street camps, but any time you have a large group of people you have to expect some ugliness.

Let me restate what I'm reading Noonan's quote as saying, in plainer and less controversial terms. I don't think any Tea Party should compromise their actual convictions--even when, as when some of us want an end to the insurance industry's ability to make medical care expensive, and others just want to massage mandatory medical insurance schemes to make sure they keep the same benefits, our convictions may in fact oppose each other. I do think we can do without the nastiness that prompted somebody to comment that the antipodean Skull Caterpillar resembled the President's mother, or somebody else to call Noonan an "old nag" and then riff on the idea of using her for horsemeat.

If you want to be politically effective, Gentle Readers, please be polite. Even online, even when you're hiding behind a silly screen name, and even if you think a cruel joke is funny.