by: Garry Reed

Libertarians generally take it as a point of unquestioned fact that the Tea Party movement was a grassroots uprising begun at the local level by libertarians and later co-opted by the Republican Party.

But the left-eye-view can't seem to figure out who started or co-opted what from whom or what the difference is between a libertarian, a conservative, and a Republican.

A pair of Huffington Post pundits, Alex Brant-Zawadzki and Dawn Teo, teamed up to produce "a multi-part series, Reading Tea Leaves" which attempts to untangle the Tea Party beginnings and expose its political ambitions for 2010.

(The left-eye-viewpoint is derived from Brant-Zawadzki's bio, which says he became politically active "after being selected as an Obama Organizing Fellow by the President's election campaign," while co-writer Teo's résumé includes a stint as PR director of the United Steelworkers Association Rescue American Jobs campaign before "officially joining the Democratic Party in 2007.")

In Part 1 of their Reading Tea Leaves trifecta, the pair identifies Eric Odom as "the man most often regarded as the founder of the Tea Parties."

They then tell a tangled tale of how Odom left the Republican Party, joined the Libertarian Party, rejoined the Republican Party, and along the way "effectively hijacked" a Facebook Tea Party group created by the Libertarian Party of Illinois and launched his own Tea Party movement.

The Tea Party, in this version, was founded by a Republican-Libertarian-Republican hijacker.

But wait. In Part 2 of the tale we're told that Eric Odom wasn't the only Tea Party procreator. "The Fund put up a petition" on the same day as Odom's hijackery "inviting members to sign up" to support the Chicago Tea Party.

"The Fund" refers to the "Political nonprofit American Future Fund and its associated PAC, led largely by former GOP staffers and operatives."

The timing suggests the makings of another Great Rightwing Conspiracy, although the authors don't take to the bait.

In Part 3's accounting, one line in particular leaps out at libertarian readers: "From day one, well-funded libertarian groups have been commandeering the Tea Party movement for electoral gain."

This is a shocker. What libertarian has ever heard of a "well-funded" libertarian group?

But the salient question is, if the Tea Party was originally created by libertarians (the Illinois LP) how can libertarians "commandeer" their own movement?

But Alex Brant-Zawadzki, in a follow-up article under his own byline, discovered yet another Tea Party progenitor: David Koch.

"Koch claims to have founded the Tea Party movement," says Brant-Zawadzki, "at an October conference held by Americans for Prosperity."*

Koch, the ninth richest man in America, is indeed sugar daddy to countless conservative and libertarian groups, including libertarian's two iconic organizations, the Cato Institute and Reason Foundation.

Thus, since Koch and Cato and Reason are seen by many hardcore libertarians as little more than mainstream libertarian-leaning conservatives, a case might be made that the "real" libertarians who founded the movement are trying to take it back from the soft, mushy "libertarian-lite" Republican conservatives.

Still, what happened to Tea Party founders Eric Odom and the American Future Fund if billionaire David Koch is the real Founding Father of the Tea Party movement?

Which maybe means that even a lot of putative "libertarians" can't tell the difference between a libertarian, a conservative, and a Republican.

*NOTE: These quotes mysteriously appear only in a cached version of the article and can be found by searching the line, "Koch claims to have founded the Tea Party movement."