S.C. Tea Partiers are a Bunch of Dumb, Uninformed Birthers...According to New Liberal Vid

You learn something new every day. Today, we find out that South Carolina Tea Partiers, and by default all Republicans, are a bunch of stupid, uninformed, racist, sexist birthers who take their lead from Fox and Glenn Beck.

That's at least the impression you're supposed to get from a new montage put together by a videographer that calls himself "NOTSCGOP." He describes his video:

What you are about to see is footage of real interviews with SC Republican voters at a rally in Columbia, hosted by SC Republican Governor Nikki Haley and Republican Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann on April 18, 2011. This is no longer the party of Ronald Reagan.

According to Gawker, "he" is South Carolina Democratic consultant Tyler Jones.

"I took two hours of footage and chopped it down to six minutes of mind-blowing stuff," Jones told Slate's Dave Weigel:

To be sure, there are some things in the video that are wacky and downright inappropriate, and not everyone shown is someone Republicans will want to make their GOP poster child.

With that said, is this really a prime, and fair, example of a South Carolina Tea Partier, a Tea Partier in general, or a Republican? And is Glenn Beck really the leader of the birther movement? (Hint: No!) And is everything said in the video as dumb and "crazy" as the background music suggests?

The truth is, you can find juicy soundbites at any public gathering, especially when politics is involved. That's the point Gawker commenter Schadenfriend tried to make on that site [Content warning for language]:

As much as I love baiting Tea Party idiots to say something stupid and editing together the most ignorant sounding (and looking) of the bunch, you could take a camera to a Democratic Party function and get a small segment of horribly misinformed wackjobs to say some off-the-wall shit, too. The freaks in my party sometimes embarrass me, too. I guess I prefer more empirical data that the Republicans are dumb as shit, like yesterday's post about the poll nearly half of Iowa republicans don't believe Obama was born in the U.S...this is more anecdotal. And sad.

Before we move on, it's worth saying again that not everything in the video was "off-the-wall shi*." There were some reasonable comments.

Back to the comments. Schadenfriend's point set off a little bit of a debate. One person responded that the video shows unequivocally the state of mind of Republicans, to which Schadenfriend responded that he likes his generalizations "to be a little less general."

Alas, though, he eventually agrees to the generalization that ill-informed Republicans are generally "mean-spirited:"

All this begs the question: Who is really "ill-informed?"