A picture is worth 1,000 words: Barack Obama, a Tea Party member?!

Via Drudge, Breitbart.com managed to get its hands on an interesting picture of Barack Obama from before he was president. According to the site, the picture is from 1997 and shows Obama dressed in a regimental coat carrying a tricorn hat.  Bonus: A Gadsen Flag ("Don't Tread on Me") in the background.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow was one of many who saw mockery of the "teabaggers" as the first recourse. (The word was used so often by liberals in 2009 that Oxford made it a Word of the Year finalist.) Liberal sites like Talking Points Memo presented attendees who dressed up the way Obama did above as weirdos. The ever-predictable Bill Maher got hoots from his audience when he donned his own tricorn hat (complete with dangling tea bags) to bash the Tea Party on TV.

The image of Obama donning revolutionary garb reportedly appeared on the cover of Chicago's Hyde Park Herald on July 9th, 1997, and was snapped by photographer Nancy Campbell Hays.