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Did you see Andrew Romano's recent swing at the Tea Party piñata? It was an attempt to enlighten Newsweek's rapidly-dwindling readership about the multitude of ways that the Tea Party allegedly gets the U.S. Constitution wrong, and while declaring that the Constitution should not be confused with "Holy Writ," Romano missed the point.

People like Frank Warner have already done a yeoman job of fisking Romano's essay. Warner was amused by the way that Romano accused Tea Partiers of "not sweating the details" while writing approvingly of an administration whose economic mantra seems to be "Don't bother designing a system that pays for itself; just close your eyes and borrow." Warner also pointed out that it's hard to pin labels like "authoritarian" and "delusional" on the Tea Party without noticing that "expanding the size and power of government also embraces a fundamentally authoritarian idea and imaginary benefits." Goose, gander, sauce: you know the drill.

Wanting in on the fun, Michael Tennant, writing in The New American, took Romano's mendacious critique as further proof that the Tea Party has the establishment in a panic. It need hardly be said that the establishment includes "career politicians" of both major parties.

Tennant noticed that Romano's notions of what political positions are "divisive" and "fundamentalist" are remarkably one-sided. "Under the progressive approach, which we have endured for a century now, have Americans really become more united?" Tennant wondered. "The government programs and taxes and regulations that Romano champions pit the old against the young, the rich against the poor, the black against the white, the male against the female, the corporation against the taxpayer, the employer against the employee, and so on, ad infinitum."

"Moreover," wrote Tennant, warming to his rebuttal, "it is precisely the policies that progressives favor that have brought us to the current precarious position, degrading our currency, running up insurmountable public and private debts, and creating a dependent class that will likely take to the streets — as the French and Greek dependent classes have already done — before it gives up a single penny of its ill-gotten gains." Tennant then went to his whip hand for the final furlongs: "Had constitutional originalism held sway for the last 100 years, the United States would still be on a very sound footing, as it was prior to the Progressive Era."

Between them, Warner and Tennant gave the bum's rush to Romano's thesis. To be fair, however, Romano left his thesis vulnerable to rebuttal by making some big mistakes: any argument about the U.S. Constitution that aspires to high-mindedness should not waste its first three paragraphs on an "ad feminam" attack, as Romano did by going after Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell. Once past that peculiar introduction, Romano flashed his condescension, and then conjured up the "religious right" as a strawman-in-waiting. By the time Romano hit his stride, he'd unwittingly announced himself as an apprentice torturer, hoping to put various fundamentalists (The aforementioned O'Donnell, plus radio talker Glenn Beck and the ever-frustrating Sarah Palin) on the rack of his imagination. It didn't work any better than touting Cass Sunstein as a "centrist" legal scholar, or pointing out that Tea Partiers are not the first to speak reverently of the Constitution, which Romano also did.

Romano made his own biases vividly clear by asserting, embarrassingly, that the Constitution is a "relentlessly secular document." Talk about a failure to communicate. While the Constitution does not -- for example -- come embroidered with the old Jesuit abbreviation "A.M.D.G," which is a Latin initialism meaning "for the greater glory of God," it's a far cry from that to the contention that the document is "relentlessly secular."

How many secular documents time-stamp their own births by noting the "Year of our Lord" in which legislators who crafted them signify assent, or assume that the gifts that liberty bestows upon a people are "blessings" rather than mere "advantages"? How is it possible to ignore the text of the Constitution while you're trying to prove that the Tea Party twists that text?

Ironically, it may be progressives (rather than originalists or Tea Party types) who treat the Constitution as though it were Holy Writ, thanks to their overweening fondness for genuflection in the direction of an endlessly-malleable (read "living") Constitution (Romano: "The Tea Partiers are right to revere the Constitution. It’s a remarkable, even miraculous document. But there are many Constitutions: the Constitution of 1789, of 1864, of 1925, of 1936, of 1970, of today...") Progressives approach the Constitution (and government generally) the way pre-Christian druids approached trees. Originalists, on the other hand, contend only that its words mean what their authors intended them to mean. In metaphorical terms, the opposing camps might be described as the shamens and the engineers-- and guess who's more likely to cloak even blatant disregard of the Constitution under the color of authority?

Having mistaken the lack of explicit references to "God" or "Jesus" for Terminator-style secularism in our federal charter, Romano then interpreted the election of Barack Obama as "a provocation" for "the forces of orthodoxy." Not for Romano the more thoughtful argument that "taxed enough already" resistance started brewing under George W. Bush, back in the halcyon days of the original "Troubled Asset Relief Program."

Hunting desperately for hypocrisy among Tea Party people and those who sympathize with them, Romano pointed out that "in the current Congress, conservatives like Michele Bachmann have suggested more than 40 additions to the Constitution," including flag-descrecration and balanced-budget amendments. By his lights, "none of these revisions has anything to do with the document's original meaning." But does that mean, as Romano infers, that Bachmann and her ilk are not the originalists they think they are? Hardly, because the Constitution provides mechanisms for its own amendment. Whether Bachmann backs a losing cause is another question, though I trust her far more than I trust a politico like Harry Reid.

Romano may not be what Bugs Bunny used to call a "maroon," but as an archeologist studying the Tea Party movement with barely-concealed revulsion (NYT columnist Tom Friedman knows all about that, BTW), he manages to write like a maroon. Echoing President Obama's dismissal of "bitter clingers," Romano asserts without a scintilla of evidence that Tea Party fundamentalists "seek refuge from the complexity and confusion of modern life in the comforting embrace of an authoritarian scripture."

How would Romano know this, exactly? A preponderence of "analysis" like that is what eventually gets your magazine sold for a dol -- Oh, never mind. The only scripture I know is the one that calls us to be charitable even to our enemies.