Politico's Kenneth Vogel reports that the Tea Party Patriots, a coalition of thousands of local groups, has added notorious smear-merchant Gary Aldrich to its board of directors.

What does it say about an organization that chooses for its board of directors a person whose claim to fame is spreading baseless allegations about the President of the United States, then justifying his smear by saying he had been “unable to knock down” the “possibility” that the allegation was true? A person who bitterly denounced “pants-wearing women”? (For the record: Aldrich wasn't using “pants-wearing” as a metaphor to complain about women in positions of authority, which would be bad enough. He was literally complaining about women wearing pants.)

Well, it says they don't give a damn about honesty, for one thing. And that they're scraping the bottom of the barrel: Usually when people need a discredited Clinton-era lunatic, they turn to Newt Gingrich or Dick Morris. How many people turned the Tea Party Patriots down before they settled for Aldrich? Wasn't Larry Klayman available? I hate to think who the next call would have gone to. Bill Dannemeyer, maybe?