As he shook hands on a rope line during his tour of the upper Midwest, Pres. Obama was accosted by a pair of tea partyists, who berated him because they did not like being called “economic terrorists” during the debt ceiling debacle that their representatives in Congress engineered last month.

Rather than confronting them — “We’ll stop calling you economic terrorists when you stop taking the U.S. economy hostage,” he might have said — the president was much more polite, of course. Via David Weigel, here’s a transcript of the exchange:

TEA BAGGER 1: When you’re talking about civility, how is your vice president calling us terrorists…

OBAMA: Sir, sir…

TEA BAGGER 1: I would like to understand that!

OBAMA: Okay, I will explain right now. He did not call you guys terrorists.

TEA BAGGER 1: He said we were acting like terrorists. Hostage-takers.

OBAMA: No. What he said was that for us to be willing to take the economy to the brink was irresponsible. And it was.

This first tea bagger was referring to an exchange between Vice Pres. Joe Biden and Democratic Rep. Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania, while the debt-ceiling negotiations were taking place:

“We have negotiated with terrorists,” an angry Doyle said, according to sources in the room. “This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

Biden, driven by his Democratic allies’ misgivings about the debt-limit deal, responded: “They have acted like terrorists.”

He said it because it was true.

Here’s a transcript of the second tea bagger’s exchange with the president:

TEA BAGGER 2: It’s the second person in your administration to call the right-wing people terrorists! Janet Napolitano did it first! She said the right-wing extremists should be watched out for.

OBAMA: But that’s true. Timothy McVeigh should be. You wouldn’t disagree with that!

TEA BAGGER 2: You do realize that 90 percent of the domestic terrorist attacks are done by left-wing environmental terrorists, and not people like me?

Weigel fact checks:

This is a very well-phrased response to Obama. It’s also bunk. In April 2009, Eli Lake broke the news that the Department of Homeland Security had commissioned a report on the threat of “right-wing extremism.” Napolitano confirmed that she’d been briefed on it, and claimed it was “one in an ongoing series of assessments” about potential violence. She quickly ate crow and met with the American Legion to sooth nerves over the report’s lines about returning veterans being targets for extremist recruiters. More than two years later, looking at that event and saying Napolitano “said the right-wing extremists should be watched out for” — with the implication that she, Napolitano, was trashing Tea Partiers — is a stretch. The “90 percent” number is made up, but so are most political numbers, so we’ll give our mystery woman a pass.

These exchanges are reminiscent of the spring of 2010, at around the time the tea party mob phenomenon was entering its second year, when tea partyists found that they had simply had enough of the name-calling.

Not name-calling when they did it, of course. They saw nothing wrong then with calling the president of the United States a fascist, Nazi, Muslim, socialist dictator, and still see nothing wrong with it now, 15 months later.

No, what they objected to was being called “tea baggers.” In fact, Republican Party boss Grover Norquist even suggested that being called a “tea bagger” was as bad as the epithet “nigger” — a comparison that is offensive in itself and could only have been dreamt up by an overly entitled white male conservative.

Of course, it was tea partyists themselves who first used the term “tea bagging.” On Feb. 12, 2009 — just 22 days after Obama was sworn in — a tea party group launched a website called “Tea Bag Congress” at the web address teabagcongress.com.

In those early days, tea partyists often showed up at their rallies with tea bags stapled to their hats — but that was before they learned that “tea bagging” also referred to a sex act and popular prank among frat boys.

It’s important to remember that, while roughly 20 percent of voters says they support the tea party phenomenon — a ratio eerily similar to the percentage of Americans who supported both George Bush and Richard Nixon when each presidents left office — just 4 percent of voters say they show up for the mob rallies or donate to the cause.

This is a tiny cabal of bullies, and the only way to deal with them is to stand up to them, as Standard & Poor’s did when they downgraded the credit rating of the United States because members of the Tea Party Caucus in Congress repeatedly claimed that defaulting on the debt ceiling would have no effect whatsoever.

Like all bullies, what these tea baggers can’t tolerate is being stood up to by the targets of their abuse. It’s time that our national leaders, especially establishment Republicans, started pushing back against the hostage-takers, political extortionists and, yes, economic terrorists who have commandeered Washington politics.