The Founders acknowledged what they called "Divine Providence" in the events surrounding 1776 and 1787. Things were not perfect then either--but, considering the alternative, this "movement" may be what stands between liberty and tyranny for America and the world!
This was a very limited issue and I think it was poorly handled.
I agree that the Tea Party movement is very important - I went to that first great march on DC and it was wonderful.
I think one of the problems is that the movement as a whole is having an identity crisis. I liked it because most of the people in it seemed to be social and cultural conservatives dedicated to getting big government out of our lives. But it almost seemed to me that this focus was lost in the debt ceiling debate, where we had a few people using it as a means of scoring symbolic points for themselves rather than looking at the whole and planning a unified strategy that would really achieve the ultimate goal.
This has always been a danger with conservatives, for some reason, probably because we are better educated and more independently minded than the left. But it can also paralyze us and marginalize us, particularly since it tends to split people off into tiny groups (or eventually, 3rd parties) grouped around their solution to some specific, temporary issue. We lose the ability to present a united front defending and extending the overall program, and our disarray results in a loss of our initiative, a loss of energy and the creation of distrust and hostility among our forces.