All the little Tea Party Americans in the world

How odd and telling that in a Facebook post responding to an NAACP resolution on supposed Tea Party racism, Sarah Palin would create a new victimary group:  “Tea Party Americans.”  Palin uses this phrase five times in the post, even while arguing at times eloquently, at times clumsily, against “divisive politics.”

Focusing on elements within the Tea Party movement rather than the Tea Party as a whole, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous summed up the NAACP’s demand:  “You must expel the bigots and racists in your ranks or take full responsibility for all of their actions.”  Echoing Tea Party activists in St. Louis and around the country, Palin’s main reply is to deny the charges outright, while accusing the NAACP of crude political motives, and while trying to change the subject to the Tea Party’s issues agenda.  What neither side seems able to address is the underlying basis for their conflict, which over a long history has tied “racial matters” and issues of governance together.

Telling stories about a visit with husband Todd’s Eskimo family and relying on the words and the example of (African American) Congressional candidate Tim Scott, Palin claims, in effect, that some of her best friends, best relatives, and best candidates are non-white, and that nothing could be further from the minds of Tea Party Americans than judging people by the color of their skin.  Furthermore, it hurts their feelings to be called racists:

Having been on the receiving end of a similar spurious charge of racism…, I know how Tea Party Americans feel to be falsely accused. To be unjustly accused of association with what Reagan so aptly called that “legacy of evil” is a traumatizing experience, and one of which the honest, freedom-loving patriots of the Tea Party movement are truly undeserving.

While trying to move from victimization to political re-assertion, Palin insists that the NAACP could have been motivated only by bad faith – an intent to harm the Tea Party rather than to express a potentially valid concern:

The only purpose of such an unfair accusation of racism is to dissuade good Americans from joining the Tea Party movement or listening to the common sense message of Tea Party Americans who simply want government to abide by our Constitution, live within its means, and not borrow and spend away our children’s futures. Red and yellow, black and white, this message is precious in all our sights.

Some will hear an amusing and homely Sunday school allusion in that clumsy last line.  “Tea Party Americans” probably also enjoy the spectacle of someone fighting back uncompromisingly rather than lending any credence at all to the complaint.

For the very same reason, however, those who never believed in a stark dividing line between a racist and “post-racial” society may find Palin’s approach off-putting and demeaning.  Nor does shifting the subject to the Tea Party’s agenda rebut the charges:  To someone who believes that there is still work to be done on matters of race, changing the subject confirms hostility and incomprehension.  More important, mere denial ignores history, which did not begin with Ronald Reagan’s condemnations of racism.  It ignores obvious and inescapable facts about the Tea Party constituency.  And it ignores the implications of any radical action to curb domestic spending and the size of the public sector.

A more honest and possibly more disarming response from Palin, on behalf of her fellow Tea Party Americans, would have been to concede the obvious elements of truth to the charges, and to offer to join the NAACP and others in rooting out bigotry and insensitivity in the movement.  Such a response might even help to broaden the movement, and the vision of those already in it.

“Yes, it’s true, of course,” Palin could have said.  “Just as there are still racist and racially insensitive people in America, any large movement – the Tea Party, both major political parties, and any sizable group including the NAACP itself – will include people whose consciousness could stand some raising.

“In the Tea Party,” Palin might have continued, “we seek to learn from history, and we understand how movements for smaller government, fiscal responsibility, and restraint on the federal government – sometimes under the label of ‘states’ rights’ – have in the past been aligned with forces of bigotry.

“We understand that going back at least as far as the Civil War and in other ways to the founding of the country, there has been overlap between those who indict overreach from the federal government and those seeking to protect special interests and privileges, including ones based on racism at its ugliest.  We understand that African Americans in particular have long experience in which the federal government stood with them against forces of bigotry entrenched and often institutionalized at the state and local level.  It’s not by chance that African Americans have generally come to favor a more activist federal government.

“And we fully understand that any major effort to rein in and reduce  government programs, many of them originally intended to aid victims of past discrimination, must be undertaken with basic fairness to all uppermost in all our minds.  We invite the NAACP and others concerned about racial equality and harmony to help us develop strategies for coping with the hard choices that lay before us all, whether we like it or not, and that must not be allowed to set us against each other along racial or other social battle lines.”

The open question is whether “Tea Party Americans” really do understand any of that. Until they give a strong sign of it, the charge will tend to stick – and, worse, will have an element of truth to it, even while turning the Tea Party into another special interest, another group of Americans who see things their way only, or not at all.

105 comments on “All the little Tea Party Americans in the world

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  1. What truth, the slurs didn’t happen, the spitting didn’t happen, By contrast they did put a race baiting militant in a Philadelphia polling place, and they dropped the charges. This same fellow is on record
    at another event, spouting frankly genocidal rhetoric. The NAACP ran ads blaming Bush for the James Byrd draggings, suggesting that the GOP incites cross burnings

  2. Race Card = Moral Bankruptcy & desperation. It’s a dirty tactic which used to work, and which will now boomerang on the race baiting Democrat demagogues.

    It’s a good example of the clumsy banality of the left, and I hope they keep making fools out of themselves.

    You are wasting your time giving them any credibility when they deserve nothing but scorn.

  3. and, worse, will have an element of truth to it

    Do I sense collective guilt being assigned by one who is hypersensitive to any hint of that in other venues?

    Some might call that vile; but not I, of course.

  4. So let me get this straight, we must bend over backwards to ignore the direct uncontrovertable roots of Salafism in this country, and abroad, but we must accept a cretinous slur upon a peaceful movement, because why exactly

  5. @ narciso:
    @ Scientific Socialist:
    @ Sully:
    @ narciso:
    Great job! Emotionally sensitive to the charge of racism directed against “Tea Party Americans,” utterly immune to an actual argument. So I guess I’ll have to re-state it: Blacks in particular have a long history of looking to the federal government for protection against institutionalized and culturally entrenched racism – a little thing called the Civil War had something to do with that, other little things like Civil and Voting Rights Acts… states’ rights as an excuse for segregationism “now, forever,” and on and on – as well as the social programs that have directly and through their administration often put blacks into a direct economic dependency relationship.

    There is a real, concrete, present as well as historical basis, for conflict between African Americans and any movement that makes an attack on the scope and power of the federal government definitional. The failure of the latter group to understand the stakes in the eyes of the former amounts to a failure of sympathy and imagination. A readiness to ignore the overlap between those who exhibit this failure of sympathy and those who actively embrace it – i.e., racists, straight up – reinforces the “element of truth.”

    It’s not sheer chance, bad manners, or some mysteriously originating defect of character that puts blacks largely on the other side on this complex of issues. The Tea Party right embraces an agenda that, upon implementation, blacks have reason to expect will harm them and their interests disproportionately, while de-legitimizing their leadership and empowering their traditional enemies. It’s similar to – not the same as – the factors that tend to make liberals out of Jews.

  6. No kids, we don’t have to accept the evil Salafis, the New Black Panther Party or the racist crackpots within the tea parties.

    Screw ’em all.

  7. Are you saying sensitive people should pander to black paranoia?

    If you lived in any one of dozens of urban environments you would quickly see how even white liberals now feel entitled to play the race card.

    When they quickly run out of logical arguments, they lash out with personal attacts based soley on their natural ability to read other people’s minds. Its as natural to them as their sense of rhythm and abiility to jump.

    This kind of reasoning may also help one conclude that Daniel Pearl’s
    Dad is an Islamophobe.

  8. Scientific Socialist wrote:

    Are you saying sensitive people should pander to black paranoia?

    Of course not. Nor should anyone pander to the paranoia of Tea Party Americans – or to the point of view that ascribes all sensitivity to racial or other matters to “paranoia.”

  9. Sully wrote:

    Do I sense collective guilt being assigned

    It’s difficult to know what sense you have, Sully, about the assignment of collective guilt.

    Why not instead inquire as to whether other folks meant to also indulge?

  10. When I hear that all Tea Party people have accepted as divinely inspired a text calling for all non Tea Party people to be converted by the sword or forced to submit I’ll be prepared to consider the reasonableness of assignment of collective guilt. When I hear that death has been prescribed as punishment for renunciation of membership in the Tea Party I’ll assign it myself.

  11. There was no truth to the NAACP’s charge, just as there was no truth to Tawana Brawley’s charge, or Jeremiah Wright’s charge that AIDS was a US Govt invention, this is what Obama immersed himself in for 2o years, or apparently the misunderstanding by Malik Shabazz who doesn’t understand that Osama committed 9/11,

  12. @ Sully:
    What about people who have accepted as divinely inspired a text that repeatedly calls for all those who don’t accept the Lord of Hosts to be put to death without exception?

    You have a twisted and fantastical view of Islam. Most Islamophobes – ones somewhat less obsessed than you with extreme fantasy interpretations – point to the jizya, the tax assessed on non-Muslims in traditionally oriented Islamic states. Such critics usually forget to mention the zakat – assessed on Muslims, similar to tithing and one of the five pillars of Islam – but, either way, how are you supposed to tax somebody whom you’re also in the process of forcibly converting?

    You can’t, it’s an absurdity, like most of your simplistic and hostile renderings of the Qur’an. The death penalty for apostasy is something different, however. Until the numerous Islamic scholars who disagree with the traditional interpretation have gained greater prominence – they include people like Montazeri in Iran and the Grand Mufti of Cairo – the issue will mark an important line of demarcation and struggle between secularizers and Islamizers.

    That, to me, is a valid “aspect of Islam” to be criticized, along with the traditional treatment of women, but in both cases there is ample material both from the history of Islam, from a more sophisticated approach to textual interpretation and exegesis, and generally from an appeal to reason to attack apostasy laws without insisting on a total repudiation of the religion.

  13. @ Ill Papa Fuster:

    Why not instead inquire as to whether other folks meant to also indulge?

    Because I’ve gotten fully fed up with observing a fellow with beams in both eyes flailing around straining at motes.

  14. And I’ve gotten fully fed up with having people run around calling a broad slice of the population racists based at the whisper of a claim that a derogatory word was hurled (false), spittle was launched (false) and intentions are bad (false).

    Seen in any reasonable light the Tea Party is a cry of rage by people from across the racial spectrum at a transparent attempt to reorder society and massively increase the size and power of government on the strength of a thin majority win in one election. And this by a profoundly cynical movement that openly claims the plain words of the Constitution mean whatever nine judges say they mean.

  15. @ narciso:
    You apparently have some difficulty comparing items in different categories and associating facts and evidence systematically. A highly particular accusation – Brawley, AIDS – is susceptible to simple disproof.

    That’s different from simply admitting the obvious: Nutjobs, including racist nutjobs, are attracted to public protest movements. A particular type of racist nutjob is more likely to show up at Tea Party event, is more likely to be attracted to typical Tea Party concerns, and is more likely to sense and seek to exploit an opportunity presented by the Tea Party – than, say, to show up at the NAACP, be attracted to the NAACP, or to sense the same kind of opportunities in the NAACP. (The NAACP is more likely to attract a different kind of nutjob – the kind of people who might be attracted to the NBPP.) Such people have shown up at Tea Party events and are attracted to the Tea Party, just as they have been attracted to the Pauls and in the past connected to Ron Paul. I know some of them personally – relatives of mine, older people in particular, in whom it’s as easy to stimulate old racist reflexes as it is to stimulate Sarah Palin fans to rise up against criticisms of her.

    The line between pointing out the obvious and inevitable and pointing out something more worrisome is often difficult to pin down. When a second, larger number of people beyond the obvious bigots compulsively seek to deny such simple, predictable facts, their denial tends to put them on the wrong side of the blurry line. Quite frequently – not by chance – many in this same group display racial insensitivity unconsciously or even demonstratively – “see, I can tell a racist joke or invoke a ‘true’ stereotype, what are you gonna do about it?” – or will lash out at people who point out their racial insensitivity, and will remain incapable of addressing whatever racial or racialized elements in the issues that they prefer to view in a purely “colorblind” fashion (see above).

    I know less about Rand Paul’s past, but his little problem on the Civil Rights Act is typical of the collisions between rightwing libertarianism and social justice – as is the fact that a rightwing libertarian like Glenn Beck has devoted himself to turning “social justice” into a curse word.

  16. It is a piece with the adoption of an obscenity as the short hand for the tea party, the one Quellist Kate uses quite often, The NAACP received adoring coverage by the nets who haven’t gotten around
    to really flag the incident in Philadelphia. It was characteristic of how Van Jones and Rucker, have tried to snuff out the Beck show through
    advertising boycotts, how some avoidable errors in the management of Katrina, turned into a indictment of racism

  17. @ Sully:

    You guys have driven each other a little past where you should have gone.

    less heat, more fun ….. Six Scimitars Over Texas!!

  18. @ Sully:

    You guys have driven each other a little past where you should have gone.

    less heat, more fun ….. Six Scimitars !!

  19. @ Ill Papa Fuster:
    We are well past the boy who shouted wolf stage on the widespread misuse of the racist bidness.

    In a kind of perverse way, people like Michelle where is my trust fund 0bama are the neo racists, with their hair trigger temperment, ever ready to spout on about racism. The tide has turned, and the general response to this rubbish will increasingly be “there they go agan; touchy touchy!”

  20. @ Scientific Socialist: Not a reply to my question, SS.

    Not “the tide has turned”, not them black people what ain’t oppressed still act mean and call names, not there’s blacks who hate whites.

    Are there or not still big bunches of Americans that think and talk shirt about blacks and are there bunches of them allied with and inside the Tea Parties?

    Does the Tea Party have groups of people like this?

  21. Scientific Socialist wrote:

    We are well past the boy who shouted wolf stage on the widespread misuse of the racist bidness.

    If that were true, then certain TP Americans wouldn’t be putting up Facebook posts about how traumatizing it was to be called racists and how proud they were about RWR calling racism a “legacy of evil.” Apparently, we’re supposed to believe that there is racism or a legacy of evil, but somehow the Tea Party has completely avoided even a smidgen of it – despite the fact that it’s aligned around the same issues that racists and bigots have historically aligned themselves, and despite any evidence that may come to our attention seemingly suggesting some not very savory attitudes among TP Americans.

    The way to diffuse the charge is to acknowledge and accurately contextualize it, showing respect to the people who claim you don’t respect them, showing that you don’t fear “going there” at all – not to engage in transparently self-contradictory denial. The potential is real for disproportionate impact and racial divisiveness in the economic situation and TP-acceptable approaches to it. Marinating in your resentment of Michelle Obama’s resentments won’t wish it away.

  22. Are you really that dense they LIED, about the violence of the Tea Parties, except KEN GLADNEY doesn’t figure into it, they lied about
    the Klansman Byrd last week’s whole legacy, they lie with out reservation and without consequence, they compared the Tea Party to the White Citizens’s Councils, those were the ones who gave the orders to blow up Churches in ‘Bombingham’, as it was known in the era when Condi Rice was growing up.

    Meanwhile the group now calling itself Park Place 51, the Cordoba thing, really didn’t click, shows every signs of being a Salafi project more and more, but we can’t call it by it’s true name. Honestly, CK
    I though you cared about truth, but it seems perceptions are more important to you.

  23. @ narciso:
    Who the heck is “they”? Does “they” have a central meeting place? And who said anything about “violence”? Your indulgence in this kind of thing just never stops. You string together facts or possible facts as though there’s some weird leftwing Dr Mabuse on the other side weaving this all together, and some international scorekeeping body whose tally showing “They” way in the lead is being suppressed by “they.” When are you going to figure out that the exact same trick can be performed for whatever paranoid trip you want to go on – leftwing, rightwing, Larouchie, Paulian, ultra-Marxist, anti-Marxist, ultra-anti-Marxist, whatever?

    Accumulating incommensurate and indirectly connected names and events under undefined generalities like “they” and “it” or even “the left” is not an analysis, and the “truth” you attach to it is completely arbitrary. Any truth could emerge from your method, or lack of a method, only at random. To the extent your judgment is based on such an accumulation, it makes your determination that the “Cordoba thing” is showing “signs” “more and more” all the less trustworthy. Who in the world familiar with how you put these things together would have ever expected you to come to any other conclusion? The more you look at something, the more you’re able to attach associations to it.

  24. The NAACP, the DNC, and by extension the major networks and news publications, CK, You want to deny that Imam Rauf is not a peace loving Sufi, that Perdana at the very least are dupes, at the worst are accomplices to this global Salafi project, Some one calls you possibly
    the worst thing you can be called in this country, without foundation, and you want a thousand word dissertation on why they might think that. THe Nyers are slowly coming to the realization that this is no good, they are also realizing that Bloomberg is not to fine a point on
    it ‘an enormous tool’

  25. They are coming around on their own, Lagushka, despite all the red herrings being thrown their way, At first they wanted to be welcoming
    understanding, but they don’t like to be played for suckers

  26. I think Tea Party participants should also be required to sign affidavits stating exactly when they stopped beating their wives.

  27. Clearly Zoltan, specially around World Cup and/or Superbowl games, I don’t want to be right about these sorts of things, but having seen
    lie and after lie, repeated and amplified, persons of good will slandered
    for asking questions, that the press deems not of interest. But Mel Gibson, who I admit I always thought was not actiing in many of his
    roles, we need to see that 24/7, even though he has no real influence on anything. Weigel, the weasel calls Megyn’s exposition,” the minstrel
    show”

  28. @ narciso:

    See comment 28 and stop telling me what new Yorkers think, you wanker.

    You got something to support your assertion, post it.

  29. I liked “Patriot,” “Braveheart,” “We Were Soldiers” and even “Apocalypto.” It’s a shame such a dishonorable man has such a keen understanding of bravery and honor.

  30. @ narciso:
    Right – so by your semblance of reasoning, Sarah Palin is a racist reactionary or at best a “dupe,” because she endorsed Rand Paul, and we know he hates Civil Rights, and his father was up to his neck and checkbook with the Alex Jones types. Makes Palin a truther, too – not to mention a Birther, plus she refused to condemn Birthers when asked about them. She also makes it a habit, as we know, of questioning the Americanism of her opponents – the worst thing you can say about someone in America.

    And that’s hardly even trying.

    As for your definition of “they” – “the NAACP, the DNC, and by extension the major networks and news publications” are supposedly responsible for the following: “they LIED, about the violence of the Tea Parties, except KEN GLADNEY doesn’t figure into it, they lied about
    the Klansman Byrd last week’s whole legacy, they lie with out reservation and without consequence, they compared the Tea Party to the White Citizens’s Councils”

    So, the truth value of your statement is all of “them” are responsible if any one of them, or anyone you associate with them (a low bar, I’d say) had anything to do with any of that. That “logic” makes you, Sarah Palin, Zoltan, and me and the frog, too, all racist truther-birther conspiracy nuts.

    Your repeated slanders of Rauf are getting tedious. You’ve had plenty of opportunity to back up your statements. When challenged on them, you’ve produced nothing except for the same bs. Yes, we know he contributed to Perdana. So what? People who contribute to dupe (i.e., people who disagree with narciso) organizations get to build churches, mosques, ashrams, temples, and sweat lodges in America, too – at least until the racist truther-birther conspiracy nuts are in charge.

  31. That’s the kind of logic that Quellist Kate, indulges in, you admit there was no truth to the NAACP statement, they even dialed it down on the
    press release, the only real violence at these things have been by SEIU
    against someone who was selling knick knacks at a town hall. There was no violence in the ‘targeting’ of certain districts, yet that was the spin. Many of these innocent Gitmo detainees have proven anything but. They falsified the climate record, and then conducted a whitewash of same

  32. There was no violence in the ‘targeting’ of certain districts, yet that was the spin. Many of these innocent Gitmo detainees have proven anything but. They falsified the climate record, and then conducted a whitewash of same

    Think you could work in Checkers, the Panama Canal, and sugar substitutes?

    Don’t know where you got the idea that I said “there was no truth to the NAACP statement.” I’ve said repeatedly that there is obviously truth to the NAACP’s statements, as far as I can tell, though I still haven’t seen anyone with a link to the full text of the resolution (which incidentally doesn’t become NAACP policy until and unless adopted by the national board later this year).

    The photos at the NAACP web site as well as my own personal experiences amply confirm elements of truth to the charge that there are “racist elements within the Tea Party.” Whether the Tea Party attracts, exploits, and incites racism and racial insensitivity to a more than trivial extent – that is, more than would be presumably inevitable with any mass protest movement – and, if so, how much and what should be done about it, are other questions.

    I’m actually more interested in the underlying objective and moral-ideological conflicts that tend to be brought to the surface as questions of subjective racial animus. They all relate to each other, however, since people’s (inherently undependable) assessments of their own subjective state and their hurt feelings about supposedly being misunderstood or misrepresented often interfere with their ability to get at what the fight is really about and where it’s most dangerous.

  33. I see now that Tea Party American is Palin’s response to the NAACP’s campaign “I am an NAACP American.” Still an odd usage for Palin to adopt, especially without explanation.

  34. You understand that the purpose of these statements, from the NAACP is to stop discussion, to ‘pick, polarize, and isolate’ the subject in question. Just like when Steve Emerson started investigating Islamist organizations in the mid 90s, Islamophobia and racism was asserted. Now as with death panels almost a year ago, which turned out to be mighty prophetic with the appointment of Berwick, who conveniently will not be subject to these same strictures. She alone chooses to challenge ‘the narrative,’ a word I have gotten quite sick of frankly Huck and Mittens will come along around October and register their complaint

  35. “Generic descendant of the White Citizen’s Councils’ you know the respectable folks that gave the orders to lynch Cheney, Schwerner
    and Goodman, that’s a solid dialog right there, don’t you agree, Why should anyone take exception to that, I can’t imagine. Also invoking
    ‘1776’ is an invitation to racism, now I know those are just words like certain words in Salon and the Huffington Post, led to a burning of
    her church, I’m sure that’s a misunderstanding. If someone is maimed
    or killed because of this highly colorful language we can blame the target,

  36. @ narciso:

    when you can explain who burned the witch’s church, go right ahead…. but cut back on all the “other stuff” a little.
    When you start linking HuffPo and Salon with Alaska, you pretty much have a muffled sound.

  37. @ narciso:

    good comeback. one point for you.

    and I hope that isn’t a cordless mic or you might have to pull it out with your teeth.

  38. Take it up with Richard Gere, as with the word ‘teabagger’ you seem all too familiar with these practices, old man

  39. Seven photos of racist signs that are claimed to have been taken at protests that have involved hundreds of thousands of people! And those photos presented by an organization that includes members who have clearly borne false witness in the past.

    I too have relatives who are racist; but not one of them is remotely as racist as Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan and The Reverend Wright, all of whom have been treated with respect and have even been honored by the NAACP. And I’ve never seen those three named worthies in their private moments, so I’m probably underestimating just how vile and despicable they are.

    As to the photos, they could easily have been carried by agents provocateur, or they could have been photoshopped. The left has certainly carried out such operations in the past.

  40. Well Sully just because he lied about Brawley, and incited violence at Freddie’s Fashion Mart, and excoriated Guiliani for trying to bring the city back from the brink, and has demagogued every spark of racial
    kindling in the last 20 years, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a point.

    Similarly just because the former marine Jeremiah Wright, plied with
    his congregation with even more lurid conspiracy theories, likely cobbled together from his coffee clatches with Castro and Kadaffi, he really meant well in shaping the mindset of our Leader

  41. @ narciso:

    Given that there are members of the Black Panthers who have appeared in proximity to NAACP members at events. And, given that there is actual footage of that Black Panther guy espousing genocide openly on the street, it’s reasonable to conclude that there may be “an element of truth” to an assertion that the NAACP is a genocidal organization. Who knows what evil lurks in the minds of its members.

  42. They are becoming more and more like the ANC, although there is really no reason for this now. I was focusing more on the Panthers,
    and the adjunct of the Black Muslims who had more than a little to do with the rise of Obama. It’s quite unsettling yet our czar doesn’t quite
    get that, was he around when a much less extravagant campaign set
    LA ablaze nearly 20 years ago.

  43. Sully wrote:

    As to the photos, they could easily have been carried by agents provocateur, or they could have been photoshopped.

    Oh c’mon. Do you have any idea how silly that reads? Does that mean that if somehow someone could prove those people were as 100% authentic and manufactured in America, you would acknowledge they were a problem? Of course not. You’d call them a fringe, and tell yourself that most Tea Party Americans are wonderful people as sensitive and humble and free of racial insensitivity as your wonderful self.

    The problem isn’t angry openly racist fruitcakes at TP rallies, though they are signs of something.

    @ narciso:
    Right – an NAACP Legal Defense Fund person possibly consulting with the DOJ about the NBPP case means that the Think Progress photos of TPers used at the NAACP site were faked.

    Good thinking.

  44. No I didn’t say, I don’t think even Sully made that point, although we have seen cropping of certain pictures, like the miliitiaman who happened to be black. but the connections of these organization is more than a little curious, is it really that hard for you to see how they are excusing lawlessness and intimidation on the one hand, and impugning legitimate dissent on the other, through the DISCLOSE act for instance

  45. @ narciso:
    I was in L.A. 20 years ago, and there was nothing like any of this going on. There was an incendiary video – incendiary because of what it accurately depicted – an out of touch police chief with an “outnumbered stormtrooper” approach to policing, a large, alienated non-white underclass convinced that they were unheard and unrepresented, and a relatively severe economic downturn following a long period of growth that mostly had left them behind anyway.

    And if y’all Tea Party Americans want to see a lot more of that kind of thing, just keep on keeping on like you are.

  46. That wasn’t readily apparent twenty year ago, was it, there may have been some reason for the anger, we’ve had similar outbreaks in Miami
    on three different occasions with less provocations. But what happens
    when you unneccessarily gin up certain audience who don’t realize it’s
    not ’67 all over again

  47. @ narciso:
    20 years ago, “it” was readily apparent to a lot of people. The only question was why the reaction had taken so long. Of course, there were some people in positions of responsibility who worried about people “unnecessarily ginning up certain audiences.”

    Good blame-shifting there: No real problems, just “unnecessary ginning up” of “certain audiences.” What characterizes those “certain audiences” I wonder? Other than that they’re stupid people who are too ignorant to know what’s good for them and how good they’ve got it, and should just shut up?

    Also, who decides when the “ginning up” becomes “necessary”? Maybe the NAACP decided in its immense wisdom to engage in a pre-emptive strike rather than indulge in appeasement. I thought you were all in favor of that kind of strategery.

  48. @ CK MacLeod:

    And if y’all Tea Party Americans want to see a lot more of that kind of thing, just keep on keeping on like you are.

    And if y’all want to see folks driven to take up extreme positions just keep on keeping on encouraging folks to call anybody who states an opinion on a whole range of legitimate issues a racist.

    You poo poohed it; but the fact is that I now discount all supposed evidence produced by anyone associated with the Democratic Party and the news media other than Fox, and a whole list of leftist organizations in the same way leftists reflexively discount all evidence produced by folks like Glenn Beck except with more reason.

    Congressmen did lie about being called names and spat upon after purposely trying to set up an incident. That fellow Bellisles (or whatever) who wrote the lying book about gun usage in colonial and later America just wrote another book that was published,and he is still treated as a serious academic by a whole swath of the left. President Obama’s current Supreme Court nominee clearly manipulated scientific evidence for ideological reasons. Dan Rather and his team at a major network clearly faked evidence or knowingly trafficked in faked evidence to influence an election. Photos of Tea Party people (like photos of those convoy people) have been cropped. Al Sharpton did knowingly attempt to destroy a career among other things in the Tawana Brawley case even though he knew it was all a lie. Bill Clinton’s people did lie about church burnings in order to inflame racial hatred. etc. etc. etc. etc.

    Sometimes what looks like willingness to manipulate the news and evidence for ideological reasons is precisely what it appears to be.

    And now you tout seven photos on an NAACP web site as proof that the Tea Party is racist. If they had seven hundred photos I wouldn’t accept them as evidence until each and every one had been proofed. And then I would suspect agents provocateurs. And with perfectly good reason.

  49. @ Sully:
    How about a little admixture of simple common sense verified through personal experience?

    I hereby testify that there are racists among Tea Party Americans, that there are an even larger number of people sympathetic to the Tea Party who regularly exhibit racism and racial insensitivity; that many of them appear completely unconscious of it; and that furthermore there are ample historical reasons to expect that even in the total absence of subjective racism on the part of the Tea Party Americans, the political conflict over their agenda would be objectively racialized.

    And no one at the NAACP, or the NBPP, or god knows who else, cropped me.

  50. How about we don’t concede a thing, CK, they never do, and thanks to the press and the educational establishment, their’ leavings’ don’t stink. Dale Robertson was a fraud, he was found and dismissed but the likes of Wiegel still used him as a foil. I’m sure there are others, but the tender concerns of the NAACP for the Tea Parties sensibilities wasn’t the point, the point is to destroy your opponent utterly, we’ve been seeing this since the first really unbearably dishonest campaign in recent memory in ’64, which gave us the Vietnam and the Civil Rights Bill,well 50/50 isn’t bad huh.

  51. narciso wrote:

    How about we don’t concede a thing,

    If you want to be an unthinking ideologue obsessed with your imaginary war against “them,” then that’s a great approach. You can then assemble a collection of vaguely interrelated factoids and expect the emergent penumbra of ick to be persuasive to others who don’t need to persuaded anyway.

  52. We admitted that Dale Robertson was a doofus, they still hung him around the tea party, Bush admitted that Iraq hadn’t gone great, no credit for that.

    Armitage’s role in the Plame matter was covered up, even though Libby had actually saved his bacon once upon a time. Conrad Black was convicted on charges that were almost entirely false, Ted Stevens may have been a crook, but they still framed him. Stuart Smalley seems to have walked into the Senate 6 months later
    thanks to Felon votes. The folks at Haditha were found not guilty of
    the charges that the late Congressman Murtha and Taiban “Tim” McGuirk penned on them. The people who were in the pocket of
    firms like AIG and Countrywide, wrote the bill that will create new
    disasters. Do you notice a pattern here

  53. @ CK MacLeod:

    And no one at the NAACP, or the NBPP, or god knows who else, cropped me.

    We have only your word on that, and even assuming the person who posts here as CK MacLeod is a real person and can be trusted to write what he believes to be the truth he may be biased and “completely unconscious of it.”

  54. @ Sully:
    Of course I’m biased and completely unconscious of it. That goes without saying. I presume as much. The fact that it is automatically true for me – whoever or whatever I am – or for the people who are operating this false front going by the name CK MacLeod tends to imply that it will be equally true for Tea Party Americans as well, leading to the conclusion that denials of same are incredible. Palin’s and the TP’s response has been to attempt to de-legitimize the complainers at the cost of reinforcing the complaint as well as the separation between the two sides. It’s part and parcel of the process by which Palin and the TP have turned themselves into far right partisan opportunists rather than a comprehensive political alternative.

  55. @ CK MacLeod:

    How about a little admixture of simple common sense verified through personal experience?

    Okay. From my own observations perhaps 10% of people in this country are colorblind in all their deeds and thoughts. The Tea Party and all other groups of people including more that 10% of Americans must therefore include racists.

    The current president of the United States is not colorblind in all his deeds and thought as amply demonstrated by his books. And don’t even get me started about “clean and well spoken” Joe Biden. The Democratic Party therefore includes at least two stone cold racists beyond the ex clan leader they buried last week.

    The Democratic Party has demonstrably implemented many government program over the past fifty years that seem better designed to destroyed the families of tens of millions of minority citizens than to help them. And, through its wholly owned subsidiaries, the teachers’ unions it has furthermore condemned tens of millions of minority citizens to terrible educations that don’t prepare them well for the world of work.

    Yet the NAACP works hand in hand with the Democratic Party and has done nothing effective to oppose the above.

    And you expect me to credit the NAACP as giving a damn about the welfare of minority citizens who don’t make their livings as race hustlers?

  56. The Tea Party has not been around long enough for anyone to make generalizations about it or its members.

    On the other hand, Colin, it really surprises me that you cannot recognize the obvious demagoguery at work here on the part of those who wish to marginalize and discredit the vast majority of those people who quite innocently belive they are affirming the most virtuous principles they have when they participate in Tea Party events.

    This is your blog, and, unfortunately, it has become a kind of soap box on which you dismiss Beck, Palin, and others who are part of a solution to the growing tyranny. You are loosing that magic feeling, my man.

  57. Scientific Socialist wrote:

    The Tea Party has not been around long enough for anyone to make generalizations about it or its members.

    The only one’s making generalizations about the TP are the self-appointed spokespeople of the TP who claim that they have nothing to do with racism and racial insensitivity. The NAACP resolution – whose full text apparently won’t be made available until it’s been adopted by the national organization – asks the TP to repudiate the bigots who are attracted to the movement, and suggests that a failure to do so will amount to condoning them.

    What makes this more than an idle attack or “demagoguery” is 1) the actual evidence that the predictable “far right” types have in fact attempted to seize upon the TP opportunistically, and 2) the material basis for racialized conflict and the long history of racialized conflict around the identical issue complex that the Tea Party puts uppermost: states’ rights, constitutionalism of a certain type, fiscal restraint/low taxes, ultra-patriotism/cultural self-defense. That is precisely the face turned to the public by the white racists Palin claims to denounce and to have moved past.

    If you’re going to run a mainly white movement on that agenda, then you can either reject the “legacy of evil” and the people who are attracted to the same issue complex for many of the same social, economic, historical, and emotional reasons as ever, and make legitimate good faith efforts to renovate and broaden the message and agenda; or you can pretend that none of that exists and that it’s all been made up by “them.” If you choose the latter path, then you deserve to be discredited.

    When “Beck, Palin, and others” start to confront the real world implications of their rhetoric, and start spending less time flattering their constituents and reducing their political enemies to paranoid caricatures, and spend more time reaching across social and political divides and telling their constituents things that may be hard to accept about themselves – then and only then will I start to see them as part of a “solution” I could possibly want to be a part of.

  58. So you think the NAACP is making an honest claim/charge against the Tea Party. And you base this on some verbose rubbish about the supposed nature of these people and the issues they find important. You sound a lot like Andrew Sullivan and that is not a compliment.

    Different folks see things differently, and you seem to have a lot of very basic differences with what drives most conservative thought, from Buckley to Reagan to Palin to Beck.

    You want the Tea Party to apologize for some imaginary bigots among them. You want to give credence to what I see as a naked abuse of the issue of racism, my definition of the race card.

    They play the race card for dupes, and your long winded arguments leave me with the impression that you are either an oblivious dupe or a very cynical wordsmith playing rhetorical games with our valuable time.

  59. So small government is racist, so said John Lewis, back in ’95. so is defending your country, Rangel said as much about tax cuts, thy don’t have to yell the N Word anymore. We oppose Obama just because of
    the color of his skin, not the texture of his radical politics, not his association with every noxious organization quite nearly on god’s green earth. Garofolo, Ratigan, et al has said as much. Are you really going to go there,

  60. And you base this on some verbose rubbish about the supposed nature of these people and the issues they find important.

    You have no basis for denying the truth of my description, which I have had to repeat and extend several times in light of your refusal confront its simple elements. If it goes on for longer than your attention span, it’s because I’m struggling to find terms that get through to you.

    You could try to deny that the TP is driven by states’ rights/restraint on the federal government, low taxes, cultural self-defense, but that would be absurd, since the TP is hardly shy about it and puts those issues at the top of its defense against the NAACP charges against some in the TP’s natural constituency.

    You could try to deny that the same complex of issues dominated the rhetoric of angry white populism and white racism in the past, but that would merely show you to be ignorant.

    You could try to deny that implementation of the TP agenda as presented would put them into direct material conflict with the typical NAACP constituency along racialized lines, but that would take using your brain, something you prefer to avoid, instead of calling names, offering insults, and cheering on your political heroes like they’re players on the team you enjoy rooting for, or invoking their names as though doing so is the same thing as making an intelligible argument – even as you attack my good faith and accuse me of wasting anyone’s time.

  61. @ CK MacLeod:

    You have no basis for denying the truth of my description

    He has no obligation to disprove your description. You and the NAACP have the obligation to prove it.

    Presumably there is more evidence than those seven pictures. Where is the video of a proven Tea Partier spouting hate like that Black Panther dude whose voter intimidation Michelle’s husband whitewashed?

    If wanting “states’ rights/restraint on the federal government, low taxes, cultural self-defense” is racist then I stand with the racists and so do a whole lot of Americans. And I will not apologize for it to an organization that tolerates Al Sharpton or a First Lady who spent twenty years of Sundays attending the church of Jeremiah Wright.

    I’m with narcisco. Not an inch. Let the NAACP cast out the beam in its own eye before the Tea Party even thinks about addressing the mote in its.

  62. @ Sully:
    http://thinkprogress.org/2010/07/14/williams-naacp/

    The guy’s just one leading example. And, no, no one said that supporting those issues made you racist, or for that matter that the TP is or was racist. Again, the demand, in the words of Jealous, is that the TP “expel the bigots and racists in your ranks or take full responsibility for all of their actions.” That formulation already assumes that the TP is not on the whole racist and that the TP doesn’t want to be considered hospitable to racists and racism. It’s giving the TP more credit than you, for example, give the NAACP or all of Islam, for example.

    And then you turn finally to “they did it first,” and “I know what you are but what am I?” and other grown-up responses. If the TP wants to be nothing more than a typical rightwing interest group, with a particularly reactionary and divisive “never give an inch” edge, then it can simply counterattack as Palin has and as you advise and support.

  63. In point of fact, you know it doesn’t work like that, recall that ‘kill’em’line that was supposedly uttered at a Palin rally except that the Secret Service says they have no recollection of that. Now if you want to be technical about, he was speaking in his capacity as an opponent of the Mosque, in point of fact, that was quite ignorant, it would be the moon god.

    The NAACP has been known on at least two occasions mentioned before, to use inflammatory language, 2000 and 2006. The previous
    director Ben Chavis, had some violent altercations in his youth

  64. @ CK MacLeod:

    Declaration of Independence – final draft by Jedediah MacLeod KCB

    When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should first denounce any and all adherents to their cause and sympathizers with their objectives who are accused by their oppressors of failing the strictest tests of purity of heart and disinteredness of motives regardless of the flimsiness of evidence presented by their accusers and the ulterior motives of said accusers lest. . .

  65. So, the caliber of this organization from the outset;
    http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/271870.php

    But by all means, lets just surrender any actual position to Obama’s ruinous economic, (this odious FrankenDodd legislation, the slashing
    of our defense, the tsunami of new taxes, that will drown any trace
    of an economy. Forget that they issued this statement to cover up
    a paramilitary organization, suppressing the vote in Philadelphia, which
    Wiegel calls ‘Megyn’s Minstrel show’

  66. Forget that they issued this statement to cover up
    a paramilitary organization, suppressing the vote in Philadelphia, which
    Wiegel calls ‘Megyn’s Minstrel show’

    “Suppressing the vote in Philadelphia”! Two dudes at a precinct that was voting 99% Obama anyway. Not a good thing. But not “suppressing the vote in Philadelphia” either. Yet now it’s a massive conspiracy to fix elections by the NBPP in cahoots with the Kenyan socialist president!

    Can you point to evidence of a single vote that was “suppressed”? It’s been almost two years. Has anyone come forth? Or are they all shivering in fear in their basements under the New Black Panther Party reign of vote-suppressing terror?

  67. @ Sully:
    Yeah, right. You’re Thomas Jefferson and Barack Obama is King George III, and we’re about to have a war, and you are so one of the good guys.

  68. If you’re going to compare apples and apples, I guess Tancredo or
    Farah’s addresses at the TPC in Nashville are closest to the NAACP
    event, not actually racist, but full of stupid and counterproductive
    language, this may be why she chose the focus she did for her speech. Now around this time last year, she paid tribute to the founding feminists at Seneca falls, and the true abolitionist William
    Seward in Auburn, who happens to be the ‘father of Alaska’ as US
    territory

  69. @ CK MacLeod:

    Actually I think a couple of grandmas did say they had turned back from that polling place after seeing the fellow with his club.

    But you are right that it isn’t a big deal. I’m sure there won’t be more than a few thousand or so fellows packing heat on election day this year. Which may actually be why the Justice Department let that fellow off, since a violent incident would serve their leader’s purposes.

  70. General Order Number Sixty Seven – First Draft by Cornelius Thadeus MacLeod

    General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau has brought it to the attention of this command that certain impetuous and even rough members of this force have been insufficiently respectful of the forces of His Hispanic Majesty Alfonso XIII. In addition there has been talk of charging up San Juan hill instead of proceeding at a stately walk as has been ordered. . .

  71. Weyler , the father of the ‘Reconcentracion’ we’ll get those annoying
    bitter clinging rebels, I thought order 66 was harsh enough.

  72. Tou know I’m in a very ‘Howard Beale’ mood today, yet another disastrous bill, was passed. an administration that has seemingly allowed the Gulf to be ruined, in order to cue up yet another legislative priority, ‘cap and trade’ and to suppress out own domestic energy
    production, Goldman following the Corcoran model, has secured themselves a parachute, Polanski is free because of the merits of
    the case, but other issues. and we’re having this sterile round robin
    of a debate

  73. /sigh

    the NAACP is just saying, if you want our votes stop pandering to the racists in your ranks.
    Do you think hollering WE ARE NOT RACISTS will get you a single black voter?
    Do you think this will help?

    Dear Mr. Lincoln
    We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!

    In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in Kansas City this week. We voted to condemn a political revival of that old abolitionist spirit called the ‘tea party movement’.

    The tea party position to “end the bailouts” for example is just silly. Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn’t that what we want all Coloreds to strive for? What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare? What they need to do is start handing the bail outs directly to us coloreds! Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the only responsible party that should be granted the right to disperse the funds.

    And the ridiculous idea of “reduce[ing] the size and intrusiveness of government.” What kind of massa would ever not want to control my life? As Coloreds we must have somebody care for us otherwise we would be on our own, have to think for ourselves and make decisions!

    The racist tea parties also demand that the government “stop the out of control spending.” Again, they directly target Colored People. That means we Colored People would have to compete for jobs like everybody else and that is just not right.

    Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government “stop raising our taxes.” That is outrageous! How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?

    Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

    Sincerely

    Precious Ben Jealous, Tom’s Nephew National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Head Colored Person

  74. strangelet wrote:

    Do you think hollering WE ARE NOT RACISTS will get you a single black voter?

    What basis do you have for accusing the Tea Party of “thinking”? That’s totally unfair, and certainly not backed up by anything we’ve seen on this topic.

    As PR/communications types, psychologists, and others will tell you, hollering “WE ARE NOT RACISTS” is a version of the hopeless “I’m not a bimbo!” strategy. What shouting “I’m not a bimbo” says is “Maybe I’m a bimbo/ people are saying I’m a bimbo/ trust me when I tell you I’m not a bimbo even though people credible enough to force me to respond say I’m a bimbo.”

    The correct response is, “well, maybe I’m a bit of a bimbo, but here is my plan for ensuring access to potable water to the people of the Punjab” etc. Defuse the charge, then prove its falsehood and triviality compared to the truth. In a political context like this one, shouting “WE ARE NOT RACISTS, AND YOU SUCK!” further underlines your willingness to polarize the discussion and cover for practices, attitudes, and policies that amount to or align with racism under whatever name.

  75. what is that line ‘about satire is what closes on Saturday night’ Williams was a very stupid, take on the idiocy of Kansas City, about
    as smart as when the TPX endorsed Minnick over the Republican candidate, REally stand up comedy isn’t his gig, you’re not helping.
    You see now why she took it upon herself to take the offense

    Now when someone says that an organization is the “Genetic Descendant of the White Citizens’ councils, that deserves a certain
    amount of proof, When some one scoffs at 1776, the very founding
    of our country, coincidentally the Muhammad Al Wahhab’s influence

  76. That does seem to be the strategy that you recommend, accept the media template, that the events that they use to frame the debate happened, the spitting, the slurs, et al, Ignore how they have ignored
    actual instances of violence by SEIU and other members. Let Think Progress and Josh’s outfit set the debate, just like we let CAIR determine what is and is not Islamic radicalism

  77. Astounding site, where did you found this specifics in this posting? I’m glad I found it. i will be checking out back soon to view what other articles you’ve got.

    • Stop fluffing the robots. (It’s typical comment spam – most of it’s caught by our ever-watchful anti-robot robots.) I’ll leave it up so you can study its fine details more closely. First clue: Anyone who says anything complimentary about the site or a post. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re 99% nasty cats here. Your occasionally partly complimentary comments are the exceptions that prove the rule.

  78. only fluffing the robot because the robot was fluffing you, Tsar, you’ve been sounding like a fair fluffing would do wonders in getting your head up.

    (and I’m almost surprised to hear that you admit to have heard of fluffing, you show-bizzing rascal)

  79. @ narciso:
    I deleted the e-mail and web-link embedded in the comment rather than delete the entire comment.

    As for fluffing, dude, I was brought up in the International Capital of the “Other Industry.”

  80. narciso wrote:

    That’s a certain Valley as I understand it, from what I’ve read

    take care that your reading does not include cheese graters.

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