I have a piece up over on Huffington Post. Here's a tease:
I was on Fox News this morning and, in the wake of the NAACP resolution calling on the Tea Party to denounce its racist extremist elements, the panel debate was about whether or not there are explicit racist elements in the Tea Party. Come on. Of course there are.
The folks denying Obama is a citizen despite a clear birth certificate and birth announcement. The signs that say "we have a lyin' African in the White House" or "monkey see, monkey do" or my personal favorite, "What you talkin' 'bout Willis?" The fact that overt White Supremacist organizations have called for support of the Tea Party movement and Tea Party candidates, including Rand Paul, have explicitly drawn on White Supremacist groups like Stormfront to raise money for their causes. There is overwhelming and undeniable evidence that very ugly, very vitriolic racists have linked up with the Tea Party.
If you Tea Party folks find this accusation so offensive, I would think you'd be all in favor of the NAACP resolution. Seems to me it's just calling on the Tea Party affiliates to do exactly what, defensively, you're doing in reaction to the resolution --- distance yourselves from this explicitly hateful wing of your movement. Why not?
So what's more interesting, I think, than pointing out the obvious existence of explicit racist extremists in the Tea Party is examining whether the Tea Party as a whole, by its very nature, is intentionally, implicitly built on racial resentment. In this regard, the NAACP resolution might be considered tame -- it goes to great pains, as many other liberals have, to suggest that only a few folks in the Tea Party are racist but by no means the entire enterprise. I say: Not so fast...
Read the rest here
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...