Nobody mocks it better than James Wolcott, and he was on a heck of a roll yesterday as he hit up the Tea Baggers in general (and Glenn Reynolds in particular) for their amnesiac faux populism. In their current version of history, there has been no energetic protests since about ... oh ... 1776, and sure, liberals can protest but that doesn't count, because unlike the rest of America, they don't have "real" jobs. Or something like that:
It's remarkable and telling how some of the biggest peaceful political rallies this country has ever seen took place only three years ago, only to be flushed down the memory hole. I'm speaking of the tremendous pro-immigration rallies that took place in 2006, with an estimated half-million people assembling in downtown Los Angeles alone. Those rallies did not lack energy, enthusiasm, or organization, and I daresay among those hundreds of thousands of people lobbying for enlightened immigration legislation were low-income workers with "real jobs."
Of course, their groundswell efforts were mocked, attacked, derided, and dismissed by the likes of CNN's Lou Dobbs and the right blogosphere, who had a righteous snit over the presence of Mexican flags. ...
The difference is that the Tea Parties, heavily promoted by Fox News and talk radio, are a white-people production, which ipso facto makes them more representative to Glenn Reynolds and associates of what "real Americans" think and believe than an ocean of brown-skinned people practicing civic activism.
This is part and parcel of what Jack and Jill yesterday called The Rotting Racist Underbelly of the Tea Party Protests (which Markos linked in yesterday's midday open thread, but which deserves a second look for its astute observations).
After stating, "I’m starting to become pretty convinced at this point that 'socialist' is a some kind of code word for 'nigger,'" Jill Tubman offers up her new and revised criteria for sniffing out an undercover racist attack:
- Is it unique to Obama, i.e. is it a phrase we’ve never heard before applied to any other president or is it something we haven’t heard in recent memory? For example: he’s not an American citizen or he’s a socialist who’s planning re-education camps for young people.
- Is it illogical or impossible - does the assertion plainly contradict the facts? For example: not an American citizen, socialist, tax raiser, re-education camps for young people.
- Is it repeated, over and over, by a desperate person whose team lost badly in the last election & who adopts a wide-eyed, credulous, nodding stare pronouncing the lie slowly and precisely with a watchful eye to see if the listeners are buying it. For example: not an American citizen, socialist, elitist, drug seller, tax raiser or terrorist.
Optional: Does the assertion cause nervousness, embarrassment or confusion among non-blacks? When other white people such as Tom Brokaw or John Stewart sense something wrong and start to ask questions like "Do you really believe that?", you know for sure you’re in the racist attack zone.
I think this is a decent starting point to judge the coverage of the Fox faux teabagging extravaganzas as they unfold. And sad to say, I'm sure we'll come up with yet more criteria for detecting undercover (or not so undercover) racism based on those very same staged celebrations in the days ahead.