I don't know, maybe it was just me, or maybe my TV, but in watching the news coverage of the Teabagger March yesterday, all I saw were angry white people. I did not see a single non-white person in the crowd. This march was the end of a disgraceful week in our nation's history that began with the controversy over the President's speech to school students, sandwiched in mid-week with President Obama being called a liar in a joint session meeting of Congress and ending the week with Angry White Teabagger Parade in DC. Anyone on the right, any conservative, well hell, anybody that tries to deny that this Astroturf movement is anything but racially motivated is an idiot, demented, or both.
The crowd of marchers were the same hooligans who appeared at the McCain/Palin rallies prior to the election. Last year, we saw a doltish woman get on stage and tell John McCain that she could not trust Barack Obama because he was an "Arab". Yesterday, a report asked a person the reason for attending the march, and her response was that she "was worried that the country was going to be taken over by Muslims." This morning I saw photos from the march with the usual comparisons of President Obama to Hitler or to zoo animals. I can only imagine how much this harms our image abroad as America tries to promote the importance of human rights to other countries.
What bothers me also is how Republican congress people have bought into this movement of racial hatred disguised as an anti-tax movement. The Republican Party has been taken over by conservative talk radio and tv personalities. Nobody from the Republican Party has stepped forward to say that it is not okay to bring guns to rallies that President Obama is attending, that it was stupid for schools to knuckle under to wingnut parents who did not want their children to hear the President's speech about how important an education is, that there is something fundamentally wrong in bringing signs to a Teabag rally displaying Presidnet Obama as Hitler, a monkey in a zoo or a monkey hanging from a noose. I guess this disgraceful behavior is acceptable to the Republican Party because the President is, after all, a Democrat.
Going back to the news coverage of the event, I was especially disgusted at NBC News. In a completely unfair and unbalanced segment, they devoted a disproportionat time to the coverage of the Teabag event, providing crowd estimates as in the "hundreds of thousands", while the DC police and fire departments gave their estimate as being around 70,000. The NBC coverage of the President's rally in Minneapolis was much shorter and did not estimate what the crowd at the Target Center was, which to me, looked to be larger than the mob that descended on Washington. Worse yet, the Pittsburgh NBC affiliate did not show any of the President's rally, but rather devoted its entire segment to the Washington rally and a local Teabag event.
What must the world think of the United States? History was made on Election Day 2008. I was bursting with pride. Things have turned ugly since then. The cloud of racism has billowed from the hearts and minds of the ignorant to capture the international stage. The behavior of the Teabaggers, and the support given by Republican congress people, is disgraceful and despicable.