Party time for bigots

It took long enough for the NAACP to declare that the Tea Party movement is shot-full of right-wing and racist extremists, despite the “movement” leaders’ denials. The tea partiers are nothing but your garden variety far-right ideologues and their knowledge-challenged lemmings who come out of the woodwork every time they feel threatened by “change.” At their core, they are little to be differentiated from the anti-government “Patriot” movement, except with a cute and cuddly name. The tea partiers are driven by the usual right-wing obsessions: race, “big” government, taxes, “alien” invasions, and “enslaving” white people. In the mid-19th Century, it was the nativist, anti-immigrant “American Party,” better known as the Know Nothing Party, and variations of these bigoted, paranoid movements have emerged again and again during the 1930s to oppose the New Deal, during the “Red Menace” during the 1940s and 1950s, in the guise of the John Birch Society in the 1960s, in the 1990s during the Clinton administration, and now during the Obama administration, this time even uglier and nakedly racist than before; making it even more sinister is the fact that calls to violence from illiterates like Sarah Palin and semi-literates like Glenn Beck seem to have a certain amount of cache with these people.

Yes, I know, people will say that these are a few fringe elements within the "movement" that is the Tea Party movement. Not so; racism is apparently thriving within it, at least in Iowa. Although it took awhile for the mainstream media to get a hold of the story, it has been revealed that the North Iowa Tea Party paid to have a billboard featuring a picture of Barack Obama in the company of Adolf Hitler and V.I. Lenin in Mason City. The point, apparently, was that each espoused a version of “change” via “socialism.” To add hypocrisy to insult, the phrase "Radical Leaders Prey on the Fearful & the Naïve” was added. The billboard was only papered-over when news of it leaked out to major news organizations.

“Fearful and Naïve” would far better describe the target audience that the people who were behind the billboard’s “concept” were aiming at. In any case, the facts are that tea partiers are not “populists.” They are are against health care reform. They are not against CEOs and Wall Street hooligans making millions and billions of dollars (they only care if “their” taxes are paying for those bonuses). They are against government spending to create jobs. They think that tax cuts are the answer for everything. In other words, they have no “plan” at all save to disrupt or destroy the country for the sake of their bigotry.