I've talked about this before and, as expected, it's been met with derisive snorts and even outright denials. Take the recent chants of "Kill the Bill, nigger" that were heard as Reps John Lewis, Jim Clyburn, and Emanuel Cleaver headed into the Capitol last week to vote on the health care bill. I am told now that Lewis, Clyburn and Cleaver are all liars and it didn't actually happen. Never mind the scores of reports from witnesses in the crowd as well the confirmation from Capital Police. The Tea Party activists are not racist. To say otherwise...well...I think you can guess how the Cult views this transgression.
Leonard Pitts Jr., writing for McClatchy News Services, sums it up best.
So it turns out that, contrary to what I argued in this space a few weeks back, racism is not "a major component" of the so-called tea party movement. I am informed of this by dozens of tea party activists indignant and insulted that I would even suggest such a thing.
In other news tea party protesters called John Lewis a "nigger" the other day in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol.
So, don't believe your lyin' eyes/ears. This jibes with the rest of their bullshit. Of course, Lewis has faced this sort of denial before in his life as Pitts notes.
He faced it in Nashville in 1960 when he was locked inside a whites-only fast-food restaurant and gassed by a fumigation machine for ordering a hamburger.
He faced it in Birmingham in 1961 when a group of Freedom Riders was attacked and he was knocked unconscious for riding a Greyhound bus.
Most famously, he faced it on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma 45 years ago this month when his skull was fractured by Alabama state troopers who charged a group of demonstrators seeking their right to vote.
Bring this up to a member of the Cult and be prepared to be met with an onslaught of anger and hate combined with a whiny-squeal-like-a-pig tone in their voices. To discuss historical facts of this nature are anathema to them...especially if there are any racial overtones. Why? Well, that's simple.
There is no racism in our country. And if you teach it in school then you are race monger, leftist who is encouraging social justice which are code words for communism and fascism.
Tea party leaders have spent much of the last few days spinning the incident, deflecting renewed suggestions that their stated fears — socialism, communism, liberalism — are just proxies for the one fear most of them no longer dare speak. Some even faxed the McClatchy news bureau in Washington to suggest, without offering a shred of evidence, that the episode was sparked by Democratic plants within the crowd.
Really? Wow...
Amy Kremer, coordinator of the Tea Party Express, went on Fox News to dismiss what she called an "isolated" incident. Your first instinct may be to cede the benefit of the doubt on that one. It seems unfair to tar nine reasonable people with the hateful behavior of one lunatic.
So, Kremer admits it DID happen. Hmm...
Given how often tea party leaders have been forced to disavow hateful signs and slogans and even the presence of organized white supremacist groups in their midst, is it really fair to use the word "isolated"?
Is there not a rottenness here? And is not the unwillingness to call that rottenness by name part and parcel of the reason it endures?
Yes, Leonard, there is a rottenness and that's why it does endure. It endures for the same reason why it endured so many years after the Civil War...because people aren't owning their responsibility for it. I have no problem admitting that I am horribly biased against Muslim men. It is a form of bigotry that I will probably struggle with my entire life. I may be a flawed person in many ways but at least I have the sack to admit that I do, indeed, have a problem. The Cult, of course, will never admit their obvious bias. Admitting Fault=End of all that is Holy.
I'll let Pitts close this one out.
Often we tell ourselves lies to spare ourselves truths. Had you asked them, the people who locked John Lewis inside that restaurant, the ones who mauled him at that bus station and smashed him down on that bridge, would not have said they acted from a rottenness within.
No, like the ones who called him "nigger" half a century later, they would have told you they were good people fighting for principle, trying to save this country from the liberals, the socialists and the communists.
They would not have said they were racists. Racists never do.