Did You Know...

**Written by Doug Powers

Ever since I heard that the NAACP was doing a study on Tea Party racism, I’ve been on pins and needles not knowing which way it would fall. As a Tea Party type, I’ve been anticipating finding out if my pre-assigned racial prejudice is overt, subconscious, genetic or merely intermittent and completely by choice.

Shockingly, and against all expectations, the NAACP has cleared the Tea Party of all charges of not being racist.

From the New York Times:

The nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization declares the Tea Party “permeated with concerns about race” in a new report that is likely to reignite a feud between the two groups.

The report by the NAACP, released Wednesday morning, argues that Tea Party groups “have given platform to anti-Semites, racists, and bigots,” and have attracted white nationalists looking for recruits.

“The Tea Party movement has unleashed a still inchoate political movement who are in their numerical majority, angry middle class white people who believe their country, their nation, has been taken from them,” argues the report, called Tea Party Nationalism.

Written by Leonard Ziskind, an author who has written extensively on white nationalism, the report looks at what it calls six nationwide Tea Party networks at the core of the movement. It says that leaders of all but one — FreedomWorks, a libertarian group in Washington headed by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey – have raised questions about President Obama’s birth certificate or have ties to white supremacist groups.

Wow. Imagine how racist the Tea Party would be if they had Al Sharpton on board. And how come Helen Thomas hasn’t joined yet?

But oddly enough, even though most Tea Partiers are angry, racist white people, the majority of them are pretty good folks:

And a foreword from the group’s president, Benjamin Todd Jealous, notes that the vast majority of Tea Party supporters “are sincere, principled people of good will.”

Hey, he left out clean and articulate with no caucasian dialect.

Even though Mr. Jealous was just one step away from saying “some of my best friends are white,” do “sincere, principled people of good will” participate in political movements headed up by racists and bigots? All I’m saying is that if Tea Partiers were that susceptible to misleading suggestion, they’d probably be Democrats.

Rhetorical question of the day: Do you think the New York Times would ever dare publish a story entitled “Tea Party releases report on NAACP” — especially without offering somebody from the NAACP a rebuttal quote?

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe