Too Much Tea for the Powers that Be – a Summer of Racial Discontent
Race relations is always an interesting and important issue, if not a tired one. Race-baiting is a frequent occurrence in America, but normally the president and his immediate family remain above the fray and attempt to maintain the alleged dignity of the the office. Not so with this presidency. Yesterday, first lady Michelle Obama spoke before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) where she decried the stubborn inequality that remains in America.
Today the organization is expected to condemn “racist” elements within the Tea Party. In fact, in the proposed language of the NAACP‘s resolution, they state that “Tea Party members have used “racial epithets,” have verbally abused black members of Congress and threatened them, and protestors have engaged in “explicitly racist behavior” and “displayed signs and posters intended to degrade people of color generally and President Barack Obama specifically.”
Just what “historic” racist elements Ms. McDowell could be talking about remain unclear; the American Tea Party phenomenon is not yet 3 years old.
Indisputably, the Tea Party movement is having a big effect on the American political landscape. Anti-incumbent sentiment is running at what might be an all-time high, and Republicans are likely to take the House, if not the Senate. While this would be good because it would lead to divided power in Washington, and hopefully gridlock, it remains to be seen what the ultimate result of the emergence of the Tea Party movement will be. Some have suggested that the movement represents nothing more than an extension of the Republican Party, but I do not believe that that description is accurate. In fact, I believe the Tea Party is a very diverse group that contains everything from the typical neoconservative civilian mass-execution supporter, to staunch libertarians of the Ron Paul variety.
What is clear is that there is an interesting power struggle going on within the group; on the one side Sarah Palin actively seeks to assume leadership of the movement, on the other side is Ron Paul, whose supporters began the movement in Boston in December of 2007 as Dr. Paul was running for president. Even more curious is that Dr. Paul is not actively seeking control of the Tea Party; a fact that, combined with his apparent ambivalence towards seeking the Tea Party’s mantle of leadership, would seem to indicate a very strong libertarian orientation of the Tea Party. Whoever ends with the control of the Tea Party has a good chance of being the Republican Nominee for the presidency in 2012.
It is precisely because of the political momentum of the Tea Party, and because of the political implosion of the Obama administration, that groups like the NAACP are attempting to marginalize the group by using the tried and true tactic of race baiting perfected by the NAACP, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Anti-Defamation League. The problem is that it does not seem to be working this time; the momentum of the Tea Party movement has remained unaffected. Certainly nobody can prove it one way or the other, but it would not surprise me in the slightest if the people the NAACP refers to in its draft resolution were left-wing political operatives attempting to substantiate the characterization of the movement as racist or extremist.
Meanwhile some other race related issues are currently in the news. The first has to do with the Arizona illegal immigration law. Attorney General Eric Holder, who just days ago filed a federal lawsuit against the law, has stated that he has not ruled out filing an additional challenge on racial profiling grounds. Meanwhile the civil rights division of the Justice Department recently dropped a voter intimidation case that it had been pursuing against the Black Panther Party based on election day shenanigans. It would appear that the administration is fine with discrimination so long as it’s discrimination being directed towards caucasians, especially men.
Ultimately we will have to wait and see what the results of both the NAACP’s nonsense and the Tea Party moment are. I am guardedly hopeful that at the very least taxes won’t rise quite as fast, and hopefully B. Hussein Obama can be sent back to the windy city where he belongs in 2012. Maybe he and Carter can go on vacation together.
