Some Carter Flashbacks: Originally posted December 2, 2010
NewsBusters has a story about a recent interview on NPR (11-30-2010) where Jimmy Carter said he never criticized the Tea Party:
In case you didn’t catch it, the interview/video at the top refutes this NPR interview.
So what about those signs that Brian Williams mentions? Not a lot of people realize this, but most of the signs with connections of Obama to Hitler are actually from what I term as a political cult. It just so happens this cult is a Democratic one. For instance, as a reminder, remember this exchange?
So, since most of these sign wielding nuts are actually Democrats, where does that leave Carter’s critique?
What are all those signs about? Is there some sort of study of them done to find out if there is a percentage of them that are racially tinged?
This study didn’t stop the questionable signs and ask if they were Lyndon LaRouche followers. Here is another story — old news, but needed for this recent news:
So, is this merely another nail in the “worst one’s” irrelevance coffin? I say yes, but I am sure there are NPR fans out there that disagree with me.
REASON.COM did a bang-up job in dealing with the issue:
- Video from “Can’t You Read the Signs?“
- See also: “Red America, White Power“
Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Tea Party movement is “struggling to overcome accusations of racism,” some of which has been perpetuated in its editorial pages. Yesterday’s New York Times, home to the most obsessively anti-Tea Party editorial page in America, was stunned to discover that “at least 32 African-Americans are running for Congress this year as Republicans, the biggest surge since Reconstruction, according to party officials.”
Previously, The Times reported that Tea Partiers are, on average, people with a high levels of education and higher than average incomes. So it would seem that they aren’t, as some editorialists and pundits contend, simply a gang of subliterate militia men or, as actress Janeane Garofalo recently told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, a subsection of the white power movement.
Wandering the recent Tax Day tea party in Washington DC with Reason.tv, we saw some stupid signs — though none that could be considered offensive or racist. We talked to some people that claimed President Obama was both a Czarist and Bolshevik. We spoke to a former star of Saturday Night Live who has previously claimed that president might, in fact, be the anti-Christ. Or a communist. Or both. There were those who fretted that the United States were morphing into a Stalinist state. And there were countless protesters concerned that the Obama administration was spending recklessly, interested in auditing the Federal Reserve, and seething about the General Motors bailout.
So did we find that the Tea Party was motivated by race, by the fact that we now have a black president? Did it seem as if their stated concerns about health care reform and a ballooning national debt simply a smokescreen, designed to concealing a racist agenda? Here is what we found.