CLT UPDATE
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
The left's despicable and failing race card
| |
|
NOTE: CLT has just been asked to be a
co-sponsor of the Tea Party Post-Party Summit, to be
held this coming Friday and Saturday in Danvers. We are
happy to be part of this event. (See Events calendar on
the left for more details or to make your reservations.)
An additional final
panel has just been scheduled for 5 pm on Saturday, May
8th.
This "Best Practices"
panel will be moderated by Christen Varley of the
Greater Boston Tea Party. Other panelists will include Chanel
Prunier, Brad Wyatt, and our own Barbara Anderson.
They have been asked to speak about what they see as
both the past successes and future challenges of the
conservative/free enterprise/limited government movement
here in Massachusetts. They will offer suggestions on
what activists should be doing to make a difference in
the state as we all go forward with
Revolution 2010. |
|
| |
According to the allegedly smart people who
flutter adoringly around the Obama administration and we know that
anybody who is really smart will be an Obama supporter the tea
party protests against his policies, besides being populated by
hairy-palmed, knuckle-dragging morons (How could anyone with a brain
think anything positive about Sarah Palin?), are not really about
his policies.
They're just a cover for the real "elephant in the room." These
people are racists.
They've got to be kidding. But they say it with straight faces, even
though it has all the credibility of Jim Jones Kool-Aid. The race
card is the laziest ploy out there to marginalize a protest. That
kind of gratuitous smear is an outright admission that they can't
argue on the merits. When you can't do that, you raise your voice
and start calling people names.
The Eagle-Tribune
Sunday, April 25, 2010
It's much easier just to blame everything on racism
By Taylor Armerding
As several states with active "tea party"
groups prepare to hold important primary elections this month,
the movement is struggling to overcome accusations of racism
that are tinting perceptions of this loose network of
conservatives....
In a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, most Americans see the
movement as motivated by distrust of government, opposition to
the policies of Obama and the Democratic Party, and broad
concern about the economy. But nearly three in 10 see racial
prejudice as underlying the tea party....
The question of racism and the tea party flared on the eve of
Congress's divisive vote on the health-care overhaul in March,
when black congressmen accused protesters of using racial
epithets and spitting on them. Tea party supporters have denied
the allegations....
Nigel Coleman, who is black, leads the Danville TEA Party
Patriots in southern Virginia. He said the fact that the
movement is predominantly white doesn't mean it is inherently
racist.
"I went to a wine festival yesterday," he said. "Weren't too
many black people there, either. Nobody called them racists."
Nonetheless, tea party activists clearly feel an urgency to end
the discussion.
"As long as people who oppose us can frame the debate that way,
then they can get people to stop listening to us," Coleman said.
"The charge of racism is one that can be thrown out there, and
it really doesn't have to be proven. But it has such a negative
connotations that it can pretty much halt the debate."
The Washington Post
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Tea party groups battling perceptions of racism
What is it about the Tea Parties that sends
the left into paroxysms of rage? ...
The problem with the Tea Partiers is that they defy the
narrative progressives have written for How the World Works. As
the left sees it, America is divided between The People and The
Corporations -- interchangeable with The Rich, The Powerful, Big
Business, and Wall Street. The Corporations exist for the sole
reason of persecuting The People and ensuring that The People
don't receive their fair share. The only way to prevent The
Corporations from laying waste to the entire country is for the
government to act as a central repository for The People's faith
and money, and use it to fight back against the corporate powers
of darkness....
A progressive dream -- thousands of Americans protesting in the
streets -- had been turned against them. The left responded
first by trying to prove that Tea Partiers weren't The People;
they were astroturfers, paid agents of the insurance companies.
When that didn't stick, progressives began throwing everything
at the wall. The Tea Partiers were racists, Fox News drones,
teabaggers, morons -- anything to drown out the truth that these
were the same middle-class Americans that the left had been
trying to marshal against the insurance companies.
It didn't work. The Democrats did manage to heave health care
reform across the finish line, but they lost The People in the
process. Worse, they cast themselves as elites indifferent to
their constituents....
The left faces the same problem today. And once again, instead
of trying to understand the Tea Parties and their
libertarianism, progressives are exasperatedly lecturing The
People on why it would behoove them to get in line....
The Tea Partiers lost the health care battle, but they won the
war against the progressive agenda. The left's Theory of
Everything has been refuted. It turns out The People are angry,
but at all the wrong targets.
The American Spectator
Wednesday, April 30, 2010
Why They Hate
By Matt Purple
If you tell a lie big enough and keep
repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The
lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can
shield the people from the political, economic and/or
military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally
important for the State to use all of its powers to repress
dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and
thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the
State.
The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no
success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind
constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and
repeat them over and over.
Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the
government can play.
Paul Joseph Goebbels
Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to
1945
"Those who fail to learn from history are
doomed to repeat it."
George Santyanna
|
|
Chip Ford's CLT
Commentary
You just know we
patriots have the leftist radicals and mainstream media propaganda
machine on the run when they start firing the "racist" slur. The assault
has been relentless but it's just not working for the statists these
days. Like The Boy Who Cried Wolf, the scurrilous charge dredged up
whenever opposition is presented is losing its power, if that power
hasn't already been surrendered.
If you opposed ObamaCare,
you must be a racist. Oppose illegal immigration? Racist for sure. If
you support the constitution, believe in limited government, oppose
higher taxation -- absolutely you are a racist.
|
|
 |
|
|
CLICK
PHOTO FOR LARGER IMAGE
According to left-wing extremists and other Democrats,
the patriot pictured above at the Apr. 14th Boston Tea Party
must be one of those typical "racist" radicals.
Photo by Chip Ford |
As charged as that noxious
term once was, overuse is beginning to dilute and deflate its
effectiveness. Barbara recently noted in a blog response: "People
who are obsessed with race are, by definition, racist. And whose who use
it as a weapon are race-mongers.... Where calling us racist if we
disagree with a black president's policies was intended to shut us up,
it has instead alerted the average person to how silly our opponents
are."
Tea Party patriots are
unconscionably and in desperation branded as "racists" by the allegedly
tolerant who strive to "transform" our nation, to "soften the political
discourse," and even more mysteriously they often brand us and our
positions as like those of the Nazis. This is another term that should
never be loosely inveighed. It too has a profoundly profane historical
definition.
Yet by these invectives
they have adopted the propaganda directly from the Third Reich's own
chief propagandist, its minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels: If you
tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come
to believe it."
So it must be rightly
asked: Which side of this debate has become the greater offender
of freedom and self-government? Is it those of us who have adopted the
tactics of the founding fathers of our great nation through organized
dissent -- or is it those who've adopted the Big Lie tactics of one of
history's most horrifying regimes?
 |
 |
|
Chip Ford |
|
|
|
|
The Eagle-Tribune
Sunday, April 25, 2010
It's much easier just to blame everything on racism
By Taylor Armerding
According to the allegedly smart people who flutter adoringly around
the Obama administration and we know that anybody who is really
smart will be an Obama supporter the tea party protests against
his policies, besides being populated by hairy-palmed,
knuckle-dragging morons (How could anyone with a brain think
anything positive about Sarah Palin?), are not really about his
policies.
They're just a cover for the real "elephant in the room." These
people are racists.
They've got to be kidding. But they say it with straight faces, even
though it has all the credibility of Jim Jones Kool-Aid. The race
card is the laziest ploy out there to marginalize a protest. That
kind of gratuitous smear is an outright admission that they can't
argue on the merits. When you can't do that, you raise your voice
and start calling people names.
Remember, these are the same people who supposedly want political
debate to be about "the issues." They supposedly gnash their teeth
over the "politics of personal destruction." And they are the people
who, until Jan. 20, 2009, regularly recited the mantra, "Dissent is
the highest form of patriotism."
Not so much now. Now, when people complain about genuine issues like
the growth of an entitlement state, the loss of personal freedom,
growth of government and crushing national debt, national columnists
like Joe Klein describe it as one small step from sedition. This guy
ought to be on the administration's payroll. Talk about a government
lapdog.
But, OK. Have it their way. Let's enter their
Through-the-Looking-Glass world and stipulate that opposition to the
Dear Leader is just poorly disguised racism. But remember, this has
to cut all ways.
So, take a trip with us earlier this week to Los Angeles, where the
president was trying to speak at a fundraiser Monday night for
California Sen. Barbara Boxer. She needs to raise big bucks because
she's actually in some danger of losing it must be because of
misogyny, not her stand on the issues.
Anyway, President Obama was shouted down by activists from a group
called GetEQUAL, supposedly because they were frustrated with his
failure to repeal the ban on openly gay people serving in the
military.
Don't be fooled. This wasn't really about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
That was just a cover for their real agenda. This was about race. It
is because Obama is black. This was a racist, seditious lynch mob,
and somebody needs to tell Joe Klein about it right away.
Same for Robert Reich. He's portrayed as a loyal Democrat. He's the
former labor secretary under President Clinton.
But he's been openly critical of Obama. He's a smart guy, so he made
it sound like it was just about policy. He attacked the president
for not fighting harder for the public option in the health care
reform bill. Later he criticized him for focusing too much on health
care, when his top priority should have been restoring the nation's
economic health and getting people back to work.
That's what he said. But it was all a ruse. I'm sure he never would
have said that if Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden had done the exact
same thing. The guy's clearly a racist, and if any harm comes to
Obama, he will bear some of the blame for inciting ill will against
the president.
And then there are the wingnut groups like MoveOn.org and the Daily
Kos, who are proclaiming their unhappiness about the fact that it's
coming on 16 months since Obama took office and the U.S. still isn't
out of Iraq, like he promised. In fact, Vice President Biden has
been out there crowing about success in Iraq that came from
following the President Bush playbook.
They're also claiming to be unhappy that Guantanamo is still up and
running, when Obama promised it would be closed this past January.
Don't believe it. Don't you see that this is a stealth effort to
weaken Obama because he's black? They're racists. They'd never
criticize a white president like this.
Same for militant greens, who flew into a manufactured rage when the
president announced at the end of last month that he would open up
areas off the East Coast, the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska to oil and
natural gas exploration. One of them called it, "a wholesale assault
on the oceans."
Don't get fooled. "Assault" is just a racist code word designed to
make us fear violence from a black man a black man who has the
power to harm us because he's the president. It's telling us that
Obama will do violence to us. Joe Klein's gotta hear about this,
too, so he can warn us about seditious environmentalists.
Of course all of this is utterly absurd. But it makes everything so
much simpler, doesn't it?
Taylor Armerding is associate editorial page editor of The
Eagle-Tribune.
The Washington Post
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Tea party groups battling perceptions of racism
By Amy Gardner and Krissah Thompson
As several states with active "tea party" groups prepare to hold
important primary elections this month, the movement is struggling
to overcome accusations of racism that are tinting perceptions of
this loose network of conservatives.
"We don't want the worst elements to take this over," said Brendan
Steinhauser, campaign director for FreedomWorks, a national group
that helps coordinate tea party activists. "If they do, the tea
party loses independents, it loses moderates, it loses people who
don't tolerate this. Being a racist is one of the worst things you
can be in this society. No one wants to be labeled this."
The challenge is made tougher by one of the defining elements of the
tea party movement: No one person controls it. There is no national
communications strategy. And incidents of racist slogans and
derisive depictions of President Obama continue to crop up,
providing fuel for critics who say the president's skin color is a
powerful reason behind the movement's existence.
In a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, most Americans see the
movement as motivated by distrust of government, opposition to the
policies of Obama and the Democratic Party, and broad concern about
the economy. But nearly three in 10 see racial prejudice as
underlying the tea party.
Supporters and opponents alike say the movement draws its strength
from opposition to Obama's policies, but they split deeply on the
race question, according to the poll: About 61 percent of tea party
opponents say racism has a lot to do with the movement, a view held
by just 7 percent of tea party supporters.
A matter of perception
That indicates that the issue of race and the tea party is largely
about differing perceptions, reflected in how people view the
well-known illustration of Obama made up like the Joker from the
Batman movie "The Dark Knight." Some see the image, with its
exaggerated lips, as an offensive reference to minstrelsy. Obama's
critics, however, say President George W. Bush was also portrayed as
the Joker, as well as Dracula.
Economic anxiety and a general distrust of government are the
motivations most often mentioned by tea party supporters. Opponents,
who are largely Democratic and a more diverse group, see resistance
to the policies of Obama and the Democrats as the movement's leading
motivation, followed by racial bias.
"I think there is an element of fear that 'our white country' is now
being run by a black man. There is a sense that 1950s America is
gone," said Herb Neumann, a white Democrat from Tulsa. "There's a
sense of loss. I grew up in the 1950s, and I don't think that moving
on is a bad thing."
The question of racism and the tea party flared on the eve of
Congress's divisive vote on the health-care overhaul in March, when
black congressmen accused protesters of using racial epithets and
spitting on them. Tea party supporters have denied the allegations.
Other incidents have received less attention: A sign in last month's
tax day protest in Washington said "Go back to Kenya!" Another in
Raleigh, N.C., last June depicted the president with a bone through
his nose. T-shirts for sale at a July 4 tea party rally in Charlotte
showed Obama standing in front of the White House, labeled "da
Crib."
'They were thrown out'
Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, said that at the
heart of the effort to counter racism accusations is dissociating
from protesters who cross the line. Around the time of the
health-care vote, FreedomWorks and Tea Party Nation worked to form a
federation of tea party groups to coordinate strategy and do a
better job sticking to a similar message, organizers said.
At a protest in Nashville, Phillips said, there were "a couple of
signs -- which I'm not convinced weren't plants from the other side
-- that were really tasteless and inappropriate." The people who
carried them "were told to put their signs down and leave. . . .
They were literally thrown out of the event," he said.
Tea party activists also point to the minority participants in their
groups. "There are a lot of people bringing up the race card," said
Jim Coop, a member of the Tipton County Tea Party in Tennessee. "The
tea parties I've been to, there've been black people there, Mexicans
and everybody else you can think of."
Nigel Coleman, who is black, leads the Danville TEA Party Patriots
in southern Virginia. He said the fact that the movement is
predominantly white doesn't mean it is inherently racist.
"I went to a wine festival yesterday," he said. "Weren't too many
black people there, either. Nobody called them racists."
Nonetheless, tea party activists clearly feel an urgency to end the
discussion.
"As long as people who oppose us can frame the debate that way, then
they can get people to stop listening to us," Coleman said. "The
charge of racism is one that can be thrown out there, and it really
doesn't have to be proven. But it has such a negative connotations
that it can pretty much halt the debate."
Polling director Jon Cohen and polling analyst Jennifer Agiesta
contributed to this report.
The American Spectator
Wednesday, April 30, 2010
Why They Hate
By Matt Purple
Former ACORN president Bertha Lewis must have been in a foul mood
last month. Once the queen bee of the community organizing left,
Lewis had watched ACORN come crashing down around her, destroyed by
two young college students with a video camera. Her eyes smoldering,
Lewis took to the podium at a Democratic Socialists of America
gathering and lit into the Tea Parties of late.
"This is not rhetoric or hyperbole -- this is real," she thundered.
"This rise of this Tea Party so-called movement -- bowel movement in
my estimation -- and this blatant uncovering and ripping off the
mask of racism."
What is it about the Tea Parties that sends the left into paroxysms
of rage? Lewis is hardly alone with such screeching verb-less
statements. The entire left, from the scribes at the New Republic to
the talking heads on MSNBC, have been driven mad by a handful of
relatively peaceful demonstrators. Bill Clinton warned that the
waving of Don't Tread on Me flags could lead like night into day to
another Oklahoma City bombing, Harry Reid defied my spellchecker by
declaring Tea Partiers to be "evilmongers," Keith Olbermann
dedicated two interminable Special Comments to his indignant rage at
the protesters, and Frank Rich dutifully spent week after week
drawing parallels between the Tea Parties and racists of days gone
by.
In fairness, there's been plenty of derision from conservatives
directed at, say, anti-war demonstrators during the Bush years. But
never before has an entire ideological establishment whipped itself
into such a frenzy over a group of protesters. What's going on here?
The problem with the Tea Partiers is that they defy the narrative
progressives have written for How the World Works. As the left sees
it, America is divided between The People and The Corporations --
interchangeable with The Rich, The Powerful, Big Business, and Wall
Street. The Corporations exist for the sole reason of persecuting
The People and ensuring that The People don't receive their fair
share. The only way to prevent The Corporations from laying waste to
the entire country is for the government to act as a central
repository for The People's faith and money, and use it to fight
back against the corporate powers of darkness.
Therefore, Republicans oppose big government because they are in the
service of The Corporations. Democrats support big government
because they fight on behalf of The People. Cut, copied, and pasted
into Ed Schultz's Teleprompter every night.
This remarkably simplistic narrative has been canonized wholesale by
the entire progressive left. We've heard it referenced constantly
during, for example, the speculation over Obama's coming Supreme
Court pick, when progressives began demanding a nominee who would
stand up for the powerless rather than the powerful (completely
ignoring the Founders' intention to make the Supreme Court
aristocratic). During the recession, progressives were outraged that
Wall Street was somehow performing better than some place called
Main Street. Al Gore's 2000 campaign slogan was "The People, Not the
Powerful." Inconvenient facts -- Wall Street donates far more to
Democrats than Republicans, for example -- are smothered by this
all-consuming narrative.
The Tea Parties turned this entire worldview on its head. Democrats
took up the cause of health care reform to strike a blow against
ghastly health insurance companies on behalf of The People. It was
to be another cut-and-dried case of average Americans demanding
their due from the rich and powerful.
Instead, the only average Americans who showed up were angrily
confronting their congressmen at town hall meetings and waving
Gadsden flags in the streets of Washington. Polls showed the
Democrats' approval numbers in freefall and independents becoming
sympathetic with the Tea Parties. Suddenly, it seemed to the casual
observer that The People were the Tea Party protesters and The
Powerful were the PhRMA-allied Democratic managers in Washington
working against public opinion. The entire progressive narrative
collapsed.
A progressive dream -- thousands of Americans protesting in the
streets -- had been turned against them. The left responded first by
trying to prove that Tea Partiers weren't The People; they were
astroturfers, paid agents of the insurance companies. When that
didn't stick, progressives began throwing everything at the wall.
The Tea Partiers were racists, Fox News drones, teabaggers, morons
-- anything to drown out the truth that these were the same
middle-class Americans that the left had been trying to marshal
against the insurance companies.
It didn't work. The Democrats did manage to heave health care reform
across the finish line, but they lost The People in the process.
Worse, they cast themselves as elites indifferent to their
constituents.
This is the central paradox of the left. Progressives are driven by
class warfare against elites, but they themselves often are the
elites. It's no coincidence that coastal urban areas vote Democrat
en masse. The People of flyover country stubbornly cling to
conservative values despite the fact that progressives desperately
want to fight for them. This quandary was explored in detail in
Thomas Frank's stridently condescending book What's the Matter with
Kansas? in which the progressive Frank wonders why those damn
Midwestern rubes keep voting against their own economic interests.
It's a problem that's confounded progressives since their halcyon
days. In the early 1900s, urban reformers decided it was time for
the federal government to start helping farmers more. But the
farmers themselves resisted, clinging to their values of frontier
individualism. One letter to a farm journal in 1904 commented, "The
tendency and drift of public sentiment and all legislation is toward
centralization and consolidation when it ought to be in the other
direction, to distribute power and divide honors, and make the
individual more responsible, instead of the township, the county, or
the mass of the people."
The farmers weren't rising up against powerful interests; they
weren't fitting into the progressive narrative. All this led
progressive Kenyon Butterfield to scold, "Present-day living is so
distinctively social, progress is so dependent upon social agencies,
social development is so rapid, that if the farmer is to keep his
status he must be fully in step with the rest of the army. He must
secure the social view-point."
The left faces the same problem today. And once again, instead of
trying to understand the Tea Parties and their libertarianism,
progressives are exasperatedly lecturing The People on why it would
behoove them to get in line.
Tellingly, progressives insisted that Obama's next initiative be
sweeping Wall Street reform. They want the world to make sense
again, and it only will if they're rallying public anger against The
Corporations. But it may already be too late. The Tea Partiers lost
the health care battle, but they won the war against the progressive
agenda. The left's Theory of Everything has been refuted. It turns
out The People are angry, but at all the wrong targets.
Matt Purple is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.
|
| |
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this
material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes
only. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
Citizens for Limited Taxation ▪
PO Box 1147 ▪ Marblehead, MA 01945
▪ 508-915-3665
|
