The racist Tea Party meme

Tony Harnden:

When you have absolutely no argument to advance, what’s the easiest thing to do? Denounce your opponents as racist. Colbert King, who won a Pulitzer for “distinguished commentary” in 2003, really plumbs the depths with this column. The Tea Party crowd needn’t be your particular cup of Earl Grey to spot the intellectual bankruptcy of this kind of thing:

Tea Party members, as with their forerunners who showed up at the University of Alabama and Central High School, behave as they do because they have been culturally conditioned to believe they are entitled to do whatever they want, and to whomever they want, because they are the “real Americans,” while all who don’t think or look like them are not…Hence, an explanation for the familiarity of faces: today’s Tea Party adherents are George Wallace legacies. They, like Wallace’s followers, smolder with anger. They fear they are being driven from their rightful place in America. They see the world through the eyes of the anti-civil rights alumni.

I talked to a bunch of Tea Party activists – including a grandmother and a paediatric heart transplant surgeon – protesting outside President Barack Obama’s event in Iowa City on Thursday. Passionate? Yes. Angry? Yes. Irrational? Some of them. Paranoid? Perhaps in some cases. White? Well, yes. I spotted one black guy in about 150 protesters. Racist? No – or certainly not a hint of it from anyone that I talked to.

The trouble with playing the racism card is that is an attempt to stifle dissent – what you are saying is illegitimate because your real rationale is that you hate blacks. Understandably, it drives people crazy. And just who is being racist by looking at a predominantly white crowd and leaping to the conclusion that they are all motivated by racial hatred?

In the past week, I think the Left has seriously overplayed its hand. The accusations of a wave of dangerous violence against pro-health care Democrats have been wildly overblown, as James Taranto skillfully debunks here. Most will see it as a clumsy attempt to marginalize opposition.

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UPDATE: And Frank Rich goes there too. Depressing.

I think it is the product of a weak mind in Rich's case. Liberalism will do that to you. Linberals have this conceit that if you were really smart you would be a liberal. If you disagree with them, you are a racist bigot homophobe. Rich manages to hit all the buttons in that meme. I commented earlier on Kings article, but I thought Harnden's description of the Tea Party members he saw was a pretty accurate one. Rich and King should get out and talk to some. I bet they have never knowingly done so.