Carl Paladino, a Tea Party candidate for governor in New York State has been sending out stuff like this emails (via WNYMedia — scroll down the link with caution as the larger article contains many NSFW images):
I can’t ascertain how official Tea Party support for Paladino is, but he is mentioned (favorably) in 20 local Tea Party emails I have received over the past few months (I added myself to their mailing list).
blondie
Ugh! I went to the link, and now I want to steam-clean my computer. What a vile man he appears to be. And the tea partiers wonder why they’re not liked or taken seriously…
Mike Kay
Wow, Michelle has nice breasts and a killer midriff.
Chyron HR
Liberal plant. Government agitator. It never happened. There is no official Tea Party and he’s not on their membership list. Seven liberal arts and sciences.
Bulworth
Sigh. I’m sure that this teabagger candidate is a regrettable outlier amidst the otherwise upstanding, non-racially motivated, patriotic teabagging Muricans.
zoe kentucky in pittsburgh
Nope, no racism here, nothing at all, move along.
Face
M.O. is teh hawt. Nice jubblies.
Cerberus
It’s very hard to say conclusively whether or not teabagging is related to race and racism. I think we’re just going to need stronger evidence than this.
/snark
Comrade Jake
It’s almost like these people take pride in being ignorant.
BruceFromOhio
I’m waiting for the day the whole deranged bunch finally breaks out the white hoods and torches, and declares war on The North.
The downside is we’ll have to burn Atlanta to the ground again. I kind of like that town.
Dog is My Copilot
Very classy…
Norbrook
To add to the “family values” wing, he’s got a 10 year old daughter out of wedlock – he cheated on his wife with a staffer, and finally got around to letting the wife know last year.
Just one peach of a guy.
Bulworth
I’m sure there was some Dem candidate or some random GOS commenter, which is the same thing, who said something mean about W one time so it all evens out.
geg6
I realize that not all the racist Teabaggers are southern, but I do know that all the racist Teabaggers here in Western PA have no problem flying the Stars and Bars. And so, for them, I will just post the song Union soldiers used to sing to taunt the traitors on the other side. Sung to the tune of “Dixie:”
Oh, we are going down to the land of traitors,
rattlesnakes and alligators.
Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.
Where cotton’s king and men are chattel,
Yankee boys will win the battle.
Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.
Oh we are going down to Dixie, away, away.
And we’ll teach those boys to understand,
they better mind, their Uncle Sam,
Away, away, away down south in Dixie!
I think Obama should just come into the press room and sing this one day. I’d pay to see that.
Mumphrey
Just once I’d like to see one of these losers admit that they’re racists. It would be refreshing in a way, rather than to hear all that crap about how “I don’t hate black people, I’ve done soooo much work to help blacks in my career and anyway, it’s only a joke and why does everybody have to be so uptight, can’t you take a joke?”
It gets so old. Why can’t they just say, “All right, you got me, I hate black people. Black people suck and I want to deport them to Africa and Obama offends me because he’s black and this is a white country,” or something like that. I mean, it isn’t like they’re fooling anybody. Well, I guess it is, now that I think about it. It gives Mitch McConnell an excuse to still have any dealings with people like that. I guess as long as they don’t come out and say anything like, “I hate blacks,” then McConnell and Boehner can get away with having them on their side.
The whole thing is so depressing, though. I’ve brought it up before, but I think that a lot of the resentment and anger we’ve seen the last year has to do with the fact that these racists know that it isn’t acceptable to be racist any more, so they feel like they do have to be weaselly about it, hence the “I’ve done so much for inner city youth” bullshit we always hear after one of these clowns gets caught out for the racist he is. I mean, even Rush Limbaugh feels like he can’t come right out and declare his racism to the world; he has to make believe it’s all just “humor”.
So I think one of the things driving all this rage is that the rest of us don’t admire them for speaking truth to power when they spew some racist shit. They think they’re people we should look up to, but we don’t, and we outnumber them so lopsidedly that they feel like they can’t get away with it. So they get angrier. This country is a mess right now.
Keith G
@BruceFromOhio:
I donno. Been there several times. Hot, crowded, and too god damn many things named Peach Tree….
Tokyokie
@BruceFromOhio:
You could probably make do by burning down Atlanta’s northern suburbs.
Bauhausler
Wow. If this guy’s political career still exists tomorrow I won’t know what to think about our system…
Michael D.
@Keith G: I like Atlanta. Have lived in the center of it for 11 years. It’s hot and muggy, but people get a long well here.
And there ARE too many things named Peachtree.
Funny though, Atlanta is known as “The City Too Busy To Hate.” I heard that shortly after I moved here and thought it was nice. Then I thought, “What would happen if they weren’t so busy?” And then it didn’t seem like such a compliment.
catclub
@Mumphrey: #14
For instance: “I got nothin against that Boehner guy, and he’s pretty dark. So there.”
mandarama
Holy shit. I mean, being from MS means you’ve seen some racist shit, but this is hard core. I thought a state like NY was supposed to be free (er?) of this stuff?
Don’t get me wrong; if one of these emails made its way to any of the people I went to h.s. with, it would probably cause great jollity. Sigh.
Grew up hearing “Dixie,” but I like geg6’s cited version above. Ya know, reconciling your upbringing and what you love about home with all of its crappy baggage is tough going, if you aren’t gifted like William Faulkner.
kay
It’s not that he’s black. It’s that he bailed out the banks!
Isn’t that the line they’re spouting and spoon-feeding the media, who apparently are not on any tea bag lists and thus are forced to print tea bagger press releases?
How is DougJ able to get on a tea bagger list but CNN cannot?
They’re upset about the health care bill! Yeah, right.
kommrade reproductive vigor
dougj ur showing ur the real racist by suggesting that paladino iz a racist so there!
/dildo tbaggins
Kryptik
@Bauhausler:
Are you kidding?
He’s probably going to get a plum job at CNN or Fox once this is all over. That or become the next head of the RNC.
Seriously, the fact that this movement has any goddamn purchase in this country shows just how routinely fucked this system is, and how utterly broken our political discourse is.
Kryptik
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
But don’t you know, racism is over! The only racists left are the ones who call ‘racism’, and thus are being reverse racist and WHY DO YOU HATE WHITE PEEPLEZ?!
Culture of Truth
It’s clear – Paladino is a Liberal Plant™
Chyron HR
@Culture of Truth:
What, like hemp?
MikeBoyScout
Nobody could have predicted.
Apply the following:
“To me it’s a sort of feeling that it’s just a nit. That it is not significant. It’s trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn’t matter for diddly.”
In other completely unrelated news
KKK has ‘reversed declining membership’ in recent years.
Uloborus
I still don’t think racism DRIVES the teabagger movement, but it’s damn all creepy how they’ve kind of mainstreamed the racist element in it. I guess I should have expected it. The whole thing is based on fanatical in-group devotion. I mean, these people are basically defined by their absolute disregard for reality, and their devotion to finding any excuse to claim their side is right and the other side is wrong. So I guess it’s simply incomprehensible to the movement as a whole that many of their members are being blatantly racist. You can’t prove it to them – facts have a well known liberal bias.
Violet
@Mumphrey:
Yeah, no kidding. They’re racists. Why can’t they admit it?
ericblair
@Michael D.:
Ya mean like the corner of Peachtree and Peachtree? Which is nowhere near Peachtree City, by the way.
My favorite story is that the whole thing was a fuckup. If you’ve ever driven around rural Georgia, you’ll notice that there aren’t really any native peach trees, but in the east there are a hell of a lot of pine trees, which also used to be known as pitch trees. Most likely, that little piece of info got mixed up with the fruit in the telling and now you’re stuck with everything called peachtree.
Also, good luck burning Atlanta when half the town’s covered in kudzu.
Remember November
Just to give you some background on this Political Ponzi Schemer- he throws a ton of $$$ to whoever gives him enough love. If anyones the whore it’s Paladino. He gave a butt ton of money to NY Dems and then when they had the Senate meltdown threw a hissyfit, said I’m takin mah monies to teh Republicans. He’s a weasel snake oil salesman with no principles other than the cocaine-tainted currency that flows through America. In other words, prefect for the GOP. If he gets elected the over/under on scandal is 4-6 months.
Culture of Truth
What, like hemp?
Heh. That’s a good Bobblespeak line.
Da Bomb
Well that just settles it. I am going to celebrate Confederate History Month by wrapping myself in confederate sheets, wearing cotton underwear(because my peeps picked it), wear shackles of bling and change my name to more proficient slave name like Toby.
This teatard convinced me that celebrating the Confederacy isn’t so bad after all.
And Michelle Obama is the hotness in this photo. And Barack Obama needs his pimp shoes with fish tanks at the bottom to complete his pimp wardrobe.
Citizen_X
What. A fucking. Surprise.
Also, I note that one of the comments there reports a bigass Traitor Flag flying from the back of a pickup. I mentioned seeing the same thing, elsewhere, last night. Is this some new trend for racist morons?
slag
Remember back in the day when GW took great pains to characterize himself as a stereotypical white guy? With his dude ranch and his choking on pretzels and whatnot? And we were supposed to sit back and watch this fratty college cheerleader whose daddy was a one-time POTUS get on his John Deere tractor for some good ol’ fashioned brush clearing and not point and laugh?
And now, we have someone in office who is pretty much the mirror opposite of the bizarre stereotypical black guy characterization these people try to stick on him, and we’re supposed to believe their characterizations have nothing to do with racism?
WTF?
Ken
Yeah, Carl, despite being a millionaire developer/attorney sees himself as the put-upon everyman and it’s his duty to “save” New York State.
In reality, he’s a pompous gadfly who really, really likes to see himself in the news. Actually, he’s more of an ass.
El Cid
The real racists are these pictures, videos, and words attaching themselves unfairly and unbidden to this innocent TeaTard’s email.
Kirk Spencer
I know I keep repeating myself, but white supremacists are only part of the Tea Party map.
The party is the new public consolidated face of the Patriot Movement.
The movement is as much a common understanding of fellow travelers as anything else, with the common understanding being:
“There is a conspiracy, of which the US government is a large and willing member, to deprive us of our freedom and property.”
Yes, some (many) are racists. That’s because they believe the ‘reason’ is to give the results of that deprivation to non-whites. But some think the intent is to do this on behalf of a foreign power, and some think it’s to create a totalitarian dictatorship — or perhaps oligarchy — of existing citizens. Some believe the organizers and controllers of the conspiracy want a plutocracy, others believe it to be a corporatrocacy. A few believe they are withstanding a theocracy, though it’s worth noting these few almost always believe the “theo” is one opposed to protestant (usually evangelical) Christianity.
“It’s a secret conspiracy, and we must resist and defeat it,” they say.
Go read what was said — what images were produced — in the 1990s. Clinton was the “first black president,” remember? This isn’t new.
kommrade reproductive vigor
It’s navigating and paying for the gas.
Montysano
@mandarama:
I grew up in Indiana, went to Purdue, then had a job where I traveled nearly every state, then settled in north Alabama. My home area in Indiana was, and still is, incredibly racist. The racial tension at Purdue was palpable. Part of the problem is that there is no racial diversity; I grew up in the town of Whiteland; we meant it then, and they still mean it today. Contrast that with, for example, the Black Belt region of Alabama, where blacks and whites have lived together for decades. The region has its problems, yes, but the communities seem truly integrated.
Michelle Obama ….. hawt. Also.
handy
@Kirk Spencer:
Funny how we didn’t hear much out of these Patriots when Bush and Cheney were burning up the Constitution for 8 years– oh wait, my bad. 9/11 changed everything. Never mind.
mslarry
They are who we think they are
slippy
@Mumphrey:
It is just embarrassing enough that they don’t want to be caught doing it. But it’s obvious that they are quite bewildered that society at large thinks there’s anything wrong with it, and severely resentful that being caught at it like George Allen was, can completely shit your career as a politician up. Allen is now, by the way, a “Reagan Ranch Presidential Scholar,” which is the most ass-clownish, meaningless foolishness I can imagine. “Reagan” “Ranch” and “Scholar” do not go together at all. I can’t imagine a lazy fuck like Reagan working on a ranch, and I can’t imagine a stupid, incurious twit like Reagan being a “scholar” of anything.
@Uloborus:
I advise you to examine their fundamental principles more closely. Racism is ALL the Teatards are about. They started as Birfers whose raison d’ etre was that the Negro Blackity Black Black President wasn’t really an American. Since losing that battle, quite publicly and humiliatingly, they have gone on to serious everlasting butthurt that “their” country, that is the country for whites only, has been “taken” from them by the Negro Usurper.
There is really nothing else to the Teatard movement than racism. If they all simultaneously stopped being the most vile, putrid racists in the country their movement would have nothing to be childishly butthurt about and they’d vanish into thin air.
I don’t give them a single pass on this issue. They are DISGUSTING.
catclub
@Montysano: #40
I don’t live there, but do know that Indiana was where John Birch Society was from, and was also extremely big in KKK
(in the 1920’s onward?).
ET
I was reading something in the last day or so that basically said that a not insignificant part of the tea party “movement” is definitely about race (i.e. the brown scary man in the White House). It think it was related to that University of Washington Survey.
georgia pig
@kommrade reproductive vigor:
Fixed.
El Cid
The militia and shortwave right of the 1990s were not made up primarily of white supremacists, and maintained distance from open white supremist organizations.
On the other hand, in rhetoric and ideology, much of their rhetoric was based on white supremist ideology, particularly fears based upon the notion that brown people were conspiring to steal our nation and its heritage and being enabled by treasonous liberals and Democrats.
Da Bomb
@Montysano:
It’s not surprising. Most major cities in the South are truly integrated. But that still doesn’t keep the crazy and racist loons from popping out.
Montysano
@catclub:
The only place where I’ve seen a robed Klan member was in my hometown in Indiana.
I certainly don’t mean to romanticize the Black Belt region of Alabama (which is hard, because I love the area). But I don’t think it’s what most people think it is. It is, remember, the birthplace of one of the great social justice movements in history, a fact which is still very resonant to the people there. The wife and kids and I attended the Bridge Crossing Jubilee in 2007 (one of Obama’s first big campaign events), and it was among our most memorable weekends. Highly recommended.
GregB
In this lunatics pea-brain, he’s not a racist.
It’s why arguing with some of these people is the equivalent of trying to talk to a kitchen table.
HRA
Paladino is a jerk (putting it very mildly) He, as other of his ilk, get too much media coverage.
Back to work for now.
Kirk Spencer
@El Cid: I’d argue a bit differently. The Aryan Nation (to name one) was heavily involved with the Michigan Militia (to name another).
Some militias maintained clear separation, but as a whole… White Supremacists were a part of the militia (or more completely the Patriot) whole.
geg6
@slippy:
I agree. All these disclaimers about the militia movement not being racist are crap. Who is the imaginary enemy they are mobilizing against? Exactly who? I can tell you one thing for sure…it isn’t white men they are afraid of.
Western PA is full of these people. They always tell me about how they aren’t racists, how some of their best friends are black or hispanic or an Egyptian or Lebanese person they met one time, how they are just concerned about their families and country. But when pressed on who, exactly, is oppressing them or threatening them or whatever it is they are afraid of, it is easily seen to be exactly what it is: fear of brown people and women. Nothing more and nothing less. And no amount of protesting can convince me any different. I live amongst them. I know them. They are all racists. EVERY.SINGLE.ONE.
Citizen_X
Well of course people get along; it’s the Black Belt region. They’ll kick your ass if you’re not nice!
Anya
Since this is confederate month, do people say to each other “happy slavery month” or “happy loser month”?
Kirk Spencer
@geg6: Who are the enemy (besides non-whites)?
Corporatists.
Communists.
Atheists.
Islam.
Plutocrats.
The US Government (IRS, BATF, etc.)
It ain’t just race.
Ash Can
@Montysano: I’ll never gripe about the South for being racist per se. As you indicate, racism is everywhere, and the South by no means has a monopoly on it. What gets me is when (not all, of course, but too damned many) Southerners go all Confederate blowhard and congratulate themselves for it — for the extent to which the South institutionalized racism, and for being entirely willing to blow up the whole country to keep it. I’m sorry if, as someone in another thread mentioned Florence King as saying, Southerners deal with the cognative inconsistency by going nuts. The rest of us end up having to pay their damned psychotherapy bill, and I for one am sick and tired of it.
Alice Blue
Before marrying the mister and moving to the hinterlands of Meriwether County, I lived in midtown Atlanta. I have such great memories of my neighborhood–it was almost like a small town in itself, with all kinds of people living together and getting along.
The word “Peachtree” predates Atlanta. Before the city existed, there was a Native American village there called Standing Peachtree.
ericblair
@Kirk Spencer:
Maybe not, but it’s the mother’s milk of the whole movement. I remember that recent study of Republicans: unlike a few decades ago, if you ask people outright whether they’re racist bigots, today they’ll probably say no.
However, one of the common themes that emerged was people saying “whenever I see Obama on TV, he just scares me.” Why? He’s a tall, sort of geekily professorial-looking, calm, well-dressed guy, right? I mean, whenever I saw Bush on TV, he didn’t scare me, he just made me want to throw things. Unless, there’s some other reason I can’t quite put my finger on.
AxelFoley
@Comrade Jake:
/thread.
Keith G
@geg6:
I think I typed this before: I have had living and working experience in both rural and urban areas in both the North and South. There are no hard and fast rules.
In my experience, there are, however, measurable common sense probabilities. Rural folk can be a bit more uptight than urban. Lower educated a bit less flexible than higher. First and second generation Americans are less tolerant than second and third generations. And on it goes. Your mileage will vary.
Add to the above, the level of buy-in to whatever cultural bedtime stories are being told.
Hence, there have been ignorant fuck northern blue collar workers in the North who were violently racist. And the Klan has had a presence in the Protestant rural Mid West.
South of the Mason Dixon line just means that there were a particular set of bedtime tales available for telling.
The teabaggers in both the North and South I have met are predominantly an ignorant lot (either accidentally or purposefully), so it does not surprise me that racism is walks among them so easily.
Uloborus
@slippy:
I don’t read that the same way at all. The Birther claims certainly make the thread of racism in the movement plain, but the same people would be yelling that Obama was illegitimate if he were white. They did it for Clinton, and then Bush fanned that flame with a vengeance with his 9/11 fearmongering. He legitimized expanding this ‘you’re with us or against us’ attitude to include political opponents. They’d have found a *different* claim to use against Obama if he were white, and lord knows the claim they have stinks of racism. But the racism isn’t necessary for the movement.
Same with ‘Their country’. It’s not blacks who took their country. It’s absolutely everyone else. In particular, it’s Democrats. Really, you don’t need a shred of racism to explain that (although no doubt Obama’s blackness terrifies a lot of them). These are the idiots who worship Rush and Beck. To them, Democrats leading the government means some kind of coup must have happened, because ‘real Americans’ obviously make up the large majority and they sure don’t vote for abortion-loving tax-increasing granny-killing big government liberals.
Quite a lot of these people are racists. The comment that if racism isn’t driving, it’s buying the gas might make a good point – it’s fanning the flames. But this is still just a bunch of really, really sore losers who believe in Truthiness rather than facts.
fucen tarmal
ok, i admit i am coming late to this party, but i am confused.
why is the first couple photoshopped to appear like the flower of young conservatism and the great white hope of a new generation of right wing citizen journalists?
i mean why are they trying to link potus and james o’keiffe?
El Cid
@Uloborus: A constant thread of resentment against Democrats (Clinton included) is that, white or not, they are traitors to their kind, including taking all the working white folks’ money and giving them to lazy parasitic violent blacks and Latinos who seek to destroy wholesome American white culture, and one of the most common conspiracy theories was that there was an imminent UN invasion being planned by Hillary Clinton, along with martial law, and this would finally be the subjugation of not only American but American white culture to foreign, and not only un-American, but to the world’s predominately non-white population.
Bnut
When I was in college at the University of Alabama, the Kappa Alpha chapter there held a party every year called “Old South”. It was a week long booze and orgy festival capped off with a parade of frat boys dressed in Confederate greys and girls in antebellum dresses. The fact that this still goes on every year is a sin. A fucking sin.
Basilisc
Their server has crashed – but I bet the page has been copied or mirrored somewhere by now – anyone have another link?
fucen tarmal
@Bnut:
because they are allowed to not understand why any one might take offense. or pretend to. all that southern civility has a down side. bless their hearts.
licensed to kill time
I’m not going to visit that link. I can see enough from the dancing natives and Obama as pimp images to get the gist.
I’m probably echoing 20 other commenters by saying that for these folks, ‘racist’ means pointing out racism, not actually being racist or concocting racist images to spew all over the intertubes.
Nice pretzel logic they’ve got goin’ on.
Cain
@Montysano:
Fellow Purdue grad here. I grew up in West Lafayette. I’m not a black guy, but I didn’t have any issues with racism when I was a kid growing up and attending college. In West Lafayette, the blacks in my school were on a pedestal they were enormously popular. But yeah, some parts of Indiana, you don’t go if you’re black.
As for racial tensions, it was hard to notice, cuz the black guys would cordone themselves off. You had to prove something first before they allowed you in their life. The thing I really couldn’t understand was when the brothers would brand themselves with their fraternity letters. Fucked up.
When I was in college in ’87, the number of black folks in engineering you could could on just your hands. It got a lot better 5 years later.
cain
Cain
@catclub:
Delphi is the world wide headquarters of the KKK and I lived about 25 minutes or so from there.
cain
Bnut
The KA’s were also the frat, though never officially blamed, that went out one night and threw balls of cotton all over the black frats front yard, then sat out and lawn chairs and drank beer watching the brothers pick the shit up. I would have volunteered to help the Alpha Phi Alphas murder every one of those racist fucks. I’m proud to be a founding father of the Sigma Pi chapter on campus, the first non-religious integrated fraternity at the University of Alabama.
I could go on and on about the one liners and off color comments made by people from the state or even from Tuscaloosa, one of the more liberal bastions of the state. My favorite (or most hated I guess) was made by an older gentleman (and I use the term loosely) who was tailgating for a basketball game on campus. Me and some of my friends left the arena and were walking home when this man offered us a beer and conversation. We happily obliged until he threw us this beauty: “For a bunch of n***** these guys play some good b-ball, wish they would play the white kid some more.” People wonder why I moved to Brooklyn….
Tax Analyst
@Chyron HR:
More like dickweed.
asiangrrlMN
@El Cid: Thank you! This is it for sure. To say that the movement isn’t fueled on racism is on some levels infuriating and on some levels naive. They didn’t question Clinton’s birth. They didn’t question Carter’s birth. All this extra-crazy shit is because of race. Period. Fear of other, fear that someone is getting more than you, etc., = fear that being white isn’t mighty any longer. Again, are these people pissed off at their wealthier white brethren? No. They are supporting the rich (white people) with shouts for massive tax cuts. The teabaggers most likely fall in the demographics that got a tax cut this year, but you’d never know it to hear them screeching about sockulism and whatnot. I’m not surprised that over fifty percent of the teabaggers are women, but they are white women. Not black women or Asian women or Latinas. If it was about government and all that shit, then they would have protested under W. and his cronies.
Michelle Obama is hot. That is all.
rikyrah
this is who they are.
racist, nogood mofos.
period.
SiubhanDuinne
@geg6:
Anybody here old enough to remember Tom Lehrer’s “I Wanna Go Back to Dixie”?
I wanna go back to Dixie,
Take me back to dear ol’ Dixie,
That’s the only li’l ol’ place for li’l ol’ me.
Ol’ times there are not forgotten,
Whuppin’ slaves and sellin’ cotton,
And waitin’ for the Robert E. Lee (it was never there on time.)
I’ll go back to the Swanee,
Where pellagra makes you scrawny,
And the honeysuckle clutters up the vine.
I really am a-fixin’
To go home and start a-mixin’
Down below that Mason-Dixon line.
Oh, poll tax, how I love ya, how I love ya,
My dear old poll tax.
Won’tcha come with me to Alabammy,
Back to the arms of my dear ol’ mammy,
Her cookin’s lousy and her hands are clammy,
But what the hell, it’s home.
Yes, for paradise the southland is my nominee.
Jes’ give me a ham hock and a grit of hominy.
I wanna go back to Dixie
I wanna be a Dixie pixie
And eat cornpone ’til it’s comin’ outta my ears.
I wanna talk with southern gentlemen
And put my white sheet on again,
I ain’t seen one good lynchin’ in years.
The land of the boll weevil,
Where the laws are medieval,
Is callin’ me to come and nevermore roam.
I wanna go back to the southland,
That y’all and shet-ma-mouth land,
Be it ever so decadent,
There’s no place like home!
Polar Bear Squares
And you work for these people Michael Steele.
Good luck with that.
M. Bouffant
How much would anyone bet that, all other elements of the story being the same, if Ann Dunham had married a WASP student from Canada or Britain, rather than a black guy from Kenya, none of the birther crap would ever have been an issue?
mandarama
@Montysano: I do take your point…a lot of my fellow academics like to express amazement that I came from MS, and talk about the race issue–and I ask them how many black kids they went to school with, and the answer is often “none, but.” Prep schools, etc. in NE. Whereas my not-so-good rural county public school was a reflection of our actual population.
I know all of the south isn’t the stereotype we see so often. Hell, I was always liberal, and so was a lot of my family. And I know plenty of other MS liberals. But I’m just discouraged, with all this bullshit coming out of my home state. And I only moved as far north as Tennessee, and it’s leading in crazed wingnut news as well. I was almost relieved to see that NY has to take the hit on this one.
El Cid
@asiangrrlMN: Right. In U.S. context, for whites, race and class and status are intertwined, having a degree of separate existence but almost always going back to a notion of race to define the terms.
And, yes – Michelle Obama is hot.
daveinboca
The gutter-slime lefties on this thread overlook the shit that they routinely sent out against GWB. And Paladino sent these e-mails in ’08 before his son died and he admittedly had a change-of-life and attitude experience.
To try to take down all Tea Party activists is employing the usual big smear and the big lie strategy that leftist traitors have employed from Lenin through Stalin to the latest freak-show Olbermann rant.
Tokugawa
I guess many teabaggers are racist, but is this the central driving tenet in their opposition on just one of the many factors in their make-up?
On one level they realise they have been disenfranchised, that democracy isn’t working. We agree don’t we?
Unfortunately they have been hoodwinked by the corporations and the charlatan demigods they employ as messengers into believing that it’s a left wing govt takeover rather than the corporate takeover we know is true.
The left has failed. These people are desperate and want answers and assurance. They are not polictically sophisticated and fall for the becks, hannitys and this guy talked about here as easy, comforting answers.
The democratic party is just they more friendly wing of the ruling corporate party. when the republicans go too far, the democrats come in to assuage the public but maintain the corrupt system.
biddy impeccadillo
@Mumphrey:
Here you go!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/27/proud-racist-remarks-land_n_438583.html