The real reason liberals accuse Tea Partiers of racism
Friday, April 30, 2010 9:28 PM
I have said something like this before, but at the risk of being a bore, and because of the times in which we live, I will repeat myself:
The real reason liberals accuse Tea Partiers of racism is that contemporary American-style liberalism is in rigor mortis. Liberals have nothing else to say or do. Accusations of racism are their last resort.
The European debt crisis — first Greece, then Portugal and now Spain (and Belgium, Ireland and Italy, evidently) — has shown the welfare state to be an unsustainable economic system. The US, UK and Japan, according to the same Financial Times report, are also on similar paths of impoverishment through entitlements.
Many of us have known this for a long time, just from simple math. Entitlements are in essence a Ponzi scheme. Now we have to face that and do something serious about it or our economy (the world economy) will fall apart.
Liberals, leftists or progressives — whatever they choose to call themselves — have a great deal of trouble accepting this. To do so they would have to question a host of positions they have not examined for years, if ever, not to mention have to engage in discussions that could threaten their livelihood and jeopardize their personal and family associations.
Thus the traditional wish to kill the messenger who brings the bad news: the Tea Partiers. And the easiest way to kill them — the most obvious and hoariest of methods – is to accuse them of racism. Never mind that there is no evidence — or what little evidence proffered has been shown to be manufactured prevarication — liberals must continue the racism meme at all costs. There is no other. To engage the Tea Party Movement in a battle of ideas would be suicidal for them, because the basic economic tenet of American liberalism — an increase in government spending and consequent increased national debt is good for society — seems nonsensical to the vast majority of our citizens at this point in history. And for good reason.
This situation could be looked at as an awakening or reawakening for our country, but it is far from completely good news. You don't have to be Nostradamus to see that relations, in the immediate future at least, between ideological adversaries are going to be increasingly hostile. In the battle to maintain power — and equally as importantly to maintain self-image — many strains of the left will redouble their efforts to define the Tea Party movement as racist, further splitting our society and racializing it. They will seize on any isolated incident of the slightest prejudice as a pretext. And it is not unlikely that they will find what they need somewhere, because any movement of millions contains someone who exhibits some form of racism some time. Again, it's simple math.
Unfortunately, not much can be done about this other than what already has. We have to be constantly vigilant, especially with the mainstream media so deeply in the liberal camp, often to an extent those media themselves don't realize. It's imbued in their DNA and their unconscious.
An interesting small case in point is the new Christian Science Monitor report “Why ‘tea party' defenders won't let N-word claims rest,†superficially a much more sympathetic (to the tea partiers) article than most. It's an attempt to be even-handed and yet reporter Patrik Jonsson writes of the now famous accusation of multiple N-word use by Tea Partiers from members of the Congressional Black Caucus: Without hard evidence for either side, the conventional wisdom might be for tea partyers to let the incident slide and to blame the movement's more radical elements.
Say what? Without hard evidence from either side? In the US of A, where I live, we are supposedly innocent until proven guilty. There was no proof at all offered for this accusation of racism. Indeed, some of the accusers have even walked away from it; the originator has gone silent. In a court of law, there would be no need whatsoever for the Tea Partiers to offer evidence of innocence of any kind in their defense. This accusation would be thrown out in a trice. But of course, the Tea Partiers did offer a defense, because the mainstream media has unconscionably stacked the moral deck against the Tea Party movement. And the world knows it. And so does Mr. Jonsson, who, most probably without thinking, employed the rhetoric of “moral equivalency†for his article where there is not even remote moral equivalency. There is only an accusation without proof. I could just as easily accuse Mr. Jonsson of racism — and I don't know him. He, at least, had the courage to report on this matter with some honesty.
Andrew Breitbart has done a brilliant job of pointing out this profound bias by offering his one hundred thousand dollar reward for provable instances of Tea Party racism, which, thus far and not surprisingly, has not been claimed. I wouldn't have Andrew's guts, because I know people make mistakes. But he has certainly made his point — and then some.
So I will return to mine. These are not great times. We may be headed for that double-dip recession or even worse. The administration is going to be proposing legislation like Cap and Trade II that not only hurts the economy but enriches their cronies in the name of bogus science. A VAT — that most regressive of taxes — will ironically be proposed by a purportedly “progressive†administration. (When will that word be returned to where it really belongs — poker?) They will do this in support of expanded government programs that cost billions, probably trillions, more than they will ever admit to themselves or to us.
Yes, as the Chinese curse goes, we do live in interesting times. If they get any more interesting, they will kill us. As they say in that great Dos XX's ad, “Stay thirsty, my friends.â€
-Roger L. Simon
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