Racist to the Bone

Amanda Marcotte has a way with words. She has constructed a voice that is both conversational and precise, and finds ways to get right to the heart of a matter with a minimum of fluff and maximum coolness. At Pandagon this week she summarized a big part of American politics, a part that is not usually addressed objectively and audibly.

First, the backstory. The NAACP called on the Tea Party movement to address the racism that constantly contaminates their message. A leader of one of the teabagging groups, Mark Williams, responded by publishing a "letter to Abraham Lincoln" that was as offensively racist as you can imagine.

Here is one paragraph of Amanda Marcotte explaining very credibly exactly what is going on:

Many of us have been saying for a long time that the screeching about taxes and big government from teabaggers is, in many cases, racist to the bone. The reason Republicans argue that we can cut taxes on the rich while reducing the deficit is because they expect their followers to fill in the rest with, “By stopping welfare payments to those (fill in racist stereotype of the day).” The base chooses to believe that the federal government spends most of their money on social spending for people who could have jobs but choose not to, and Republicans let them believe that because it means they can continue to push fiscally irresponsible policies and leave Democrats to clean up the mess. And those of us who make this argument are often met with skepticism from people who believe that it would be hard for teabaggers to be that stupid and racist and short-sighted. But Williams makes it clear that all the coded language about overspending is meant to convey exactly that stupid message. Bait taken

The Tea Party Federation, which is a coalition of teabagger groups, kicked Williams and his group out yesterday.

The teabaggers' main message is that government has gotten too big. They are fond of conspiracy theories that have the Obama administration controlling the details of everybody's personal lives, but the one big thing they like to talk about is taxes. They hate taxes. If the government were smaller it would spend less money and taxes could be lower, in their simplified view.

The war on Iraq has cost between two and three billion dollars a week, but you don't hear the teabaggers crying to stop the war, do you? This isn't about government spending, it's about the government spending money to help people who need help. Will that be well-connected white people? Not so much.

Gallup recently showed that the Tea Party is essentially the Republican base. They reported, "Their similar ideological makeup and views suggest that the Tea Party movement is more a rebranding of core Republicanism than a new or distinct entity on the American political scene." Watch how they work this during the upcoming elections. Teabaggers are saying things the Republicans can never say out loud, but the GOP is going to want those votes in the fall.