Monday, July 26, 2010

awesome piece on the Shirley Sherrod smear case from Frank Rich

There's a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin'
That story began on July 13, when the N.A.A.C.P. passed a resolution calling on the Tea Party to expel "racist elements" in its ranks. No sooner had Tea Party adherents and defenders angrily denied that such elements amounted to anything more than a few fringe nuts than Mark Williams, the spokesman and past chairman of the Tea Party Express, piped up. He slapped a "parody" on the Web — a letter from "colored people" to Abraham Lincoln berating him as "the greatest racist ever" and complaining about "that whole emancipation thing" because "freedom means having to work for real."

Williams had hurled similar slurs for months, but now that the N.A.A.C.P. had cast a spotlight on the Tea Party's racist elements, he was belatedly excommunicated by the leader of another Tea Party organization. In truth, it's not clear that any group in this scattered movement has authority over any other. But one thing was certain: the N.A.A.C.P. was wrong to demand that the Tea Party disown its racist fringe. It should have made that demand of the G.O.P. instead.

The Tea Party Express fronted by Williams is an indisputable Republican subsidiary. It was created by prominent G.O.P. political consultants in California and raises money for G.O.P. candidates, including Sharron Angle, Harry Reid's Senate opponent in Nevada. But Republican leaders, presiding over a Congressional delegation with no blacks and a party that nearly mirrors it, remain in hiding whenever racial controversies break out under their tent. "I am not interested in getting into that debate," said Mitch McConnell last week.

Once Williams was disowned by other Tea Partiers, Breitbart posted the bogus Sherrod video as revenge under the headline "Video Proof: The NAACP Awards Racism." To portray whites as the victims of racist blacks has been a weapon of the right from the moment desegregation started to empower previously subjugated minorities in the 1960s. But its deployment has accelerated with the ascent of a black president. The pace is set by right-wing stars like Glenn Beck, who on Fox branded Barack Obama a racist with "a deep-seated hatred for white people," and the ever-opportunistic Newt Gingrich, who on Twitter maligned Sonia Sotomayor as a "Latina woman racist."