Romano? That Sounds Eye-talian.
A Newsweek article by Andy Romano about how Tea Partiers view the Constitution is going okay until we hit this sentence:
For the forces of orthodoxy, the election of a black, urban, liberal Democrat with a Muslim name wasn’t a panacea at all; it was a provocation.
There it is, out of nowhere--the slimy insinuation of bigotry. Romano may feel the Tea Partiers are overreacting, or being irrational, but does he have the slightest bit of evidence their actions are due to Obama's color, much less his name? Is he saying if John Edwards did the exact same things as Obama, the Tea Party wouldn't have arisen, or wouldn't have cared so much?
Elsewhere, Romano notes the culture wars of the early 90s that brought down the Democrats--in that case, the right was reacting to the white, rural, classically-named Bill Clinton. So why bring in color, and religion? Maybe Romano needs to control his anger.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:11 AM
8 Comments:
Not slimy but factual. Not an insinuation but pretty clearly stated See reports yesterday of white nationalists having "infiltrated" the sons of Mcveigh (how does a core infiltrate itself?)
Spare me. It's easy enough to find whatever you want in any large organization as long as you don't care about being honest. Maybe the Tea Party should waste its time investigating its investigators--it'd be easy enough to find all the blatant bigots among them.
does he have the slightest bit of evidence their actions are due to Obama's color, much less his name?
Slightest bit? Sure. Of course, it could be a coincidence. But I'd say it's circumstantial evidence.
I skimmed your link and didn't see anything relevant. It was fascinating, though, to discover that Americans believe Bush's religion affected his politics more than Obama's affects his.
Nothing relevant, eh? There is a Tea Party group that regularly sets up signs near the shopping mall near my home. A significant proportion of their signage refer to Obama as a Muslim and/or Hitler. I find the cognitive dissonance uninteresting, but it's surely some "slightest bit of evidence," no?
I've been at a couple Tea Party rallies and never seen such signs, but I'm sure they exist--they're just not as common, as far as I can tell, as comparisons of George Bush to Hitler and to chimps. (I've also seen plenty of anti-Semitic signs at anti-war rallies.) The point here is someone is writing about the Tea Party and claiming that Obama excites greater opposition than a white Democrat would, but what we're seeing is the level of opposition (from Tea Partiers and non-Tea Partiers) that would arise against any Democrat doing what he's doing at this moment.
When Obama was elected, he had just as much support as any white, WASP President in recent memory. More, in fact. He lost it, by and by, through his actions. Yet the guy who wrote this article sees electing a black man from the city with a funny name as a provocation. I guess the haters were too stunned at first to stop him from being elected, but they sure succeeded later in driving his poll numbers below 50%.
I agree, LAGuy, about the highe incidence of the Hitler/Bush thing. Maybe it's a corollary to Godwin's Law? "As a presidential administration grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." I'm really surprised you haven't seen the Muslim thing, though. I think I've seen it at 5 out of 6 rallies.
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