Color me totally not shocked.
Up until now, any lefty was pretty much laughed off who pointed out that the teabaggers are virtually 100% white, are peppered with white extremists, and festoon themselves with violent imagery like guns, and allusions to secession.
Sorry teabaggers, people like Taichi, Desh and others called this out a long time ago. I don’t think the majority of teabaggers are neoconfederate racists. But they are enablers of the latent racism and extremism that is encouraged within their tea bag movement. If one either encourage this shit, or stand by in silence while your fellow teabaggers are yelling nigger and faggot at fellow Americans, you’re pretty much as guilty as they are. Here’s a tip: The tea bag party has already, in large measure, founded itself and built itself on the backs of extremism; they aren’t going to purge themselves, in any substantive way, of extremists. Clucking of tongues, and sad shaking of heads isn't going to fundementally change the Tea Bag Party.
The one caveat I’ll add is that I don’t place all the blame on the Dixie’s and Webbways for driving the tea bag movement over the cliff in a frenzy of racism, gun worship, threats of secession, and rightwing extremism.
The elites in the rightwing media have gleefully been pouring fuel on this fire. The non-stop chants about “Marxism-socialism”, about fake Hawaiian birth certificates, about Obama being a fifth column secret Muslim, etc…….all that shit is intended to inflame and to subtly tie Obama to subconcious imagery related black radicalism.
Obama is more conservative or centrist than Dennis Kucinich, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, or Howard Dean. These white lefties would never be subject to this level of rightwing buffoonery; i.e., the guns, the threats of secession, the racially-charged signs. Clearly, as many of us have pointed out for the last year, it’s because, the media and blog conservatives – the ones who are smart enough to manipulate the tea baggers- have made a concerted effort to fear monger the under educated teabaggers into the idiotic perception that they are somehow making their last stand; their Dunkirk in the face of a wave of socialism, Marxism, and black radicalism. As such, the rightwing elites are pretty much as much to blame as the Dixie-types in the Tea Bag Party.