Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.
-Eric Hoffer
It took the NAACP to finally do that which was necessary by calling a spade a spade and the aftershocks of the resolution to recognize and call out racist elements within the Republican Tea Party was long overdue. This growing cancer on the American body politic is as dangerous as it is easily manipulated and it needs to be treated in the most aggressive manner possible lest it metastasizes. While I am certainly not falling into the trap of calling the entire movement racist which is the little linguistic hoop that the propagandists, shills and GOP operatives in the corporate media are trying (and successfully so) to do as the damage control efforts are furious. There definitely is an obviously racist component within the co-opted, once libertarian based movement and the virus of outright racism has been in carried by the massive influx of Republican operatives and opportunists as if it were smallpox borne upon blankets.
This has a very powerful allure to the angry and frustrated numbers of America’s growing economic diaspora, a growing tangle of wreckage of an economy sold as free market snake oil and erected on a foundation of sand during the Reagan era. As each passing day brings stock market bonanzas to the greedy players of the rigged game of American casino capitalism gotten fat on the busted backs of small business, the restiveness of jobless and foreclosed upon masses of asses are looking for scapegoats for their misery, most of which is largely self-inflicted as a result of willful ignorance and for supporting a party that sanctions their ignorant prejudices as though they were ministering to lepers being admitted to frolick in the fountains of Lourdes. One thing that needs to be recognized immediately is that the Tea Party is no real social movement nor is it a broad-based protest movement against the perceived evils of big government and the creeping menace of an imminent socialism. As most of us who have been watching this horrific blight on American society over the past year and a half already understand, and as a recent Gallup poll pointed out, the Tea Party is overwhelmingly comprised of card carrying and damned proud of it Republicans.
With the GOP brand name having been submerged in a vat of elephant shit by eight years of the George W. Bush debacle it was fairly obvious that there had to be some form of serious re-branding in time for the 2010 mid-term elections. It was recognized early on by party powerbrokers and strategists that there was no chance at regaining their control of the spoils system that serves the ruling oligarchy without a furious and dishonest attack on President Barack Obama who coincidentally happened to be America’s first black leader of state. The Congressional obstructionism has been constant and brutally enforced by party bosses to not only derail the Obama agenda but to dishonestly label the tepid and in over his head centrist deal-cutter as the second coming of Lenin. The putrid career reprobate Newt Gingrich attacked Obama’s “secular socialist machine” as he has been an integral part in plotting the overthrow of the Democratic Congress just as he did in 1994 with the Contract On America to Bill Clinton. Gingrich, a philandering little fascist dwarf has been one of the biggest turds in the Republican cesspool for decades and like the arrogant little twit that he always has been is making noises about a serious run for the White House (which according to many scumbaggers has become the “Black House.”
The Mayberry Machiavellis in the GOP and their tantrum throwing Tea Party base which was rolled out like the Nazi Sturmabteilung during last summer’s health care town halls to disrupt and intimidate have been immensely successful in ensuring that the country stays mired in an economic quagmire which plays very well into the plan to blame it all on that horrible negro in the White House. The town hall invasions were given full coverage by a corrupt and morally bankrupt corporate media and the ever timid and feckless Democrats were terrified into turning any sort of a serious health care reform into a back door bailout of the insurance industry parasites with the full power of the state behind forcing already financially busted out citizens to buy overpriced, lousy coverage with the threat of government fines.
The soon to be rolled out Wall Street reform has similarly been gutted and transformed into nothing more than a facade of regulation that would stop the degenerate gamblers from defrauding Americans and ripping off clients with their derivitave schemes. Due to the media-hyped, Republican backed Tea Party and the menacing brownshirt activists stomping around like deranged gerbils on chrystal meth the quisling Congress was able to turn any serious reform into more of the same corporate welfare and to badly damage Obama by pissing off liberals and progressives who will simply stay home in November while the Dick Armey of Darkness that are the teabaggers will be turning out in droves. The Republicans, as recently as a year and a half ago, a broken and disgraced party (at least in the minds of the clueless liberal elite) are full of piss, vinegar and posessed of that little gleam in the eye similar to a pederast sizing up his prey as they prepare to ride the backs of the angriest and dumbest motherfuckers in America into an encore performance come November. Shit, they will be so excited that maybe they can have the corpse of Terri Schiavo exhumed so that they can take turns gang-banging it just for old time’s sake.
This is why the NAACP’s resolution is so very troublesome to the Republicans who control the Tea Party, it is dangerously close to depriving them of the necessary political cover of being able to engage in the worst forms of demagogy and race-baiting while being able to have the Tea Party as a firewall. With the humiliation of the Bush presidency along with several ugly scandals tainting the GOP it was essential that they were able to roll out a new face prior to the 2010 mid-terms. That face of course belonged to KKK Kewpie Sarah Palin (an mentally deranged dimwit bimbo from Wasilla, Alaska who makes George W. Bush look like Albert Fucking Einstein) whose political rallies during the 2008 election set the gold standard for hatefests in America. Palin’s outdoor bund gatherings were nothing more than a mixture of a drunken Klan rally and the day that the welfare checks arrived at the local white trash trailer park in any seedy part of town that never gets the same sort of condemnation as the “ghetto” or “the hood”. They were extended versions of Orwell’s Two Minute Hate, the neocon line that Obama was some sort of secret terrorist, a closet MUSLIM and a Commie were shoveled to the dead enders like buckets of bloody chum to sharks. Chants of “Terrorist” and “Kill Him” were widely reported as McCain’s Frankenstein monster connected with the same sort of dopes, losers and borderline retards who had helped to put Bush into office because, well, he was just like them.
Palin’s ugly race-baiting was running concurrent with one of the most insidious propaganda campaigns in U.S. history when a secretive front group paid to have tens of millions of a filthy anti-Muslim DVD entitled Obsession: Radical Islam’s War against the West in the distribution of Sunday newspapers in swing states. The Palin ascenscion paralleled the coordinated slime campaign against Obama and eventually spun off the Idiotic sub-group Birthers whose ludicrouls claims that Obama was not born in America disqualified him from the Presidency. There are still ongoing efforts to get this idiocy into the courts and it’s a certainty that a GOP Congressional majority will use the Birther farce to manufacture propaganda in the form of legislation. Sarah the semi-literate was out via Twitter to defend the Republican Tea Party by decrying the NAACP and setting up the straw man of the dreaded inclusion of a mosque at the American holy land in New York City known as ground zero to roust the rabble. Palin attracts the same sort of morons who would fall for a story that the Taliban is using trained armed monkeys against U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
The real truth here is that the Republican party has relied on racism and pandering to the bigots at least since Richard M. Nixon’s Southern Strategy sought to harnass white southern discontent with the Civil Rights movement and as a part of a two-pronged attack against liberalism. That was the decade upon which nearly ALL of the cornerstones of the Republican temple of hatred were laid. Along with civil rights, women’s rights, liberalism, hippies, rock and roll music, sexual freedom and the need to smack down any who would dare to question corrupt and unprincipled authority if not the establishment itself all sprung from the Sixties. But that is a topic for another time – it is the insidious use of racism that we are going to look at here.
The Republicans have institutionalized racism since the days of Richard Nixon’s infamous Southern Strategy. It was a plan that sought to divide and conquer by fomenting racial enmity. It was immensely successful in charting the path to GOP power by capitalizing on the festering resentment in the deep south over their being forced to accept their ‘devils’ as equals instead of relegating them to subhuman status. The epitome of the charlatan as politician that was Ronald Reagan tapped into this when in 1980 he shamelessly pandered to the peckerwoods in Philadelphia, MS the site of the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers. The film Mississippi Burning was based on that tragic incident where animosity and raw hate combined in brutal murder that opened the eyes of a nation in torment to the cruelty and repression within. The Gipper used this carefully chosen forum to continue the sly peddling of the demagogy of race baiting that would form the cement for the next quarter century of disastrous conservative rule:
“I believe in states’ rights. I believe we have distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended to be given in the Constitution to that federal establishment”
Preached doddering Dutch to the delight of hordes of sweaty, knuckle dragging peckerwoods who had gathered at the Neshoba County Fair.
The importance of Reagan’s speech was the inclusion of the code word ‘states rights’ being newspeak that fanned the flames of racism. The late Lee Atwater admitted as much in a 1981 interview with historian Alexander P. Lamis that was published in his book Southern Politics in the 1990s:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964… and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster…
Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps…?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’
Atwater incidentally was the man who as a campaign strategist for Poppy Bush was behind the lowball sleaze of the Willie Horton commercials that helped to bring down Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election. One of Atwater’s protégés was an ambitious and amoral man of some renown in recent history, a man named Karl Rove who continued Atwater’s legacy by using an orchestrated clandestine slime campaign based on innuendo that Senator John McCain had fathered a black child to lay waste to his momentum in the 2000 GOP primaries and catapult George W. Bush into a lead that he would never relinquish. Under the destructive influence of Bush’s Brain American politics have disintegrated into an orgy of slander, racism, religious discrimination, swift boating, slander, fear, hatred and animosity of a level that has now begun to feed upon itself, growing exponentially with each diatribe by a hired propagandist. Sarah Palin’s cohort, FOX millionaire Glenn Beck has denounced President Obama as a racist and none of the Republican payroll demagogues ever miss out on an opportunity to pander to the lowest common denominator of white resentment towards blacks and other non-whites.
In the aforementioned film, Mississippi Burning Agent Rupert Anderson played by Gene Hackman, a good ole boy who had renounced the racism of his upbringing mused aloud:
Where does it come from, all this hatred? You know, when I was a little boy… there was an old Negro farmer liveddown the road from us, name of Monroe. And he was… Well, I guess he was just a little luckier than my daddy was. He bought himself a mule. That was a big deal around that town. My daddy hated that mule. His friends kidded him that they saw Monroe ploughin’ with his new mule… and Monroe was gonna rent another field now that he had a mule. One morning that mule just showed up dead. They poisoned the water.
After that there was never any mention about that mule around my daddy. One time we were drivin’ past Monroe’s place and we saw it was empty. He’d just packed up and left, I guess. Gone up North or somethin’. I looked over at my daddy’s face….and I knew he’d done it. And he saw that I knew. He was ashamed. I guess he was ashamed. He looked at me and he said…”If you ain’t better than a nigger, son, who are you better than?”
The rejection of Bush and the temporary derailing of Rove’s Thousand Year Reich have escalated the tactics and in an economically collapsing America nothing works better for political purposes than scapegoats. Not how Arizona’s new Gestapo style racial profiling law has become a rallying point for fascist Republican teabaggers and desperate and cynical politicians in other states are now pushing for similar legislation to combine with the already widespread anti-gay marriage ballot measures to form a very toxic brew indeed. In Florida, Bill McCollum, one of the most prominent of the traitors who was a part of the great Clinton blowjob inquisition is down with a similar effort, along with a pissing away of state taxpayer funds to mount a campaign against Obamacare which he is able to do as the sitting Attorney General. These people are a pack of vicious swine with zero loyalty to an inclusive and economically functional America, they just want to pour gasoline on the fire and watch it burn.
Racism is a cancer and it ravages societies, destroying them from within. Yet at the same time racism is gospel preached to an endless supply of converts by demagogues with political agendas. The Republican perpetual hate machine is fueled by racism, that and the fear and without them it could not exist. The demagogues preach to the masses from their electronic pulpits. They seek to pander to those seeking an answer for all that has gone wrong in their pathetic and failed lives. Lives in most cases that have been made miserable by the power brokers behind the demagogues who they have come to worship.
The hatred, the fear, the racism it is their benediction. It is in the hate that they seek shelter, the ability to salvage something resembling self worth from the cruel world. Ultimately in choosing to affix their sins to scapegoats they find a sort of salvation, but ironically it comes at the cost of ultimate damnation as they are consumed by their anger and their victims made to suffer for the expedience of those who seek to make them outcasts. If you ain’t no better than a (insert epithet here) then who are you better than?
Lee Atwater died of an inoperable brain tumor in 1991, cut down in his prime. He did however experience something of an epiphany that brought about reflection and change. In an article published shortly before his death in Life Magazine he wrote:
My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The ’80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don’t know who will lead us through the ’90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.
While I am highly skeptical of deathbed conversions it may be that facing the end of one’s mortal existence does provide an unprecedented opportunity for introspection. A self-analysis stripped bare of the deceits and hypocrisies of a daily existence for even a lifelong parasite like Atwater. Perhaps staring down the barrel at impending death is what it takes for a renunciation of the sins of a life spent sowing the seeds of hatred. Atwater is correct when he refers to it as a tumor of the soul. That it is, and as torn and frayed as this country is now that it has metastasized it may be terminal.
In closing, the Tea Party is not a racist movement per se but the GOP however has infiltrated it, wrested it from the original libertarian founders and has donned it as an-exoskeleton to harnass the racist sentiments of the dregs of American society as a way to regain political power. There are well intentioned people with the Tea Party but they are tainting themselves by associating with racists. So to y’all in the Tea Party who aren’t haters of people because of their skin color and religion:
Wake up, cleanse yourselves by kicking out the racists and be taken seriously. Even more importantly, peel off the Republican parasites like the bloodsuckers that they are and reach out to progressives and liberals who are just as pissed off over how this country is being destroyed as you are. Time to stop being manipulated by the race-baiting neocon scum of the GOP, return to your original libertarian roots, reach out and then, and only then will you be a formidable force. Oh, and tell the shameless millionaires Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin to go and fuck themselves and slime their way back into the sewers that they inhabited prior to 2008 and take that swine Gingrich with them.
Just my two cents over the morning cup o’ joe
EE
Posted by Donn Marten 
Bahoowah 