It finally happened. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People finally demanded that the Tea Party movement address the growing racism among its ranks, though the NAACP wouldn't accuse the Tea Party movement itself of being racist.
This of course, is exactly what the Tea Partiers said the civil rights group did. Sarah Palin - no stranger to overreacting - took a page out of Rush Limbaugh's playbook in insisting that supporters of her ideology are average people concerned about the country. The Tea Partiers, she said, are normal, everyday folks who work hard, raise families, and support smaller government. She completely overlooked the butchers, doctors, and insurance salesmen who carry around sings depicting President Obama as Hitler and spit on black congressmen. Palin also added that the Tea Party is a "DY-verse" group.
And it is. Ask Rick Santelli - it happens to include a few Italians!
And at least one South Asian.
No, I'm not saying Nikki Haley is racist. Of course she doesn't have anything against white people! Sorry, I couldn't resist. No, seriously, I don't think she's bigoted toward blacks, but as a woman of South Asian decent - and as someone who was on the receiving end of a racial slur during the gubernatorial primary in South Carolina - she should be among those to take the first step to condemn the bigotry in the movement that helped get her the Republican gubernatorial nomination in her state. If she has Palin's personal contact information, she should call Alaska's most famous book-banning wolf killer and tell her to do the same.
Nikki, don't lose that number.
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I must thank the Tea Party for electing Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown since he voted for the Financial Reform Bill and help the President of the United States with another legislative victory, thank you Tea Party.
The problem is this. Tea Party candidates will win a number of these congressional races because local districts are often safely partisan in nature. They can make their wild, unfounded claims, crazy accusations, etc., and win. That means not only are we likely to see an increase in Republican seats in both houses, we're likely to see more antics, more insanity, more stupidity. At the same time they're going to do everything they can to derail Obama's policies which will likely mean high unemployment, a moribund economy, and more compromises on policy positions that make no one happy.
That could literally mean that if the Republicans put up a legitimate candidate in 2012, they could win. Such a result is bad enough, but the likely response for the Democrats is to move further to the "middle" to placate voters. As we've seen over the last decade, the "middle" in American politics is basically on the verge of being an 80s Republican. Increasingly that means we'll have a political landscape of a conservative party and ratfuck insane parties. The former, given it's track record, slowly moving to the right, the latter, given it's track record, loudly screaming "socialism, communism, fascism!!!"
If we continue on this course, privatization will be socialism.
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