The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) made a power grab to control the Internet and there is a raging debate on both sides. Rather than take a position to rollback the FCC action or let it stand, I offer a third alternative. Shutdown the FCC.
Al Sharpton
When 300,000-500,000 of your closest friends, depending on who is doing the estimating, show up for a rally on the Washington Mall you would think it was somewhat newsworthy, no? Of course it is, that’s why the New York Times published the story on page fifteen. If you were walking by a newsstand and glanced at the front page, you wouldn’t have know that a half million of your fellow citizens got together with Glenn Beck to restore honor in America. The front page would entice you with:
- Graft-Fighting Prosecutor Fired in Afghanistan
- For Obama, Steep Learning Curve as Chief in Time of War
- Upstarts Chip Away at Power of Feudal Pakistani Landlords
- Years Later, No Magic Bullet Against Alzheimer’s Disease
- In Hard Times, One New Ban (Double-Wide)
I guess our friends at the times couldn’t find any fabricated stories of someone shouting the “N-word” at Dr. Martin Luther King’s niece Alveda King, who was one of the featured speakers, to elevate the story to the front page. Perhaps it would have been too embarrassing to mention on the front page that Al Sharpton’s counter-demonstration where “several hundred people packed a football field at Paul Laurance Dunbar High School to stage a rally commemorating Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” Yesterday, you would have thought both rallies were the same size with crowd estimates of several thousand for each. Perhaps this shows the true value of racial politics today. America is tired of the race baiting and the false charges. President Obama was elected with hope and change to become the post-racial leader of the country. It appears the country has moved on without his leadership.
In another piece in the Times two Progressive women pine for a “Palin of Our Own”, to win the hearts and minds of America. The problem is America doesn’t want to listen to Janeane Garofalo or Joy Behar sneeringly spouting off about Sarah Palin. As far as any women Progressive politicians, who is there other than Hillary Clinton and we’ve seen that act and passed on it.
In another piece titled “Party Down”, Marc Ambinder tells us about the anti-incumbent mood, “Unlike parties, which often recruit candidates who would appeal to the average voter in a general election, these activists care only about nominating the person who accurately represents their own views and frustrations.” Appeal to the average voter? The problem with the Republican Party in the past is that they have been listening to the main stream media reports about who the “average voter” is. So they have elected so called “moderates” who get their clocks cleaned by real Progressives in the election. The left snickered in their sleeves while growing the government into the bloated, ineffective, couch potato that it is. It alarms those on the left that the Tea Party movement has changed all this and tone deaf incumbents are getting tossed left and right. They have unmasked the average voter to be conservative and by measuring candidates against a conservative yardstick, they have struck a chord with the voters who have long felt ignored and disenfranchised. Now those voters are energized and can’t wait to get to the polls. Reason for panic on the left, indeed.
The NAACP was once a proud organization with a noble cause, to advance the lot of people of color. Today it has abandoned those principles to become just another attack arm of the Democratic Party. This week they released a resolution condemning racism within the Tea Party movement.
I have been to a number of Tea Party events with hundreds of thousands of peaceful orderly participants and racism was not evident, surprisingly so. I say surprisingly because with any gathering of that magnitude to have a few fringe elements at either end of the spectrum would almost be expected. So is it possible there are racist elements at any given event? Sure. It is routine in the Tea Party? It is so rare, you have to aggressively search to find it and when you do, what proof is there that they are really Tea Party members or supporters or just some wacko who walked into the crowd with a sign?
Let’s look at the Strategy
The left has tried vainly to paint the Tea Party as racist because that is the most toxic label that they have. The racist label brings out the black electorate, polarizes the progressives, mortifies the moderates, and makes conservatives cringe. If they can make it stick it is very effective. It is also overused and as such, it is losing its sting. So how do you make it stick?
One way is to follow what the NAACP is doing. Pass a resolution condemning racism and demand the Tea Party repudiate racism in their ranks, which by the way is virtually non-existent. If you can cow the Tea Party members to take the pledge, then the liberal/progressives can plant racists at each rally with nasty signs, videotape them and then blame the Tea Party for failing to honor their pledge and thus “proving” racism is in the ranks of the Tea Party and it cannot be eradicated. This is straight out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
Let’s Look at the Facts
This is from the NAACP web site:
“Today, NAACP delegates passed a resolution to condemn extremist elements within the Tea Party, calling on Tea Party leaders to repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches.”
I was a marshal at the Tea Party rally in New York on April 15th this year. We were concerned about reports on the street that infiltrators with racist signs might show up to garner media attention, which to that point had been rather thin. What were we to do? We couldn’t take their signs away, we couldn’t touch them as they had as much of a right to be there as we did. We came up with the idea that we would carry signs repudiating the person that our signs pointed to. We would approach the person, politely, tell them that their sign did not comport with the values of the Tea Party and ask them to put the sign away or leave. If they did not comply, we would surround them with our signs that said those views of that individual were not consistent with the Tea Party so that any media picking up their sign would see ours as well. If things got aggressive we would call in the police that were on hand. To my knowledge we never had to use our tactic as there were no racially offensive signs at the rally. We did not need a resolution by the NAACP to develop our counter strategy. It was part of our core beliefs, which puts the big lie to the NAACP’s resolution.
More from the NAACP web site:
“The resolution came after a year of high-profile media coverage of attendees of Tea Party marches using vial, antagonistic racial slurs & images. In March, respected members of the Congressional Black Caucus reported that racial epithets were hurled at them as they passed by a Washington, DC health care protest. Civil rights legend John Lewis was called the “n-word” in the incident while others in the crowd used ugly anti-gay slurs to describe Congressman Barney Frank, a long-time NAACP supporter and the nation’s first openly gay member of Congress.”
The first part of this passage was almost laughable. High profile media coverage? The lame stream media has been trying to bury the Tea Party by not covering them. What main stream media coverage was there in Washington in September of 2009 where several hundred thousand Tea Partiers rallied? It was dismissed as a couple of thousand.
Nancy Pelosi’s stunt to march through a crowd of Tea Party members to pass the Obamacare bill, did draw a lot of media attention and controversy. Show us the money! Andrew Breitbart put up $100,000 to anyone who could produce any video evidence that the things claimed in the above quote from the NAACP actually happened. There were media cameras and microphones all over the place, hundreds if not thousands of people with cell phone cameras and miraculously not one of them captured what the NAACP claims happened as fact. John Lewis was invited on several news programs to give his side of the story and he declined. Mr. Breitbart is still waiting to write that check. As Groucho Marx famously said, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own two eyes?”
NAACP President Ben Jealous had this comment. “I give a 42-page speech. Half a page is focused on the tea party,” Jealous said. “We need the media to pay attention to the issues that are most important to this country” such as jobs, education, and crime. Uh, what did you expect sir? If you wanted the media to pay attention to the other 41 ½ pages of your speech, perhaps you should have dropped to bogus charge against the Tea Party.
I scoured the NAACP web site for any mention of the New Black Panther party and the case against them that was dropped by the Obama Justice Department. The site lacks a search feature so it made it more of a challenge but I looked through the site’s blog and found nothing. Now here is a case that is plainly caught on video tape and other video tape is found of King Samir Shabazz, spewing racial epithets and advocating murder of whites or “crackers” and their babies, but we hear nothing about this from the NAACP.
So, we have the NAACP issuing a resolution about alleged racism in the Tea Party for which they have no proof (there are some still pictures on their websites of people holding signs, but no reference to where the pictures were taken or who the sign holders were. They could have just as easily been a plant to smear the Tea Party). They ask the Tea Party to pledge to oppose racism, which I have demonstrated that opposing racist messages is standard operating procedure among the Tea Party, but they make no mention of the overt racism among their followers, where that racism is clearly on full display in living color with sound and includes not only racist sentiments but a call to actually murder whites. This apparently is considered worthy discourse to the NAACP leadership.
I call upon all members of the NAACP who really believe there is no place for racism in America to cancel your membership in the NAACP and join the Tea Party. We do not tolerate racist messages among our members. We have many African Americans in prominent positions in the Tea Party and we would have more if you join us. Our positions to end wasteful government spending and free up our economy will probably do more to advance you and your fellow NAACP members than fighting for the next government program. The NAACP has run aground on the shoals of petty squabbles to help the Democratic Party. It’s time to abandon ship and swim for shore.
The above opinions are my own. I do not speak in an official capacity for the Tea Party.
