It’s really a shame how these awful Tea Partiers keep letting the liberals down. They refuse to live down to their expectations. They refuse to be violent and/or disorderly. They leave that to the Nancy Pelosi-endorsed Occupy Wall Street and its branch offices, which have turned parks into jungles, threatened local vendors and businessmen, urinated and defecated on police cars and other unsuitable places, raped women, and pushed old ladies down stairs.
They have refused to be violent (though a black Tea Partier was sent to the hospital by pro-union roughnecks); they were not causes of the outrage in Tucson, Ariz. (though the parents of one of the doctors who saved Gabrielle Giffords sent Christine O’Donnell a check). Left-wing idealists assault people, pee in the street and strew garbage everywhere.
Evil, malicious and violent Tea Partiers go where they have permits, stand around for a while and listen to speeches, control themselves until they can get to a suitable rest room, pick up their trash and go home.
Nowhere, however, have they let down the left more than on the vexed issue of race. It’s vexed, because they keep vexing them, with facts contradicting the old left-wing theory that all conservatives are born and live out their lives in white sheets. The left said people protesting the health care bill insulted and spat on black liberal congressmen, a claim that has yet be verified by anyone in a crowd of thousands of witnesses.
It claimed the Tea Party opposed Obama because it was protesting the loss of white privilege, and they elected a slew of blacks, Hispanics and children of immigrants to state and national office, and pushed Herman Cain, who grew up under segregation in Georgia, for president. While the left was trying to prove that this in itself was even more racist, salvation came in the news that a number of women, most of them blond, had accused him of making unwanted passes.
Salvation loomed. Hadn’t Emmett Till been killed (56 years ago) for having whistled at a white woman? Hadn’t this been the theme of Harper Lee’s classic? “You don’t position a white woman with a black man and pretend nothing’s happening,” said Kathleen Parker, explaining why it was “racist” for Sarah Palin to campaign against Barack Obama. Surely the right would now show its true colors. Hope flared anew.
Conservatives “don’t care what blacks do” to themselves, but a blonde could be trouble, said Michael Tomasky. Karen Finney wondered “if these guys rally round Herman Cain” now that a “whole other level of black sexuality” had entered the mix.
“He keeps coming after our women,” as Toure had put it, explaining how traumatic it was for Republicans to see a black man make eyes at a blonde. In fact, as he added, “the instinctual fear in America of black men” being “aggressive” ran terribly, terribly “deep.” And how deep, exactly? Deep enough that while liberals stood up for affronted white women, conservatives embraced and backed up the black man.
Rush Limbaugh claimed that the “Cain Babes” were part of a plot by the media. Laura Ingraham made fun of their hair and their cleavage. A man who called in to the Limbaugh program allowed that even if Cain had “scored with the lady” it shouldn’t prevent him from becoming the president.
“Scored with the lady”? A bona fide racist would be tearing his hair out. So much for “white fears of black sexuality.” We’re further along than we thought.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to TheWeekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
