dstraito
TB Fanatic
Leonard Pitts Article below my comment:
And the hits just keep on coming. Once again Leonard Pitts exemplifies the Leftist mindset: Identify and personalize, then minimize and attack your opposition, especially when you can’t counter with logic because logic will NOT support your positions. Leonard obviously just backs an America for Minorities, especially Blacks yet no one calls that racists (well, I do).
His first flaw is he starts off quoting Keith Olbermann. He loses all credibility to begin with. He like most of the left have fundamentally underestimated what the Tea Party movement is about. It scares them and they don’t understand it. He tries to marginalize it and when the movement can’t be explained away he falls to the age old ploy of calling it Racist. Evidently he didn’t get the memo, since the left has been calling everything and everyone “Racist” for any opposing ideas, that there is little barb left to that adage.
How naïve is it to think that Americans (of all color) don’t want to be saddled with an unsustainable debt? He says Tea Party members don’t like Obama because he is Black. How convenient an explanation to marginalize the Tea Party and be able to label it Racist when there are a LOT more reasons that Obama is not liked and for most, his skin color has nothing to do with it. As far as that goes, he’s also White.
Many don’t like Obama because he was the most Leftist Liberal Senator in his short stay in congress and his voting “Present” on most of the issues before him didn’t show his positions on anything.
Many don’t like the fact that Obama’s policies are jeopardizing America.
That he caters to our enemies and alienates our allies.
I could go on and on about reasons Tea Party people might be against Obama. Color is not even on the list.
Leonard mentions the “Birth Cry of a new America”, well there are a LOT of American’s who not only don’t embrace the “Fundamental Transformation” the Left is trying to do but see it as a threat to the continuance of this Great Nation.
By reducing the entire concerns of the Tea Party to the only reason they exist is because they are Racist means he doesn’t have to address any of the issues that he might not have good answers to. It also comforts him because he doesn’t have to question his own ideology which is flawed and unsustainable.
Good luck with your head in the sand Leonard, keep on treating the Tea Party this way. I’m glad because your fundamental lack of understanding and inflexibility to consider any issues that don’t advance your race and ideology will be your downfall. Yes, keep it up, please.
Article From Leonard Pitt:
And the hits just keep on coming. Once again Leonard Pitts exemplifies the Leftist mindset: Identify and personalize, then minimize and attack your opposition, especially when you can’t counter with logic because logic will NOT support your positions. Leonard obviously just backs an America for Minorities, especially Blacks yet no one calls that racists (well, I do).
His first flaw is he starts off quoting Keith Olbermann. He loses all credibility to begin with. He like most of the left have fundamentally underestimated what the Tea Party movement is about. It scares them and they don’t understand it. He tries to marginalize it and when the movement can’t be explained away he falls to the age old ploy of calling it Racist. Evidently he didn’t get the memo, since the left has been calling everything and everyone “Racist” for any opposing ideas, that there is little barb left to that adage.
How naïve is it to think that Americans (of all color) don’t want to be saddled with an unsustainable debt? He says Tea Party members don’t like Obama because he is Black. How convenient an explanation to marginalize the Tea Party and be able to label it Racist when there are a LOT more reasons that Obama is not liked and for most, his skin color has nothing to do with it. As far as that goes, he’s also White.
Many don’t like Obama because he was the most Leftist Liberal Senator in his short stay in congress and his voting “Present” on most of the issues before him didn’t show his positions on anything.
Many don’t like the fact that Obama’s policies are jeopardizing America.
That he caters to our enemies and alienates our allies.
I could go on and on about reasons Tea Party people might be against Obama. Color is not even on the list.
Leonard mentions the “Birth Cry of a new America”, well there are a LOT of American’s who not only don’t embrace the “Fundamental Transformation” the Left is trying to do but see it as a threat to the continuance of this Great Nation.
By reducing the entire concerns of the Tea Party to the only reason they exist is because they are Racist means he doesn’t have to address any of the issues that he might not have good answers to. It also comforts him because he doesn’t have to question his own ideology which is flawed and unsustainable.
Good luck with your head in the sand Leonard, keep on treating the Tea Party this way. I’m glad because your fundamental lack of understanding and inflexibility to consider any issues that don’t advance your race and ideology will be your downfall. Yes, keep it up, please.
Article From Leonard Pitt:
Race is only part of the reason for the Tea Party movement
From
http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/03/01/2006567/race-is-only-part-of-the-reason.html
They are occasioned by a recent commentary from Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. The commentary -- you can find it on YouTube -- scores the Tea Party movement as the outcry of people who haven't yet made peace with the fact that their president is black.
Everything else, Olbermann said, is euphemism. Taxes? Socialism? Budget deficit? No, he argued -- when you strip away all the pretenses and rationalizations, "it's still racism," and they hate the president only because he is black.
One is reminded of the 2008 campaign in which many of Barack Obama's opponents insisted people "supported" him only because he is black.
It was an offensive claim in that it assumed black was black was black and that people are so imbecilic that skin color -- alone and of itself -- was sufficient to win their votes. As if you could sub in rapper Flavor Flav and they would not care.
The truth, it always seemed to me, was more nuanced.
People liked Obama's policies, his eloquence and his fierce intelligence, and the fact that he was black, that his election would turn history on its ear, was a desirable bonus, but only that -- icing on the cake, but not the cake itself.
I submit that a rough inverse of that dynamic now helps define the Tea Party movement.
Ask yourself: Would we even be having this discussion if Condoleezza Rice were president? If Rice, Republican stalwart, conservative icon and black woman were chief executive, would the first pot of tea ever have been brewed?
One suspects that the average Tea Party participant would tell you emphatically, "no" and that this "no" serves as his personal shield against charges of racism. How can I be racist, he would demand, when I know in my heart that I would've supported Condi to the max?
If you concede him that, then you have to ask yourself what it does to Olbermann's contention that racism is the whole raison d'etre of the movement.
The answer leads us back again to nuance, albeit in mirror image.
The Tea Party people distrust Obama's policies, his eloquence, his fierce intelligence. The fact that he is black then becomes the final straw, the difference maker and deal breaker. To put that another way: I doubt most of the Tea Partiers hate Obama strictly because he is black, but it sure doesn't help.
My point is not that Olbermann's argument is wrong but, rather, that it is incomplete.
Yes, race is obviously a component, and a major component at that, of the reaction against the president. The recurring use of racist imagery and language, the attendance at Tea Party events of a racist group like the so-called Council of Conservative Citizens, settles that definitively.
But ultimately, people seem moved by something even bigger than race. This is race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, "culture," and the fact that those who have always been on the right side, the "power-wielding" side, of one or more of those equations now face the realization that their days of dominance are numbered.
There is a poignancy to their responsive fury because one senses that the nether side of it is a choking fear. We are witness to the birth cries of a new America, and for every one of us who embraces and celebrates that, who looks forward to the opportunity and inclusiveness it promises, there is another who grapples with a crippling sense of dislocation and loss, who wonders who and what she will be in the nation now being born.
One hopes they will find answers that satisfy them, because the change they fear will not be turned back. No one ever volunteers to return to the rear of the bus.
So for all the frustration the Tea Party movement engenders among the rest of us, one also feels a certain pity for people like the woman last year who cried, plaintively, that she wanted her country back.
As if she didn't realize that it is already, irrevocably, gone.
Leonard Pitts writes
for The Miami Herald.
lpitts@herald.com
From
http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/03/01/2006567/race-is-only-part-of-the-reason.html
They are occasioned by a recent commentary from Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. The commentary -- you can find it on YouTube -- scores the Tea Party movement as the outcry of people who haven't yet made peace with the fact that their president is black.
Everything else, Olbermann said, is euphemism. Taxes? Socialism? Budget deficit? No, he argued -- when you strip away all the pretenses and rationalizations, "it's still racism," and they hate the president only because he is black.
One is reminded of the 2008 campaign in which many of Barack Obama's opponents insisted people "supported" him only because he is black.
It was an offensive claim in that it assumed black was black was black and that people are so imbecilic that skin color -- alone and of itself -- was sufficient to win their votes. As if you could sub in rapper Flavor Flav and they would not care.
The truth, it always seemed to me, was more nuanced.
People liked Obama's policies, his eloquence and his fierce intelligence, and the fact that he was black, that his election would turn history on its ear, was a desirable bonus, but only that -- icing on the cake, but not the cake itself.
I submit that a rough inverse of that dynamic now helps define the Tea Party movement.
Ask yourself: Would we even be having this discussion if Condoleezza Rice were president? If Rice, Republican stalwart, conservative icon and black woman were chief executive, would the first pot of tea ever have been brewed?
One suspects that the average Tea Party participant would tell you emphatically, "no" and that this "no" serves as his personal shield against charges of racism. How can I be racist, he would demand, when I know in my heart that I would've supported Condi to the max?
If you concede him that, then you have to ask yourself what it does to Olbermann's contention that racism is the whole raison d'etre of the movement.
The answer leads us back again to nuance, albeit in mirror image.
The Tea Party people distrust Obama's policies, his eloquence, his fierce intelligence. The fact that he is black then becomes the final straw, the difference maker and deal breaker. To put that another way: I doubt most of the Tea Partiers hate Obama strictly because he is black, but it sure doesn't help.
My point is not that Olbermann's argument is wrong but, rather, that it is incomplete.
Yes, race is obviously a component, and a major component at that, of the reaction against the president. The recurring use of racist imagery and language, the attendance at Tea Party events of a racist group like the so-called Council of Conservative Citizens, settles that definitively.
But ultimately, people seem moved by something even bigger than race. This is race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, "culture," and the fact that those who have always been on the right side, the "power-wielding" side, of one or more of those equations now face the realization that their days of dominance are numbered.
There is a poignancy to their responsive fury because one senses that the nether side of it is a choking fear. We are witness to the birth cries of a new America, and for every one of us who embraces and celebrates that, who looks forward to the opportunity and inclusiveness it promises, there is another who grapples with a crippling sense of dislocation and loss, who wonders who and what she will be in the nation now being born.
One hopes they will find answers that satisfy them, because the change they fear will not be turned back. No one ever volunteers to return to the rear of the bus.
So for all the frustration the Tea Party movement engenders among the rest of us, one also feels a certain pity for people like the woman last year who cried, plaintively, that she wanted her country back.
As if she didn't realize that it is already, irrevocably, gone.
Leonard Pitts writes
for The Miami Herald.
lpitts@herald.com
