Tea Party Members Shout Racial and Gay Slurs and Spit on a Black Lawmaker

Can we now dismiss the Tea Party “movement” as a poisonous cocktail of angry xenophobes, homophobes and racists spewing hate under the guise of tax protests? And yet this fringe group still has plenty of supporters. I was reading some right wing, conservative blogs trying to spin the shameful event from this weekend and cannot believe their laughable excuses:

1) The MSM made up this confrontation with lawmakers. I know many of you probably think as I did that MSM stands for “men who have sex with men”. I kept seeing this code language showing up in conservative blogs and I wondered, “why are they always blaming us gays”. For those of us who need translation from Nazi-speak, MSM means the “main stream media”, which is any news organization that they don’t agree with. Anyway, many in the conservative movement believe that this unfortunate event didn’t even happen, that it was manufactured by the MSM to discredit the TP movement. So much like global warming and Darwinism, they choose to ignore reality and the facts and simply say, “Everyone is lying because no one likes me”. My eight year old neighbor tried this excuse when he accidentally threw a rock and broke another neighbor’s window.

2) The Congressmen are lying. The next excuse they use is to blame the victims. They say these Black and gay congressmen are lying about the harassment because that is what gay and Black people do. One blogger even went so far as to cite the Tawana Brawley case as proof that Black lawmakers lie. I’m sure they were dying to tie this episode to O J Simpson somehow. This excuse most conveniently plays into their pre-existing stereotypes, so it is probably the one that they believe.

3) The confrontation did happen but it was conducted NOT by TP members but by infiltrators to the TP whose purpose was to discredit the movement. This is the most fascinating and entertaining excuse but again it plays into the conservative’s wide-eyed belief in conspiracies. I, for one, think that this is once again the work of Mossad, stealthily sneaking into our country and masquerading as TP members only to create bad public relations by yelling disparaging remarks at lawmakers…uh huh….that’s what it was.

As long as we’re making up BS excuses, here’s another creative one they can use: the Congressman only misunderstood the TP protesters, they were actually shouting (if you listen closely) “Snigger” and “Saggot”. The were only encouraging the men to laugh along with the irresistible humor of Bob Saget. What's wrong with that?

The most rational, mature response would have been to acknowledge that any political movement has an extreme, fringe element and apologize for their actions. But I don’t think they can say that because this type of behavior does not represent only small, part of their movement and instead is a predominate theme. ________________________________________________

One of my favorite writers, Junot Diaz, a Domincan American, has a short story in this week’s New Yorker. I encourage you to check out his work. He is an amazing writer.