Article by Gene Lalor

Let’s face it. As a group, conservatives are too often weenies, just too damned meek for their own good.

Granted, the second Beatitude reads, “The meek shall inherit the Earth” but before that can happen we have to battle defamation, promote truth, challenge the defamers, and win elections. Humility, docility, and submissiveness just won’t cut it nowadays.

With virtually the entirety of the mainstream media on the other side, it’s no easy task to battle, promote, and challenge the left, the liberals, the “progressives” so it’s good to see some degree of resistance and retaliation such as that demonstrated yesterday by the Tea Party.

That much-maligned, amorphous and diverse collection of Americans, blacks, whites, elders, young people, Democrats, Republicans, independents, libertarians, and moderates are concerned primarily about excessive taxation, (TEA=Taxed Enough Already), big government and everything associated with big government including its primary exponent, President Barack Obama.

It is the Tea Party’s opposition to Obama that has inspired most of the brickbats hurled its way.

Even before Obama’s election, it was widely expected that any criticism of the president would be contorted into charges of racism and that indeed has been the case in an attempt by America’s left wing to render the first black chief executive and his ultra-liberal policies immune to all negative critiques.

If any white dare say or write anything negative, in fact say or write anything non-supportive, all the president’s men and women or, more often, his lackeys in the mainstream media, clamber aboard the race train to denounce the blatant bigotry of the speaker/writer.

Gallup and USA Today studied the Tea Party and in an analysis titled, “Tea Partiers Are Fairly Mainstream in Their Demographics,” concluded, “Tea Party supporters skew right politically; but demographically, they are generally representative of the public at large. That’s the finding of a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted March 26-28, in which 28% of U.S. adults call themselves supporters of the Tea Party movement:” http://tiny.cc/0ymc8

The Tea Party movement was recently accused of racism and its membership of being racists by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The charge was denied, withdrawn, and excused by various NAACP members but, as with any such allegation, the charge lingers while the retraction is often forgotten.

To their great credit, instead of rolling over and playing dead, the Tea Party hit back and their primary defenders were black Tea Party members and national black activists.

Emerging barely a year and a half ago and now consisting of millions of men and women with millions more counting themselves as supporters, the Tea Party Express called a news conference to declare it wasn’t about to allow itself to be slandered by an organization it considers “irrelevant and silent on the issues most important to African Americans.”

The NAACP is trying to scare blacks into supporting Democrats, according to Niger Innis, spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, reviving the “racial terror” tactics used by the Ku Klux Klan: “The same terror that was employed by whites in hoods is now being employed by blacks and whites in suits.”

AlfonZo Rachel, a commentator for the conservative PJTV website, was equally forthright, contending the NAACP was made up of the “same kind of people who would rat out a runaway slave.”

Frequent presidential aspirant Alan Keyes, said Obama and the Democrats had tried to sell blacks “the phony promise of socialism and government largess. It simply means that we should all become slaves on the government plantation:” http://tiny.cc/bekua

There may in fact be racial bigots among the millions of Tea Party members just as there are racial bigots in the NAACP and in the Democrat Party. There may in fact have been the rare bigoted placard displayed at Tea Party rallies, carried either by a bigot or a DNC plant. That means nothing.

What is indisputable is that the Tea Party is not and has never been a bigoted, racist organization and has never tolerated or disseminated such sentiments. Let the NAACP or any other liberal group substantiate any allegations of Tea Party racism before they again claim racism.

And may the next conservative group or individual fight back rather than silently take such abuse.