Delusion and capitulation: the price of unity?

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

In his closing speech trying to urge sanity and togetherness Jon Stewart, seeking to say both sides do it, had to say three times that the Teabaggers are not racists.

But that is false.

I do not believe the teabaggers are a white supremacist movement to bolster my alienated, blinkered leftist world view.

I believe it because it's all they fucking talk about!

But if we pretend otherwise then everything will be good.

Essentially, "I will give up the truth if you give up your lies."

I guess that is the price of unity.

The irony of Stewart's closing speech was that we have heard it all before. It is a cliche. It was what Barack Obama ran on and seems to actually believe. It is what the most absurd, self-congratulatory Broderesque pundits have always preached.

And it has been as decisively and quickly and repeatedly debunked as anyone could possibly ask... over and over. And over.

[RZM]

1. From what I can tell . . .

the 'size of government' and 'taxes are too high' and 'the deficit' and 'Obama sucks' is 'all they fucking talk about.' Not white supremacy. I suspected that particular comment by Stewart would not go down as well here as the rest of the speech :)

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

2. Yes, they have a roster of issues that are factually bogus...

...and that they never cared about before until they could be laid at the feet of a non-American alien fascist, marxist, atheist, Muslim interloper.

Who just happens to be black.

And they need to take back their America from somebody who took it away from them.

And they happen to be 99.99% white.

I wonder who they need to take America back from?

[RZM]

4. I don't think you are capable of being convinced otherwise

Nor do I want to spend much time and energy defending the tea party. I'll just say this:

1) I think it's naive to believe that we wouldn't see something similar if Hillary Clinton (remember, a truly hated figure on the right in her time) were president.

2) You didn't really contest my point. You stated that white supremacy was 'all they fucking talk about' and I said it wasn't, but rather they spend much of their time blathering about deficits and taxes and such. Your counter is that they are only doing that because he's not white. That's an inference, not a fact. Like many other groups, they dislike ANYBODY AND EVERYBODY who doesn't agree with them. The fact that African-Americans overwhelmingly vote Dem means that the stage is not set for common ground or cooperation and when you have a bunch of whites and a bunch of blacks on opposite sides of any issue, there are always going to be those on all sides (and outside observers) who see it in racial terms. Obama's race matters, don't get me wrong. It's mattered at many points in his career, in both the positive ones and the negative ones. There certainly are racist elements in the Tea Party who see Obama in strictly racial terms, but overall I think it's a bit overdone. Broad-brushing is quite often intellectual laziness and like it or not, that goes for the Tea Party too (other than of course painting them as constantly harping about deficits and taxes, which is clear for all to see)

3) 'Take back America' has been a meaningless phrase for quite a while now. EVERYBODY think that their vision is that of 'true America' and just about everybody thinks it's well nigh time to 'take it back.'

[TheKentuckian]

3. They are definitely racist and a bunch of extreme nutters trying to bring back the gilded age

at the service of wealthy interests.

They are the extreme Reich wing of an unAmerican terrorist organization called the GOP and the foot soldiers of economic fascists and social radical regressives.

[JackRiddler]

5. It's bullshit, but how many people in the crowd do you think buy into the equivalence argument?