Tapping Into America's Dirty Secret

The South has never stopped fighting the Civil War, or as my friend from Mississippi calls it "the War of Northern Aggression".  That is seriously how it was taught in his school!

That war rages not just in the South but across the country, but it's just hidden.  I firmly believe there is a great percentage of the Tea Baggers who though they would deny it are just tapping into that hidden war.  It is not about succession.  It is about racism.

Just look at the demographics of that whole manufactured movement, it's 99% white for starters.  Heck, that's even whiter than the GOP!  And listen to the anger they vent at their events.  You will hear more than one racial epithet with quite a few "fags" and "homos" tossed in for variety.

This is the rage that people like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have tapped into.  They want to "take our country back".  From who?  The country elected the government, we are still a Democracy so who are they wanting to take it back from?  Well it all boils down to the fact that there is a black man in the White House.

That sticks in their craw worse than any ideological issue.  Oh they rant about health care, but when you ask them for specifics, they can only reply with the lies that have been spread.  Then their anger turns to their real problem, President Obama.  They have been raised in a world of white privilege and that has ended and they don't like it!

Just look at the outrageously racist posters they carry and their inflammatory if misspelled signs.  These folks are holding metaphoric torches and pitchforks and they might as well be chanting slogans from the Ku Klux Klan.  If you showed them pictures of themselves they would be embarrassed, but in the heat of the moment they have let their inner racist out to rant.

What Fox News and Palin and the others are doing is very dangerous.  They are playing with fire, and they have no idea how or if they can control it. It's time to turn down the burner and stop feeding the flames.  Some in the Republican Party have already realized this and are distancing themselves from the Tea Baggers, but it may be too little too late.  The GOP is cracking at the seams, and their lock-step mentality may have worked when they were the party in power but now it is just making them look obstructionist and worse.

If the GOP  get co-opted by the Tea Baggers, the true conservatives will stay away, not wanting to be identified with the radical elements of that bunch.  It's good news for Democrats if they can start behaving like a unified party, but hey, they are Democrats!

The whole thing is potential bad news for the rest of us.  With luck it will fizzle out and fade into history's dustbin.  On the other hand, a small group of racists managed to control a whole continent for a while, and all they had to do was tap into the racial hatred of Jews.  Maybe Palin and Fox will start down that road next?