This is false, outrageous, and no surprise. The NAACP is like a talking GI Joe doll with a cord coiled into his back. Pull it, and GI Joe says something manly and combative. Pull the NAACP's string. "Racism!" squawks the shopworn voice. Pull it again. "Bigotry!" it squeals, as it has so many times before.
The NAACP once was totally justified when it decried the racism and bigotry that the Jim Crow South's Democrat-led governments mandated by law. In 2010, however, screaming "racism" sounds increasingly delusional, given that America is governed by a black man who voters comfortably elected in November 2008 and wished well, largely across the political spectrum, on Inauguration Day 2009.
The NAACP's original resolution sought to "repudiate the racism of the Tea Parties" and combat their supposed efforts to "push our country back to the pre-civil rights era." This statement reportedly was toned down, although it was debated behind closed doors and will remain unseen until the NAACP's board approves it in October.
If the Tea Party movement really is fueled by bias, why did they invite a black man like me to address one of the first tea parties in Washington, D.C. on February 26, 2009?
Why would these alleged racists invite me to rally an even bigger tea party in Manhattan on July 1, 2009?
Did prejudice inspire them to let David Webb, a black man, organize that Times Square event, and also run the New York Tea Party?
Did racial insensitivity lead the Tea Party to showcase Congress of Racial Equality national spokesman Niger Innis, Project 21's Deneen Borelli, and other black conservatives and free-marketeers?
"In March, respected members of the Congressional Black Caucus reported that racial epithets were hurled at them as they passed by a Washington, D.C., health care protest," the NAACP's website states. "Civil rights legend John Lewis was called the 'n-word' in the incident."
Americans still await video footage and/or hear audiotape that proves these oft-repeated accusations. Reps. Lewis (D-Ga.) and Andre Carson (D-Ind.) were encircled by TV cameras, radio news gear, cell phone cameras and other recording devices. To date, none of them has yielded any sound or image of anybody lobbing racial insults.
If such comments actually were uttered, the NAACP and its Leftist allies would have played them repeatedly to embarrass and humiliate Republicans, conservatives, and the allegedly racist Tea Party movement. In fact, no one whatsoever has claimed conservative activist Andrew Breitbart's $100,000 bounty for any documentary proof that these supposed race bombs ever were tossed at their targets.
Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity last week played video footage from four different news cameras that captured the exact moment last March 20 when Rep. Carson says "maybe fifteen people" yelled "n - word fifteen times" as he walked outside the U.S. Capitol. "
They started surrounding us," he added, referring to him, Rep. Lewis, and Lewis' chief of staff. "It was like a page out of a time machine."
None of these four videotapes shows anything resembling Carson's scenario.
"The camera never blinks," newsman Dan Rather once wrote. It does not hallucinate, either.
Consider the Tea Party's Contract from America, a pledge to which it holds its endorsed candidates. (TheContract.org.) Among 10 planks, it advocates a single-rate tax, a two-thirds-vote requirement for tax hikes, ObamaCare's repeal, and the defeat of cap-and-trade legislation. Nothing is even remotely related to race, ethnicity or identity.
Wouldn't bigots devote at least one of 10 reforms to something racial?
The Tea Party movement avoids racial issues and instead advances lower taxes and spending and greater fiscal discipline. These issues are neither black nor white. They are green.
Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
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