The Ace Of Spades

Eugene Robinson plays The Race Card. (The stating of facts about America by Americans of a skin tone darker-than-the-nat'l. average.)

One thing that struck me from the beginning about the tea party rhetoric was the idea of reclaiming something that has been taken away.

At a recent campaign rally in Paducah, Ky., Senate candidate Rand Paul, a darling of the tea party movement, drew thunderous applause when he said that if Republicans win, “we get to go to Washington and take back our government.”

Take it back from whom? Maybe he thinks it goes without saying, because he didn’t say.

On Sunday, in a last-minute fundraising appeal, Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee implored his supporters to help “return American government to the American people.”

Again, who’s in possession of the government right now, if not the American people? The non-American people? The un-American people?

Exactly, Gene, the un- & non-American people. House UN-American Activities Committee, anyone? One can't really (Not that it would stop any of them, mind you.) accuse anyone of being un-American unless s/he is at least passing, if you will, as American. Un-Americans do live among us.

Plus which, Bush Derangement Syndrome. That is, the stating of facts concerning the not- & never-President.

After all, it was Bush who inherited a budget surplus and left behind a suffocating deficit—I’m not being tendentious, just stating the facts. It was Bush who launched two wars without making any provision in the budget to pay for them, who proposed and won an expensive new prescription-drug entitlement without paying for it, who bailed out irresponsible Wall Street firms with the $700 billion TARP program.

Bush was vilified by critics while he was in office, but not with the suggestion that somehow the government had been seized or usurped—that it had fallen into hands that were not those of “the American people.” Yet this is the tea party suggestion about Obama.

It would be more than fair to state loudly & firmly that, as w/ virtually all the crap thrown at President Obama, the "seized & usurped" meme (Hate that non-word.) in reality applies to Bush. Or have all of you chumps forgotten America's 2000 Presidential Selection, Brought to You by The Supreme Court of These United Snakes in a Purely Partisan Decision? Of course you've forgotten, you're shitheels w/ the attention span of a mayfly, & you more than deserve the government you get.

I have to wonder what it is about Obama that provokes and sustains all this tea party ire. I wonder how he can be seen as “elitist,” when he grew up in modest circumstances—his mother was on food stamps for a time—and paid for his fancy-pants education with student loans. I wonder how people who genuinely cherish the American dream can look at a man who lived that dream and feel no connection, no empathy.

They're assholes, Gene. We know you'd be lynched if you came out w/ the complete truth, but c'mon, go down swinging. (Uh, wait, maybe not the best word choice. Or is it?)

I ask myself what’s so different about Obama, and the answer is pretty obvious: He’s black. For whatever reason, I think this makes some people unsettled, anxious, even suspicious—witness the willingness of so many to believe absurd conspiracy theories about Obama’s birthplace, his religion, and even his absent father’s supposed Svengali-like influence from the grave.

And our answer is that those who are unsettled, anxious & suspicious are two-faced chickenshits, at best. Our patience therew/ grows thinner by the day.