Friday, February 5, 2010
Litracy Test
The first Tea Party Convention in Nashville opened up with a bang when former congressman Tom Tancredo said that we should have to take a civics, literacy test before we can vote because "people who could not even spell the word 'vote', or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House." I say, bring it on. I’ve seen enough of those barely literate tea party signs that say things like yes God bless Amercia and Thank you Fox News for keeping us infromed to be willing to bet that huge numbers of white people would be stripped of their voting rights right along with the minority citizens he seems to be targeting.
I guess Mr. Tancredo longs for the good old days before the 1965 Voting Rights Act when whoever was white and in power could decide which Americans got to cast their ballot on election day. I get sick and tired of hearing these apologists for the movement saying that it isn’t about race, it’s about limited government spending. WTF?!?! You had eight goddamn years to complain about Bush taking us from a surplus to over a trillion dollar debt and I didn’t hear one peep. Obama didn’t even get a chance to step into the White House before you were ready to impeach him. As someone who grew up in the first generation in the South to attend desegregated schools, I recognize a racist when I see them and a lot of Tea Party members bear a strong resemblance to the bigots I knew as a kid.
I’m not saying that most of the people at these rallies are consciously prejudiced but they have a fear of “those people”. George Bush was one of them in a way that anyone named Barack Hussein Obama could never be. And the really bizarre thing is that the Tea Partiers are actually “my people”. They are the culture of my childhood. I had my fifteen seconds of fame in the mid-seventies when WAVE-TV 3 filmed my sister and me sitting on the side of the stage at a free Ray Stevens concert at the Kentucky State Fair. And now he’s writing songs for the Tea Party movement. That pretty much sums up my life. Even though they drive me insane, the people who actually believe the bold-faced lies that our sitting president is a racist, socialist foreigner are the same people from church who changed my diapers in the nursery and taught me in Vacation Bible School when I was little.
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There is no way to prove this but it needs to be part of the discussion. There is this growing belief that the Tea Party rallies are infiltrated by people who show up to deliberately behave as extremists. The liberal news media picks out these people to paint the unfair picture of "all Tea Partiers" being extremists.
ReplyDeleteThe picture you used here is a perfect example of singling out a sign with words mis-spelled. The media loves to do this sort of thing, too. Instead of focusing on the opinions of the people at the rallies, the liberal media zeroed in on signs mis-spelled and the extremists of the movement.
I'm not as cynical as some are who believe that the Tea Partiers aren't smart and don't have a sense of humor. I give them the benefit of the doubt. I wouldn't think it unusual if they intentionally mis-spell words on those protest signs in an effort to mock the snobs in the liberal media. Although the mis-spellings give elitists something to giggle over I think the Tea Partiers are having the last laugh on those who don't take them seriously.
Lastly...I'm a huge fan of Ray Stevens and I can tell you that he is NOT writing songs for the Tea Party. He recorded a song that resonated with the Tea Party, called "We The People"...don't make it out to be that he's working for them or anything. The song would've been written even without a Tea Party movement given who the President is and his policies.