Olby to tea partiers: C’mon, you know you’re racists

A change of pace for the modern-day Murrow. Instead of angrily accusing his opponents of racism, here he accuses them of racism with exquisite, almost poignant condescension. A money quote from the Newsbusters transcript:

I know if I could only listen to Lincoln on this of all days about the better angels of our nature, I’d know that what we’re seeing at the Tea Parties is, at its base, people who are afraid – terribly, painfully, cripplingly, blindingly afraid…

You’re scared and you’re in a world that has changed in a million ways, and the most obvious one of them is something unforeseeable not a decade ago – a black President. And yet, you are also in an world, inherited, installed by generations that knew only fear and brutality and prejudice and difference and suspicion. The generations have gone, but the suspicion lingers on.

You can read the whole thing at the link but I recommend sitting through at least the second half of the clip lest you miss the heartrending pathos of it all. DrewM did a nice job of responding to him at Ace’s site, but I’d add two points. One: I’m actually surprised that Olby keeps hammering this racial demagoguery, not because it’s beneath him — to the contrary — but because it’s turned him into a joke and you’d think his giant ego would eventually blanch at that fact. He may not be bothered by lefty bloggers like Bob Somerby rolling their eyes at his simple-minded race-baiting, but when Jon Stewart’s doing seven-minute goofs on him for framing Scott Brown as some sort of woman-hating brownshirt, one might expect a moment of reflection. Then again, this is a guy who thinks pick-up trucks are code for white supremacism and who once compared Fox News to the KKK (there’s a Klan reference here too, natch), so it may be less a case of him thinking this is some smart, shrewd debating strategy than simply being unable to resist a compulsion. Since he was kind enough to psychoanalyze tea partiers, feel free to respond in kind.

Second point: No less a liberal light than James Carville interviewed tea partiers to find out what’s driving them and ended up concluding that racism isn’t a factor. Believe it or not, they’re really, truly motivated by antipathy to Obama’s agenda. In which case, what’s the ultimate point here? That rallying in support of small government is itself ipso facto racist?

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