Twinkie Alert: In Contemplating Tea Parties, the Washington Post Finds Racism Just About Everywhere

Tea Party “racism” has roused the Washington Post to editorial indignation, as racism — whether real or imagined — always does. “The angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar,” ran a recent piece by Post columnist Colbert King, an eye-witness to one such conclave:

Those were the faces I saw at a David Duke rally in Metairie, La., in 1991: sullen with resentment, wallowing in victimhood, then exploding with yells of excitement as the ex-Klansman and Republican gubernatorial candidate spewed vitriolic white-power rhetoric.

It so happened that your loyal servant here spoke at a Tea Party in Mandeville, La. on April 9 (essentially a bedroom community of my hometown, Metairie). You’d think some of the angry faces that so traumatized King, some of the very ones, in fact, might have been in evidence. Instead, the opening prayer was given by a black pastor who was greeted with a warm and lengthy ovation:

“The Rev. Stephen Broden drew at least six standing ovations from a mixed but predominantly white audience gathered by the Greater New Orleans Tea Party,” wrote the New Orleans Times-Picayune about an earlier conclave.

“So race is part of this picture,” wrote Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne on April 18, while citing the chilling findings of a New York Times/CBS poll. “A quarter of Tea Partiers say that the Obama administration’s policies favor blacks over whites, compared with only 11 percent in the country as a whole.” More horrifying still: “Sixty-three percent of the Tea Party folks say they most watch Fox News for information about politics and current events.”

Among policemen for political correctness, the Post has long prided itself as among the most industrious and vigilant. To wit:

• “When a sports team owner defended his team’s name (Redskins) the Post pounced: “Redskins is not a term fashioned by American Indians… The nickname was assigned to them just as the pejorative designation ‘darkies’ was once imposed on African-American slaves. That was wrong then — this is wrong now.”
• When Republican Sen. George Allen made his off-handed “macaca” crack about his Democratic opponent’s Indian campaign aide the Post was all over him. The comment was clearly a “slur.” Scolded an editorial, “Many Indian Americans are Disturbed by Allen’s Remarks.”

[youtube r90z0PMnKwI nolink]

• When Bill Bennet made an oblique reference to black crime rate a Post editorial scolded him for being “the poster child for racism.”
• When the National Rifle Association’s Dr Paul Blackman made a similar reference while citing mountains of irrefutable statistics, he had, “adopted a racist position.”

And if you think advisories against unsafe Chinese imported foods might past muster with an editorial staff usually quick to trumpet the dangers of everything from Alar on apples to almost everything in a Hostess Twinkie (“Twinkie Deconstructed,” April 27, 2007) think again. It turns out that the crack editorial board sniffed out “yellow-peril imagery,” in these recent advisories about Chinese imports:

They conjure images of the fiendish juggernaut of the Chinese Poison Train bearing down on the hapless American consumer, tied to the tracks by a nefarious evildoer with a Fu Manchu mustache.

Point is, the Washington Post is immensely proud of its hyper-sensitive olfactory abilities in sniffing out bigotry. So Tea Parties were long, long overdue for a few of their whiffs, gags, and consequent scoldings.