For the past couple of weeks, I’ve had a little fun with the fact that a tea party would be held in my dear old lefty hometown of Ann Arbor (Mich.). That party was held on Thursday, Tax Day. A reader sent me a story from AnnArbor.com, and he said, “The first picture is worth a thousand words.” In the picture, a tea partier is asking an anti–tea partier why he insists on disrupting the tea-party protest. The tea partier is a black woman from Ypsilanti (Ann Arbor’s downscale neighbor). (I mean no offense by that: I my own bad self was born in Ypsi.) The anti–tea partier is a white man from Ann Arbor.
Of course, of course.
Why do I mention race? You know exactly why: Because it has become the prime gambit of the Left to claim that the tea-party movement is racist — and, indeed, that anti-Obama, anti-administration, and anti-Democratic criticism at large is racist. Just listen to Jimmy Carter.
For a story that appears in the new National Review, I asked Col. Allen West about all this. He is a congressional candidate in Florida and one of about 40 black Republicans running for Congress this year. He said, “We see right now that the Left is trying to use race as a means to suppress honest criticism of government.” He further cited one of Saul Alinsky’s infamous “Rules for Radicals”: You “pick a target, freeze it, personalize it,” and so on. “The Left just wants to demonize the tea-party movement,” West continued. They want to place it outside the bounds of legitimacy. “They’re scared,” said West. “The Left is scared. That’s all they’re showing.”
The candidate himself is a popular speaker at Florida tea parties. And, as he said to me, “I think they can see I’m black.”
Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Party on, tea people.