This week, actor Morgan Freeman was interviewed by the hapless Piers Morgan on CNN. In that interview, Freeman accused the Tea Party of being racist because of their opposition to President Obama.
http://youtu.be/Yecco-KPDK4
Comment: First of all, Freeman took the well-documented statement by a Tea Party leader (and others) that their goal was to make sure Obama served only one term. Sure enough. What Freeman added was his own view in such a way as to make the casual viewer think that they wanted to "get that black guy out of there". That is patently false. Such a statement has not been made by any Tea Party leader to my knowledge.
It is not about race. It is about Obama's left-wing, big government policies. Indeed, the main reason the Tea Party was born as a movement was in opposition to higher taxes and more government control. They have also opposed any Republican office-holders who have not stood up for those principles.
Secondly, who are the most-favored figures with the Tea Party among Republican presidential candidates-and talked-about possible candidates?
Herman Cain
Marco Rubio
Allen West
Michele Bachmann
Sarah Palin
Of course, it's pretty hard to call the Tea Party sexist when the turnouts are about half women.
I guarantee you if Allen West ever declares his candidacy for president (and he will someday) the Tea Party will support him above all others.
So much for Mr Freeman's racist charges.
And if any us "cried" when Obama was elected, it was because we had done what the media neglected to do-vet him. We did the research. We examined the words of Obama's infamous pastor. We examined the connections with Bill Ayres, Bernadine Dohrn, and others. We examined Obama's sparse qualifications for president, and we knew that he was a far leftist. That is why we were disappointed that Obama became president, and we have seen our fears realized.
If Barack Obama were indeed a president of all the poeple, how do you explain a race-obsessed Justice Department under Eric Holder that picks and chooses its civil rights cases by who the victims and perpetrators are? Would Obama have made those statements about making the Republicans ride in the back seat? Would we have a Democratic Congress engaging in character assassination against a large segment of the population (their political opponents and the Tea party)? Why would Obama engage in class warfare with his rhetoric in trying to raise taxes on higher income-earners?
Here is Herman Cain's response to Mr Freeman on Fox News with Neil Cavuto:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orbWXl7Ydk4&feature=related
I don't know Mr Morgan, and he may be a good guy. But his statement is another example of calling anyone who isn't on Obama's side a racist. To use his own words, we need to be better than that.
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If Morgan Freeman senses racist motives, I would take him more seriously than many. Freeman, after all, is a man who has openly and firmly opined that there should be no such thing as "Black History Month." He has laid out the reasons why rather well - although Carter G. Woodson, who invented what was then called "Negro History Week," would probably agree. Woodson always expected it to be a temporary measure, to fill in parts of history that had been concealed. There is no distinct and separate history.
Getting back to Freeman, he has assiduously worked himself out of stereotypically "black" movie roles, and lived his life as an individual. I believe he is correct that those who do object to the president's skin color have found the Tea Party a convenient vehicle to submerge their opposition in, without having to admit their motive.
That said, the primary motivation I see is not racism, but a sense of wounded entitlement. Republicans and the faux conservatives who can't tell an aristocracy from a free market, had a sense starting in 1980 that they were entitled to a Thousand Year Reign, or at least a Republican Century. Every time the voters swing the other way, they are outraged at the interruption.
Anyone who claims to know what motivate "people" to join "the Tea Party" is either deluded, or projecting their own personal motives onto a rather inchoate and disparate movement. The only thing the movement has in common is precisely that they don't like Obama, for one reason or another. IF there is any one starting motive, it seemed to me it was the bail-out of large financial institutions from their own bad investment decisions. Unfortunately, as things stood, these institutions WERE "too big to fail." Their collapse would have frozen the entire economy and thrown three times as many people out of work. President Obama's greatest failure is that he did not break them up into pieces small enough to be left to rise or fall on their own dime, without any one or even three threatening to bring down millions of innocent Americans with them.
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