Weak tea

F**king F**ksticks!

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I was reading this article by Dave Weigel at Slate and I realized that “What the fuck?” month is still going on. It starts with this:

We sit down and we’re given the full details for the conference: “Fractures, Alliances, and Mobilizations: Emerging Analyses of the Tea Party Movement.” It’s the first event of its kind hosted by Berkeley’s two-year-old Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements.

Do you get the feeling that just maybe there might be little bit of bias here? It’s kinda like Baylor University doing a comparative study of Mormonism.

But wait! There’s more:

But the social scientists are more ready than the historians to crunch numbers and prove that racial animosity is key to the Tea Party. It’s cold comfort for people like Hardy Frye, but it does suggest that Obama’s ability to form some grand populist coalition was always limited. The University of Washington’s Christopher Parker shares his research-in-progress based on interviews in seven states that break down subjects into “true skeptics” of the Tea Party at one end and “true believers” at the other.

“If you look across the board here, true skeptics of the Tea Party, 49 percent agreed with the proposition that blacks ought to work their way up without any special favors,” says Parker. “But if you look at the true believers, that goes to 92 percent. This is another indicator of racism, right: Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve. Forty-five percent of true skeptics disagree with this; almost 80 percent of true believers disagree with this.”

After all the media and progblogger hoopla about how the Tea Party is nothing but the Klan minus the white sheets, THIS is their proof?

I think we need a new rule – Everyone is presumed to be not guilty of racism unless they:

1. Use racial epithets and/or stereotypes

2. Advocate discrimination and/or the superiority of one race over another.

3. Actually discriminate based on race

Allegations of racism must be supported by clear and convincing evidence.

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