Wingnuts

Subtle and Not-So-Subtle Tea Party Racism

Will Bunch posted his first teabagger item for the Daily News. The following two profiles jumped off the page.

Perhaps none more so than Phillis Kluft, 71, who raised four kids as a single mom in East Haven, Conn., and moved six years ago to The Villages, Fla., a retiree-laden epicenter of Beckmania where she is a leader of the Tri-County Tea Party of Florida. Kluft said she believes that supporters of President Obama are mainly seeking handouts from Washington.

"I saved money for my old age and didn't go on a vacation or buy a new car. It really galls me that these people sit on their ass and expect other people to take care of them!" the grandmother said, her voice rising in intensity, then adding to whoops of approval in Section 107: "I am so disgusted with this Obama bulls---!"

Here's a senior citizen who's very likely receiving Social Security and Medicare benefits, complaining about how "these people sit on their ass and expect other people to take care of them." This is clearly aimed at people who she believes are welfare queens and the like. If not, who then? People on Medicare like her? No way. This is racism thinly disguised as an anti-government and anti-tax position.

Next...

An outlier was Mike Freese, a Vietnam veteran, retired Florida alcohol-enforcement agent and amateur artist who greeted arriving fans with a large rendering of a majorly wrinkled Nancy Pelosi in a bikini, reading "Obamacare Can't Stop This," getting belly laughs from passers-by. Freese, in a "Git-R-Done" camouflage baseball cap, showed a reporter a deck of playing cards he'd made showing Obama as the joker, holding signs linking Obama to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, among others. "I don't care if they think it is [racist] or not," he said, when pressed about it. "They call it racist anyway."

That's because it is. The last time a deck of cards was used in this way, Republicans were trying to kill the people shown on the cards.

And the Pelosi bikini thing? Classy.

Adding... Glenn Beck is clearly turning into a televangelist.