Behind the right's attack on Obama Don't be fooled by the grass-roots image of the tea partyers

[Shallah Kali]

Behind the right's attack on Obama
Don't be fooled by the grass-roots image of the tea partyers and the '10thers.'
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rutten16-2009sep16,0,4339213.column

Wilson, for example, isn't just a loudmouth with impulse-control issues. He's one of those Southern lawmakers with links to the sinister neo-Confederate movement and, as a state legislator, was one of the die-hards who opposed removing the Confederate battle flag from atop the South Carolina statehouse. He's also an unrepentant supporter of Obama's extreme critics. When he spoke on the House floor Monday, Wilson praised the "patriots" who turned the town halls into shouting matches and the tea party demonstrators who gathered in Washington last weekend to oppose "a government takeover" of healthcare. (Among the 179 representatives who voted against rebuking Wilson -- and circulated a letter on his behalf -- was Iowa's Steve King, who recently alleged that Obama was excluding "white men" from his initiatives.)

Meanwhile, the tea party spokesman, former radio talk show host Mark Williams -- what else could he be? -- was on CNN Monday and was asked by anchor Anderson Cooper about his personal blog in which Obama is described as "an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and racist in chief." Is that really what Williams thinks of the president, an incredulous Cooper asked. "He's certainly acting like it," Williams replied. "Until he embraces the whole country, what else can I conclude?"

Williams rather grandiloquently portrays himself as a kind of unlikely David battling an amorphous Goliath. The truth, however, is more prosaic because the tea parties are a grass-roots movement only in the sense familiar to those who know their way around California politics, where this whole thing began: The seed money and advice have come from a political action committee headquartered here and called Our Country Deserves Better. It's actually the successor to a PAC formed to defeat Obama in the general election. Williams was hired to work for the original PAC and then moved on to where the next job was.

The operators of Our Country Deserves Better also will be familiar to Californians because they're longtime activists on the state GOP's extreme right flank. One is former assemblyman and unsuccessful congressional candidate Howard Kaloogian, whose one notable success was as chairman of the campaign to recall Gov. Gray Davis; another is political strategist Sal Russo, who once worked for Ronald Reagan.

During his appearance on CNN Monday, Williams told Cooper that the movement Kaloogian and Russo got going isn't really about healthcare reform. That, he said, is "just a metaphor." The real purpose is to stop the slide into socialism, whose "seeds" -- according to Williams -- were planted under President George W. Bush and are being "nourished by Obama."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rutten16-2009sep16,0,4339213.column

[aquart]

1. Nobody here is fooled.

Not about that, anyway.

[Shallah Kali]

3. I figured that. I posted it because of the political connections of the teaparty inciters.

.

[pnorman]

2. Good article!

Thanks!

pnorman