Some Carter Flashbacks: Originally posted December 2, 2010
NewsBusters has a story about a recent interview on NPR (11-30-2010) where Jimmy Carter said he never criticized the Tea Party:
REHM: Last question, very briefly, what do you think of the Tea Party movement?
CARTER: You know, I never have criticized the Tea Party movement because, strangely enough, I capitalized on the same kind of situation politically that has made the Tea Party successful — that is, an extreme dissatisfaction with what was going on in Washington. Because I came along right after Watergate and right after the Vietnam lost and right after the assassination of the two Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr., and so I capitalized on that, and I was elected over some very wonderful people who were U.S. senators and immersed in the Washington scene.
In case you didn’t catch it, the interview/video at the top refutes this NPR interview.
So what about those signs that Brian Williams mentions? Not a lot of people realize this, but most of the signs with connections of Obama to Hitler are actually from what I term as a political cult. It just so happens this cult is a Democratic one. For instance, as a reminder, remember this exchange?
So, since most of these sign wielding nuts are actually Democrats, where does that leave Carter’s critique?
In 1979, LaRouche formed a Political Action Committee called the National Democratic Policy Committee (NDPC). LaRouche has run for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States seven times, beginning in 1980….
Read more at newer links: My Updated Post | Slate
What are all those signs about? Is there some sort of study of them done to find out if there is a percentage of them that are racially tinged?
UCLA study: Most tea party signs not racist
A study conducted by a UCLA grad student at the 9/12 taxpayer march on Washington contains some bad news for one of the mainstream media’s favorite narratives: the old ‘racist teabaggers’ meme.
Conversely, quantitative observation showed that the alleged racism was not prominent at the rally, at least not as far as signage is concerned. And to think Obamacrats wasted all those race cards for nothin’.
[….]
The investigation showed only 25% of signs expressing antagonism towards the President himself, only 5% touching on the President’s ethnicity or faith, and a piddly 1% promoting ‘Birtherism’.
I presume the 1% was newly anointed ‘birther’ Jake Tapper, respected journalist of ABC News – or once respected until he had the temerity to mention the President’s long form birth certificate the other day.
The teabag obsessed Obama apologists at MSNBC and the New York Times will no doubt be bitterly disappointed to learn that despite the breathless hype, racism no more typifies the tea party movement than honest unslanted analysis typifies their political coverage.
This study didn’t stop the questionable signs and ask if they were Lyndon LaRouche followers. Here is another story — old news, but needed for this recent news:
NewsBusters reported Thursday, a UCLA graduate student has published a study debunking the myth that the Tea Party is racist.
On Monday, Gretchen Carlson invited the study’s author on “Fox & Friends” to do what every news outlet ought to, namely, tell the truth about what the movement that is radically changing the political landscape is really all about.
[….]
Isn’t it interesting how easily this study was done?
As Carlson asked Ekins, why haven’t any news outlets, apart from Fox News and conservative websites, done any investigation into the allegations of racism within this movement to see if they were at all true?
Yes, that was a rhetorical question, for media have been trying to either dismiss or demonize the Tea Party since its inception.
THE VIDEO IS GONE, BUT THE TRANSCRIPT IS BELOW:
GRETCHEN CARLSON, HOST: Well, Brian, speaking of the Tea Party, the movement has been under attack since it started. Liberal members of the media and politicians have come out calling it racist.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JANEANE GAROFALO: They have no idea what the Boston tea party was about.
KEITH OLBERMANN: That’s right.
GAROFALO: They don’t know the history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: And you see folks waving tea bags around.
HOUSE SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI: Carrying swastikas, symbols like that to a town hall meeting on healthcare.
FORMER PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: An overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.
HBO’s BILL MAHER: The Teabaggers, they’re not a movement. They’re a cult.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
CARLSON: But is the racist label accurate? A grad student at UCLA just completed a study on the Tea Party and the signs that are carried at the rallies and she came up with a much different conclusion. Joining me now to share her finding is Emily Ekins. Good morning to you, Emily
EMILY EKINS, UCLA GRADUATE STUDENT: Good to be with you.
CARLSON: So, you went to a rally. You decided to take photographs of about 250 signs, and what did you find out?
EKINS:Well, what I did is I tried to take a picture of every visible sign I could find and I found that over 50% of the signs were about limited government and lower spending. And only about 6% of the signs were controversial in nature.
CARLSON: How tough was it for you to go and take these photos and come up with that conclusion?
EKINS: You know, it was actually pretty straight forward. I’m surprised more people haven’t done this. I just went to the rally, I walked in a systemic fashion, you know, row by row, took a picture of every visible sign and then I categorized them. And I should say that I was very conscientious that any sign that, you know, could be construed as controversial, meaning they had undertones about immigration or race or Islam, you know, I was sure to include those into these controversial categories. But frankly, they just, there weren’t that many, and so it added up to six.
CARLSON: Why do you think that your test results differ from the perception of the mainstream media and those clips that we just saw?
EKINS: Well, honestly, I think it has everything to do with your method and your approach. I think what often happens is people go to these events, these rallies, and they’re either attracted or repelled by various signs. And if you just cover a couple of signs no matter how objective you try to be, you’re just, you can’t generalize everybody that’s there by a couple of signs. And so the method needs to be systematic that when we go to these events we need to look at all the signs. We need to say, we need to see what all the signs are telling us. And I think that method revealed something very different than a method that just looks at a few signs.
CARLSON. Here was a quote from NAACP Ben Jealous on the Tea Parties. “We take issue with the Tea Party’s continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements. The time has come for them to accept the responsibility that comes with influence and make clear there’s no space for racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in their movement.” I mean, I guess he’s speaking to the 6% of the signs that you found that were questionable, but you still say that’s a tiny percentage in what the overall message was.
EKINS: Yes, I mean overwhelmingly, the message is about limited government. At this particular rally that I, that I did conduct the analysis at.
CARLSON: I know that you want to do further studies, and I find it actually amazing that nobody else has done what you chose to do. So hats off to you. But I’m interested in knowing, you’re at UCLA. What grade did you get?
EKINS: Well, actually I’m a PhD student, so grades work differently there. This is my research for my dissertation, and actually my advisors, you know, they’re very encouraging and seeking academic truth. So they were, they were pleased with kind of the new approach and they’re very encouraging.
CARLSON: Well, that’s very good to hear. Congratulations to you, Emily Ekins, she is a UCLA graduate student. She decided to go to that Tea Party movement and decide see what the signs are really all about. Thanks for sharing your findings with us, Emily.
EKINS: Sure. Thank you.
So, is this merely another nail in the “worst one’s” irrelevance coffin? I say yes, but I am sure there are NPR fans out there that disagree with me.
REASON.COM did a bang-up job in dealing with the issue:
- Video from “Can’t You Read the Signs?“
- See also: “Red America, White Power“
Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the Tea Party movement is “struggling to overcome accusations of racism,” some of which has been perpetuated in its editorial pages. Yesterday’s New York Times, home to the most obsessively anti-Tea Party editorial page in America, was stunned to discover that “at least 32 African-Americans are running for Congress this year as Republicans, the biggest surge since Reconstruction, according to party officials.”
Previously, The Times reported that Tea Partiers are, on average, people with a high levels of education and higher than average incomes. So it would seem that they aren’t, as some editorialists and pundits contend, simply a gang of subliterate militia men or, as actress Janeane Garofalo recently told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, a subsection of the white power movement.
Wandering the recent Tax Day tea party in Washington DC with Reason.tv, we saw some stupid signs — though none that could be considered offensive or racist. We talked to some people that claimed President Obama was both a Czarist and Bolshevik. We spoke to a former star of Saturday Night Live who has previously claimed that president might, in fact, be the anti-Christ. Or a communist. Or both. There were those who fretted that the United States were morphing into a Stalinist state. And there were countless protesters concerned that the Obama administration was spending recklessly, interested in auditing the Federal Reserve, and seething about the General Motors bailout.
So did we find that the Tea Party was motivated by race, by the fact that we now have a black president? Did it seem as if their stated concerns about health care reform and a ballooning national debt simply a smokescreen, designed to concealing a racist agenda? Here is what we found.