They want their country back! 
The National Tea Party Convention kicked off yesterday in Nashville.*** And just in case you weren’t positive that the majority of these tea partiers have swallowed the right wing politics of fear hook line and sinker, check out what Tom Tancredo, former Republican congressman from Colorado had to say:
“Every year the liberal Dems and the rhino Republicans turned up the temperature ever so slightly. It seemed after a while we’d all be boiled to death in a cauldron of the nanny state. And then, something really odd happened, mostly because I think that we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country. [ wild applause and laughter] People who could not even spell the word ‘vote,’ or say it in English [more hootin' and hollerin'], put a committed socialist idealogue in the White House, name is Barack Hussein Obama.”
Tancredo went on to say,
“The revolution has come. It was led by the cult of multiculturalism aided by leftist liberals all over who don’t have the same ideas about America as we do.”
Later, in response to questions from the Daily Beast, Tancredo said:
“I don’t want anybody to be refused the right to vote if, maybe, they have to mark [the ballot] with an X. I do think they should have to know something about how the government works.”
First of all, I doubt some rule mandating that only informed citizens be permitted to vote would give Republicans or Tea Partiers a straight shot to the White House. I’m by no means suggesting that all right wingers are dummies. But it can’t be denied that many of the crazies who attended the town hall meetings last summer–screaming about Obama is a socialist Nazi who wants to pull the plug on your grandma–are some of the most uninformed idiots in all the land. While I certainly believe that there are dumbasses on the left side of the spectrum as well, considering that the the keynote speaker for the Convention, Sarah Palin the Wolf Huntress herself ran for Vice-President without even knowing what the hell the Vice-President does, Tancredo ought to be careful what he wishes for.
The salient point, however, is that the call for literacy tests is racism. Plain and simple. Yeah…. something really weird happened… a black man was elected president! Why? Because we didn’t make all the brown folks… all the “multicultural” folks take a civics literacy before voting his black ass into office.
That’s the subtext, isn’t it? Is there any other way to read his comments? Especially considering that literacy tests were widely used to deny black people the vote during the Jim Crow era?
***[Author's Note: When I write something, I really ought to press "publish." I wrote this fully 4 days ago. So... um... yeah.]
You know, every time I read stuff about the Tea Party people (and I try to limit that, for the sake of my blood pressure) I can’t help but feel like they are an echo of the Third Reich. Their party is also entirely a propaganda machine. It is such horrible and blatant manipulation…and it terrifies me, it really does. I keep watching them wondering when I need to run away to Canada or start building attics for some of my non-white friends…
They may not be pinning anything to our shirts yet, but they are pinning words to people already, marking them out for persecution. I’m serious about being actually scared of them…
Interestingly enough, the fastest-growing ESL community in my area seems to be people from countries that were included in the former USSR.
So some of them might fail the “understand the word ‘vote’” test but I’m guessing they’d have some thoughts about the characterization of President Obama as a socialist.
And, for the record, I TOTALLY agree with you that his “literacy test” comment was code for “brown people.” It just struck me as funny, given the particular changing demographics of my teeny pocket of the world. :)