8.05.2010

When "Unity" Is Spelled Wrong

The "Uni-Tea" Party Facade


Last Saturday, July 31, was a day made of FAIL. The “Uni-Tea” rally was an event organized by New Jersey neo-con Jeffrey Weingarten to prove that the Tea Party wasn’t a hotbed of racism by pushing the microscopic numbers of black people who are willing to teabag for Republicans into the front lines.




Still, there were probably twice as many black people on the speakers list as there were in the actual crowd. And oh, what a crowd — an event which predicted attendance in the thousands was lucky to have two hundred people, of which less than half a dozen were people of color.

The Tea Party protests too much, we think; the more noise they make about how they aren’t racist, the less everybody believes them, especially while they continue to step on their own cranks as their supporters show up at public rallies with racist signs and their candidates for elected office pop off in public about blacks and Muslims.

An endless procession of pro-rightist shills lead by black Republican David Webb, were paraded across the stage mouthing the standard rightist tropes about free enterprise and picking one’s self up by one’s bootstraps — basically, saying what the crowd of pudgy Caucasians in folding camp chairs wanted to hear. Deneen Borelli ranted about Obama’s supposed “war on fossil fuels” and the offshore drilling moratorium even as Gulf Coast ecosystems and economies are devastated by the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Black Republican David Webb Was MC For the Event

The most gob-smacking of the bunch, though, had to be Janks Morton who, after going on for so long about God that we found ourselves silently begging him to stop, looked us all right square in the eye and told us that “healthcare is a privilege”. Yes, that’s right; this tool was basically telling us that people with catastrophic injuries and illnesses should be allowed to remain sick and debilitated — and probably die — because they aren’t rich enough to afford the “privilege” of healthcare.


The day’s headliner, Little Andy Breitbart, was in fine form, accusing the opposition of doing everything he’s guilty of — including the ham-handed doctoring of video footage — and accusing his opposition of (wait for it) slandering “the good name of Karl Rove”, while totally avoiding the issue of his own attempt to slander USDA employee Shirley Sharrod with hacked-up video footage edited to make Sherrod seem to be saying the opposite of what she actually said. He continued to hammer on that tired old “politics of personal destruction” riff while totally ignoring his destruction of ACORN with James O’Keefe’s video footage which was edited in the manner of an old Benny Hill sketch. He pissed and moaned about how the mainstream media was mistreating the Tea Party, even as he and the Tea Party were relentlessly fawned over by Fox News and now he is gaining a crowd of fans from the neo-Nazi crowd on Stormfront.com.

Photos by Isis and The Cubster. Find more photos here and here.