The Associated Press (AP) is reporting that another Tea Party group, this time from in Kansas, is in hot water trying to defend its depiction of the President as a skunk. The group claims its depiction of President Obama as a skunk is satire, not racism as the leader of a civil rights group alleges.
The Hutchinson-based Patriot Freedom Alliance says on its website that like the president, the skunk is “half black, half white, and almost everything it does stinks.”
Oh yeah, absolutely nothing racist about that depiction at all, it’s just some good ol’ boy fun that’s all boy.
The Hutchinson News reports local NAACP president Darrell Pope sees no humor in the depiction, which he calls a blatant statement of racism.
A local tea party supporter Chuck Sankey says former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been the target of worse insults than what’s on the website.
And what exactly would those be Chucky? Notice he doesn’t outline any, just throws out the generic commentary; and even, for the sake of the argument, if that was true, how does it justify portraying one’s group as racists?
“It’s satire is what it is,” said Thomas Hymer, Hutchinson, who maintains the website, http://patriotfreedomalliance.org/default.aspx “Satire in a politically incorrect form,” he said.
Darrell Pope, president of the Hutchinson branch of the NAACP, said he sees no humor in it and called it “a blatant statement of racism.”
“It’s intended to be malicious,” Pope said.
Tea Party supporters can tout Herman Cain all they want, Pope said, but the skunk posting is “a statement of what they’re all about.”
The national NAACP previously has urged Tea Party leaders across the country to denounce any signs of racism.
Regarding the reference to half-black, half-white, Sankey said, “Isn’t that the truth? What’s wrong with the truth?”
Obama’s mother was a white American, and his father was a black African.
“It may be offensive to some, of course, but in humor there is always an element of truth,” said Sankey, saying he is neither racist nor bigoted but is concerned about the direction the country is going.
If people are offended by it, Sankey said, his advice is: “Don’t look at it.”
Well heck Sankey, why not just depict the president as a zebra, then you’ll get your racist hit about him being half black and half white as well as attack his African roots, oh but wait, you won’t be able to nail the whole stinky stud huh? Sankey’s a good ol’ boy racist as is the group for posting the picture.
What this really shows is the blatant racism that is the undercurrent behind the predominantly – like 98% – white bread Tea Party movement. This isn’t the first Tea Party group to use this kind of “humor”. In October a Loudon County, VA GOTP mailer went out complete with a picture of President Obama with a bullet hole in his head; and last spring an Orange County, CA Republican Party mailer portrayed the President as a monkey, and earlier had put out a picture of the White House with a watermelon patch in front of it.
There’s definitely a pattern here; while you can excuse one example as not being symptomatic, when you have a second and now a third you begin to see a certain modus operandi behind some Tea Party conservatives in the Republican Party today, and when others within the Tea Party fail to denounce these kind of postings and mailers then they give tacit approval, they become guilty by association. If it looks like a duck wearing a white sheet, and it quacks like a duck wearing a white sheet, then it’s a duck wearing a white sheet!
The Liberty Tree 