In case you missed it, America’s best political writer, Matt Taibbi weighed in on L’affair Breitbart on the Rolling Stone blog:

I’ve decided it isn’t even necessary to have the debate over whether or not the Tea Partiers are racists. It’s enough to point out that the Tea Party and its sympathizers contain too many people like Andrew Breitbart (the idiot blogger from the Big Government website who originally posted the Sherrod video), Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, all of whom popped huge public woodies the moment the Sherrod video surfaced.

It’s just not necessary to say whether or not these people are racists. All that needs to be pointed out is that when they get a chance to gape at a video purporting to show a black Obama official confessing to having mistreated a white farmer (it turned out to be the opposite of that, of course), or a tape of Black Panther King Shamir talking about “killing cracker babies,” the word that best describes the emotions they display at these times is glee.

They enjoy these morbid stories about offenses to white dignity way too much. I caught Glenn Beck talking about some case involving a Black Panther who was intimidating people at a voting booth back in 2008—the guy had this pervy smile on his face that made him look exactly like one of those creepy dudes sitting hunched over at the edge of the bed playing the cuckold in cheating-wife porn videos. Over the Black Panthers! Who the hell has even seen a Black Panther since the seventies? The whole thing reminds me of that Chris Rock routine about Native Americans—“When was the last time you saw two Indians?”

I love how he ends the piece by asking “Is anyone else dreading 2012?”

I feel ya, dude. It’s going to be an all out brawl. 2012 might be the year the American republic ends up so frayed as to be ungovernable. The rightwing has backed itself so far into a corner that there is almost no way that they can still walk it back anymore. People are going to die during the next national election cycle. 2008 was merely the opening act. It’s already fucking fucked up. The rhetoric is so mean and hateful that the next step is easy to predict: Violence. 

Looked at from one point of view, the whole Axis of Idiocy (Fox News, tea baggers, conservative Christians) thing we’re seeing in this country is nothing short of a mass mobilization of some of the meanest and stupidest people to publicly present themselves that I have witnessed in my entire life. Don’t get me wrong, I consider most of these sad, deluded fools to be people whose time will somewhat quickly come to an end. The Tea party is a manifestation, by and large, of cranky old white people. They’ll be dying soon enough and their grandchildren will not be replenishing their ranks. It’s just not going to work that way. the demographics all but prohibit it from happening. Still, even if, historically speaking, it’ll be temporary, what happens in the meantime is going to make for a really trying couple of decades, ‘cause there is a mean genie that’s gotten out of the bottle and he ain’t going back in anytime soon.

The Tea Party is Perverted and Irrelevant (Rolling Stone)

Before this comment, a disclaimer: I am not a Tea Partier, I am not a Republican (How many of them come to this site anyway?), and as for politics it is my fervent wish that a third party will rise in America that can pragmatically blend the best elements of the progressive left and the libertarian right. That being said:

I have no doubt that there are many members of the Tea Party who do, in fact, embody nearly every negative stereotype about the group as a whole. This does not, however, invalidate the concerns of all its members. It is my hope that the more reasonable libertarian portion of the Tea Party that is concerned with issues such as reigning in wildly irresponsible fiscal policy and the overwhelming power of the Federal Reserve will effectively seperate itself from the more pure reactionary elements. Blanket labeling Tea Partiers as perverted and irrelevant racist white people who just can’t get with the times invalidates the very legitimate concerns of other people involved with the movement. It also comes off as cheap ad hominem to me, and I do not fully trust the motives of the major news media outlets such as MSNBC who have been very quick to jump on the “Tea Partiers are all out of touch racists” bandwagon. It’s also dangerous to dismiss legitimate pent up rage in a populace, and many working class white people have been thoroughly economically screwed over by the decline in manufacturing and the outsourcing of labor over the past 30+ years. Some of them have very legitimate reasons for their anger, and even if that anger becomes expressed through inappropriate avenues it does not diminish the legitimacy of the anger in and of itself or make it “irrelevant”, and as I said before it is dangerous, even naive, to think so. It is especially hypocritical for so “liberals” to judge a group of people based on its worst members; that’s what bigots and racists for a very long time have done, and if you want to borrow a page or two from the playbook of intolerance you can go ahead and do that, but I think taking the high road would be more advisable. Also, I agree in sentiment with the idea of having organized tax revolts after the largest vertical transfer of wealth (the bailouts) in this nation’s history. Let’s not forget that the original Boston Tea Party occured because the British government was trying to bailout the British East India Company through coercive taxes and market manipulation. The point I’m trying to drive home though is this: There’s a lot more going on here than people like Matt Taibbi would have you believe, and blanket labeling people with pejoratives that liberals love to slander conservatives with doesn’t really accomplish much of anything.

I think everything he says here is a fair assessment. 

Backtrack a little: this whole thing started because the NAACP reasonably asked that the Tea Party movement distance itself from a minority of racists within their midst.  Rather than take a deep breath and look in the mirror and admit that “yes, there are some racists among us, we should not tolerate this”, the Tea Party spokespeople like Breitbart instead let their egos get bruised and jumped to the conclusion that the NAACP was accusing ALL of them of being racist.  Thus they thought it fair game to make the NAACP appear racist.

Childish.

The fact that Beck can still have a TV and radio show after he called the President a racist on national TV (really? the man was raised by a white mother and grandparents, in fact he took time out in the last months of his presidential campaign to visit his sick white grandmother in a state that was half an ocean away from the rest of America!)—that just boggles my mind.  I guess it shows how far we have let our standards fall, at least with regards to Fox News; we expect that kind of hateful rhetoric on Fox, but if someone like Helen Thomas expresses her “controversial” opinion on Palestine/Israel she is forced to retire.  Is there anything Beck can say that will get him canned?

I don’t think Breitbart, Beck, et al, think they are superior based on their own white skin, they think they are superior because they are conservatives, and liberals are stupid and/or evil and should be defeated at all costs, honesty be damned.