So the post-partisan, post-racial president has chosen to take the fringes of the Tea Party movement and slam the entire Tea Party with them even while declaring that is not what he’s doing. The utter gall of the man simply amazes.
President Obama said Tuesday he believes the “tea party” is built around a “core group” of people who question whether he is a U.S. citizen and believe he is a socialist.
But beyond that, Mr. Obama told NBC, he recognizes the movement involves “folks who have legitimate concerns” about the national debt and the government taking on too many difficult issues simultaneously.
So let’s see if we get this straight. There are some people in the Tea Party who have legitimate concerns. But the core group—the reason the party was founded—is made up of Birthers.
And the media will not present this as a slam, because of course, Obama says it isn’t. He’s not slamming the Tea Party. Just the core group that founded it (and, in their eyes, is presumably running it, though the Tea Party is decentralized).
Ladies and gentlemen, the next lefty talking point is out of the gate.
Strange… so what happens when Obama applies this logic to his Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright days?
-ls
Entirely different, Laurence. Ayers was just a guy he knew from around the neighborhood–starting a campaign from his living room and serving on boards with him hardly amounts to more than a nodding acquaintance, after all. And yeah, he did sit in Rev. Wright’s pews for twenty years, refer to him as a spiritual adviser, and have his children baptized by him, but he never heard any of the sermons that sensitive people might term racist and/or anti-Semitic and church publications reiterating that sort of thing probably were tossed out with the junk mail ads.
But a couple of people with birther signsat the back of a Tea Party rally of several thousands is a clear indication that while there may be one or two petty concerns about Obama’s policies, anything more serious is the result of misguided people being led by racist demagogues.
I should think this is clear and of course anyone who indicates a belief that perhaps giving favorable treatment to certain states in return for their senators’ votes might warrant legal action is a virtual Klansman.
I hope you now understand the error of your ways.
Those “Miss Me Yet?” photoshopped billboards of President Carter are looking pretty good about now. Especially when you think of three more years of Captain Wonderful.
Here’s the entire statement from Obama:
“I think that it is a still-loose amalgam of forces. There is a part of the tea party movement that actually did exist before i was elected. We saw some of it leading up to my election. There are some folks who just weren’t sure whether I was born in the United States, whether I was a socialist, right? So there is that segment of it, which I think is just dug in ideologically. And that strain has existed in American political for a long time.
“Then I think that there is a broader circle around that core group of people who are legitimately concerned about the deficit, who are legitimately concerned that the federal government may be taking on too much. And last year, a bunch of the emergency measures we had to take in terms of dealing with the bank crisis, bailing out the auto industry, fed that sense that things are out of control. And I think those are folks who have legitimate concerns.
“And so I wouldn’t paint in broad brush and say that everybody who is involved or have gone to a tea party rally or meeting are somehow on the fringe. Some of them i think have some mainstream legitimate concerns. My hope is that as we move forward and are tackling things like the deficit, imposing a freeze on domestic spending and taking steps that show we’re sincere about dealing with our long-term problems, that some of that group will dissipate.
“There’s still going to be a group at their core that question my legitimacy or question the Democratic Party generally or question people who they consider to be against them in some way. And that group we’re probably not going to convince.”
Not much of a slam if you ask me.. Because there *are* those in the movement who question the legitimacy of the president. A real slam would be to say the whole movement is full of complete morons. Which is not what he said nor implied, and would alienate any of the ‘broader cirle’ that exists in the movement.
So basically, you’re saying that when Obama says the “core group”—as in, the founders—is made up of birthers and nutjobs, that’s not really a slam?
I beg to differ. The core group of the Democratic party is what runs the Dems. So I can say that the DNC is made up of marxist, socialist nutjobs who want to suspend the Bill of Rights and that’s not really much of a slam, since I’m also going to acknowledge that most of the Dems aren’t like that?