Teabagging racism: "It's not just because he's black."

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The key, and most revealing, line from this WaPo piece on the Tea Party rally in Washington yesterday:

[Teabagger Jerry] Johnson expressed opposition to Obama. "It's not just because he's black," he said. "I wish I could tell you that I loved this guy, that he was a great president, that I had faith in him. But I have none. Zero."

Read that again.

That's right, this apparent bigot, a lawyer from Virginia, said he opposes Obama not just because he's black. Meaning, partly because he's black.

There you go.

Unless this guy badly misspoke, which is unlikely, he basically admitted to being a racist. And I suspect he's far from alone among the teabaggers.

Which is not to say that all teabaggers are racist, of course. Not all of them are, just some of them. And while I understand that their prime motivation is taxation, which they zealously oppose, along with opposition to government generally, except when it benefits them, they certainly seem to be motivated by a variety of other factors, including Obama's race and a general hostility to anyone who isn't like them. It is hardly surprising that many of them, more than among Americans generally, are Birthers.

As for their extremist anti-tax crusade (and claim that Obama is a socialist), the facts are against them, too. With Obama's stimulus package tax credit, federal income tax on the middle class is, with the exception of 2008, at a 55-year low.

Not that the facts mean much to these people, though. Even if Obama's skin colour does.