ED KOCH A RACIST?? WHO’S NEXT!!

We've been hearing endlessly from our Main Stream Media pundits and from former democrat presidents that the Tea Party folks include violence-prone extremists, fueled by racism and masquerading as ordinary-looking Americans. You know, the kind you'd see at a mall, or at a park, or in the mirror.
 
I had been having a hard time trying to follow the threads of logic that led these politicians and others to what at first blush looked to me like tortured conclusions. It seemed to me that denouncing the Tea Parties was just another Saul Alinsky tactic of demonizing the opposition, and instilling fear in people of color so that they vote for their supposed protectors on the left. 
 
But if that many people said the Tea Partiers were racists and violence-prone, then surely the subject merited another look. Perhaps detecting racism and hateful violence was not as easy as I had thought.
 
After all, the Tea Party Denouncers include presidents Carter and Clinton, both reputed to be of superior intelligence, and people like NY Times and Washington Post editorial writers, people of high standing who are actually paid for expressing their views, as opposed to Yours Truly who doesn't even have a tip jar.
 
What I learned from examining the matter more closely is that, unlike the Detractors, I had been taking a viewpoint constrained by the evidence, looking at the facts without resort to speculation, and that had surely limited my "understanding." I always believed that a racist was someone who was hateful toward and prejudiced against another person simply because of his race and the color of his skin. I also believed that we can identify a racist by the person's words and deeds, since one does not have the advantage of being able to read another's mind.
 
(The grand exception to that last point applies to certain clairvoyants on the left, like the NY Times' Frank Rich who compares Tea Parties to the Nazi's Kristallnacht, or the Washington Post's Colbert King, who compares the Tea Partiers to George Wallace, or Bill Maher who likened the Tea Parties to Ku Klux Klan rallies, all of whom are apparently able to intuit these conclusions without any evidence, based simply on their natural knowing.) 
 
If you just look at the Tea Partiers' words, their slogans, signs and speeches, you find that their words don't deal with anything racial or target people of color, but rather beat the drum against big spending, big taxing, and big government. Obama is opposed, but only in the context of his policies, not as a black man. And as for their deeds, dressing up in patriot costumes, carrying signs sporting pro-capitalist and anti-socialist messages, and giving and listening to speeches, all appear to have nothing to do with race.
 
As far as violence goes, the Tea Party Detractors don't have much to work with. If there were really lots of hateful rhetoric, people advocating violence, threatening and committing violent acts, they would be shown non-stop on cable news and gleefully parodied by Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.
 
The boring truth is that Tea Parties I've attended, or seen on TV, or read about, or heard about from friends, are about as violent as a bunch of Iowans getting ready to sit down to a Memorial Day picnic.
 
So how on earth do the Tea Party Detractors go from "A" to "WHITE SUPREMACIST?"
 
In short, the Detractors look beyond the physical world, beyond the actual words and deeds of the Tea Party protesters to form their conclusions. In conducting my review, I had to put myself in their shoes, to learn to look not only at what the Tea Partiers said and did, but what they might harbor in their minds, knowingly or unknowingly, as they said and did those things. I learned to look past the surface, to divine what lies beneath those placid Apple Pie-4^th of July exteriors.
 
From what I've read so far, the Detractors' analysis of Tea Party racism involves a two-step test: The first goes something like this: Barack Obama is black. If you oppose policies that Barack Obama advocates, you are not motivated by the content of those policies, but by your fear and loathing of the color of his skin, even if you are not aware of being so racially motivated. This is true even if you once voted for him.
 
The gist of this view was set forth recently by President Clinton in commenting on the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. Clinton not only tied in Tea Party protesters to the same type of "right wing extremism" that Clinton says led Timothy McVeigh to bomb the federal building, but he also indicated that there was a racial undercurrent to the Tea Partiers' protests.
 
In responding to a pointed question from CNN's Wolf Blitzer on any tie between the protests and the fact that we have the first African-American president, Clinton said:
 
"President Obama…symbolizes the increasing diversity of America. He symbolizes the loss of control, of predictability, of certainty, of clarity that a lot of people need for their psychic well-being." (See the whole clip at Clinton Psychoanalysis of Tea Partiers.)
 
Sounds a little like the '08 Obama analysis of Pennsylvanians as "clinging to their guns and religion," doesn't it? Could our former president be preparing for a new career as a shrink or perhaps as the host of "Psychoanalyzing the Stars?" Clearly, he thinks he knows what lies in the hearts and minds of Americans, and it ain't pretty.
 
(But wasn't Bill Clinton declared to be a racist during the '08 election by some of the same commentators now decrying the Tea Partiers? Remember how Clinton belittled Obama, saying that "a few years ago this guy would have been getting us coffee." If Clinton was a racist then, isn't he still a racist underneath his placid exterior, and therefore not to be trusted? Isn't Bill Clinton calling the Tea Partiers "racist" a little like the pot calling the kettle black? BTW, am I allowed to use the word "black" when discussing race?…
 
And then I do have another problem with Clinton re-writing the cause of the Oklahoma bombing and therefore an important page of his elusive legacy. McVeigh himself said it was Clinton's attack on the compound at Waco that set him off on his violent course, and not any ramblings of right wing extremists.)
 
So the first prong of the two-step Tea Party racist test doesn't make a lot of sense to me. What else do the Detractors have to go on?
 
Their second explanation goes something like this: Obama's policies themselves are designed to take taxpayer money from all the people, primarily to improve the lot of people of color. Therefore, if you oppose the policies which are designed to lift up the people of color, you must be opposed to people of color.
 
That's it, folks. That's all they've got. Which leads to the question: Is it possible to challenge a Barack Obama policy without being assumed to be a racist? I would say not.
 
And that brings us to the sad case of Ed Koch. I know it's hard to believe that former New York City Mayor, Ed Koch, might be a racist. After all, didn't he support Obama in the '08 election? And he's a democrat, so he is not a member of a suspect political party. But he has been very outspoken in his criticism of President Obama, who is black.
 
Earlier this month Mr. Koch spoke out in interviews and in articles decrying the president's "shameful" treatment of Israel and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In one interview, Koch said:

"I have been a supporter of President Obama and went to Florida for him, urged Jews all over the country to vote for him saying that he would be just as good as John McCain on the security of Israel. I don't think it's true anymore." (See video of interview at Ed Koch Criticizes Obama.)
 
As if that wasn't bad enough, Koch then recklessly went on to say that he believes Obama "orchestrated" what happened in Israel regarding the Administration's condemnation of Israel for the recent building of new apartments in East Jerusalem.
 

"What they did is they wanted to make Israel into a pariah…It's outrageous in my judgement…I believe that the Obama administration is willing to throw Israel under the bus in order to please Muslim nations," Koch said.

   
Koch's statements are surely fighting words, and more inflammatory than any I heard at the DC Tea Party April 15. Obviously, Koch is in serious trouble here of being considered a racist, not only for opposing an Obama policy, but especially for calling out Obama as a Muslim-pleaser. We all know that many blacks are Muslims, and therefore those words have racial overtones. You can do the syllogism from there.
 
I conclude from my investigation that there are only two ways to look at the Tea Parties:

• Either they are full of knowing or unknowing racists who oppose a president because of psychic needs and fears;
  
• or the Tea Party People are actually the progressive ones, the ones who have moved on to the level that Martin Luther King, Jr. aspired for Americans: to judge a man by the content of his character and not by the color of his skin.

What if that day has come, but those who make political profit from race-baiting refuse to see it.