{"id":325868,"date":"2010-02-16T07:47:35","date_gmt":"2010-02-16T12:47:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/firedoglake.com\/?p=67526"},"modified":"2010-02-16T07:47:35","modified_gmt":"2010-02-16T12:47:35","slug":"early-morning-swim-keith-olbermann%e2%80%99s-special-comment-on-racism-and-the-tea-party-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/325868","title":{"rendered":"Early Morning Swim: Keith Olbermann\u2019s Special Comment on Racism and the Tea Party Movement"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Not a whiff of racism among those Teabaggers.<\/a><\/p>\n

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Almost 30 years ago, Tony Stewart, a civil-rights activist, co-founded the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations in Coeur d’Alene. The task force has campaigned to rid north Idaho of its reputation as a haven for anti-government extremists. Its tactics brought many successes, including a $6.3 million civil judgment that effectively bankrupted Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations.<\/p>\n

When the Tea Party uprising gathered force last spring, Stewart saw painfully familiar cultural and rhetorical overtones. Stewart viewed the questions about Obama’s birthplace as a proxy for racism, and he was bothered by the “common message of intolerance for the opposition.”<\/p>\n

Branding Obama a tyrant, Stewart said, constructs a logic that could be used to rationalize violence. “When people start wearing guns to rallies, what’s the next thing that happens?” Stewart asked.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Teabaggers will no doubt whine about this Olbermann segment, but you didn’t hear boos when Tancredo and Farah gave their racist speeches in Nashville — you heard thunderous applause. Why is that?<\/p>\n

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Not a whiff of racism among those Teabaggers. Almost 30 years ago, Tony Stewart, a civil-rights activist, co-founded the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations in Coeur d’Alene. The task force has campaigned to rid north Idaho of its reputation as a haven for anti-government extremists. Its tactics brought many successes, including a $6.3 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5394,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-325868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5394"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}