A Bit Mystified By Mark Williams

I wanted to avoid commenting about Mark Williams' problems, but since he's from Sacramento, I may as well.

Tea Partiers have generally avoided most racist pitfalls. At this year's April 15th Tea party at the California State Capitol, for example, the Tea Partiers mocked liberals for assuming the Tea Partiers were going to stumble into obvious racial traps. The Tea Partiers were going to be above that. They wanted to focus on health care reform and government spending, not race.

Coming from California, Talk radio host Mark Williams should be even more sure-footed than your typical Tea Partier suburbanite, yet he clearly isn't. Why? Has a couple of years in New York altered his thinking? Absent Mexican illegals to focus on, has he turned to savaging blacks? No one made him start using Southern-planter-inspired race rhetoric, so why is he doing so?

Maybe Williams wanted to get satirical, but missed the mark. Wikipedia has a discussion of satire, including this point:

This "militant" irony or sarcasm often professes to approve (or at least accept as natural) the very things the satirist wishes to attack.

If the NAACP or Benjamin Jealous was on the record as promoting a welfarist mentality, Williams might have a point. Unfortunately for Williams, the NAACP is focused on securing civil rights and not on exploiting the welfare system - there is a reason the NAACP is run by lawyers, after all - and so Williams' efforts at satire fall into another category - just offensive.

One must be careful with satire to aim at the correct target:

This week, Williams' accidentally racist chickens have come home to roost. After posting one of his most overtly racist (accidentally, I guess) statements ever to his personal website after the NAACP passed a resolution calling on national tea party leaders like Williams to condemn racist rhetoric seen at tea party rallies in the past, Williams has found himself ostracized by a growing number of tea party groups across the country.

...As the public face of the Tea Party Express, which has helped propel candidates like Nevada Republican Senate nominee Sharron Angle to victory this year, Williams represents one of the most establishment-connected groups on the Tea Party circuit. Tea Party Express was founded and is run by Republican operatives, which puts it on par with groups like FreedomWorks.

Before it was cool for tea partiers to publicly endorse Republican candidates, the Tea Party Express was doing it. They're no fringe group of grassroots activists -- these guys are supposed to be the professionals. The group was created by a team of high-level California Republican consultants, and the Tea Party Express' PAC -- Our Country Deserves Better -- still boasts legendary GOP bamboozler and former Rep. Howard Kaloogian as its co-chair, and veteran Republican political consultant Sal Russo as its chief strategist.

...And here's how it sounded when Williams tried to make the point in the form of a fake letter to Abraham Lincoln from NAACP President Benjamin Jealous that Williams posted to his blog:

Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government "stop raising our taxes." That is outrageous! How will we Colored People ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?