RUSH: Does anybody know what the tea party actually stands for? What does t-e-a stand for? T-e-a stands for something. (laughing) Snerdley, ‘What? What?’ I’ll tell you in a minute what t-e-a stands for. First word is taxes. It’s about ending taxes. Nevertheless, as you well know, the State-Controlled Media and the Obama regime and the Democrat Party are doing everything they can to discredit and to marginalize members of the tea party. They are casting them as racists, old, angry white guys, a bunch of sexists, largely Southerners, they shout the N-word, they shout homosexual epithets at Barney Frank and so forth, when none of this happens, nobody can document that it happened. And all of these Congressional Black Caucus members, as we now know, were deliberately trying to provoke an incident on Obamacare Sunday by walking through the crowd, which was totally unnecessary.
And when they got inside the Capitol building, John Lewis — who a lot of people have had a lot of respect for, he was beaten up pretty badly in the Selma march — said he was called the N-word. And a lot of people are genuinely surprised that John Lewis would sell out the civil rights movement in the process of lying about something that did not happen so as to compare health care, Obamacare, to the old civil rights and make it the new civil rights fight. They don’t have any new pages in the playbook. They just have to go back to past pages. And so the effort to demonize is wide open, and the reason is that they are afraid of members of the tea party and what the tea party stands for. These are sexists, by the way, who happen to love Sarah Palin, for example. These are racists, by the way, who happen to love and respect Shelby Steele and Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell. It really is unconscionable what’s being done to these people. They know it full well, and of course the government-controlled media is right in there doing their bidding for them on this because the tea party people refuse to sit down and take it, they refuse.
They have the audacity to dare protest the regime. Regimes do not like to be protested. Regimes don’t put up with being protested. And regimes target average citizens. Presidents do not. Regimes do. Regimes lead the targeting of average citizens. So I have three polls here today on just who the tea party people are. Oh, by the way, I should remind you that John Lewis compared McCain to George Wallace during the presidential campaign. I mean that’s just how far they’ve gone. That’s how desperate they are. We have a poll here from the Hotline National Journal: ‘The Winston Group conducted 3 national surveys over the winter — one in each Dec., Jan. and Feb. — to find out who Tea Party members are and what drives them. Over the course of the surveys, they found that more than half (58%) IDed themselves as GOPers, with 28% claiming to be indies and 13% Dems. But 65% IDed themselves as conservatives, while 26% said they were moderates. Tea Partiers also skewed older and male. Of those associated with the Tea Party, 56% were male, compared to 48% of the electorate as a whole. Just 14% were between the ages of 18-34, while 20% of all voters are under 35.’
The headline of this story: ‘Tea Party Largely Older, Whiter, Male.’ Do you think that we will ever see a headline that says ‘NAACP Largely Older, Blacker, and Male?’ Will we ever see that? But the same could be said of the NAACP except in this case, it doesn’t happen to be true, that is not who the tea party people are. There are other polls that differ tremendously from this. One is from Gallup: ‘Tea Partiers Are Fairly Mainstream in Their Demographics. Tea Party supporters skew right politically; but demographically, they are generally representative of the public at large. That’s the finding of a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted March 26-28, in which 28% of U.S. adults call themselves supporters of the Tea Party movement. Tea Party supporters are decidedly Republican and conservative in their leanings. Also, compared with average Americans, supporters are slightly more likely to be male and less likely to be lower-income. In several other respects, however — their age, educational background, employment status, and race — Tea Partiers are quite representative of the public at large.’ That is from Gallup.
‘While opposition to the healthcare bill is perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of Tea Party supporters in the new poll, their views on abortion are also notable. Nearly two-thirds consider themselves ‘pro-life’ on the abortion issue, compared with 46% of all national adults.’ We go to another poll reported at TheHill.com. ‘Four in ten tea party members are Democrats, or independents.’ That’s a little bit different than the first poll that we heard. And another poll says that largely the tea party is made up of women, not men. So for as many polls as there are, there are that many descriptions of who the tea party people actually are. Let me play you an audio sound bite from last Thursday on a syndicated radio show. I don’t know what the name of the show is, but the Representative Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee, was the guest. And here was the question: ‘The pervasive feeling in Washington right now, all this vitriol, all this hate, what’s being done in America about all this now? What about the tea party?’
COHEN: Tea party people are kind of like without robes and hoods, they have really shown a very hardcore, angry side of America that is against any type of diversity. And we saw opposition to African-Americans, hostility toward gays, hostility to anybody who wasn’t just, you know, a clone of George Wallace’s fan club. And I’m afraid they’ve taken over the Republican Party.
RUSH: So another lie. Mr. Cohen is lying through his teeth. I think in one of his own campaigns, his opponent referred to him as something close to a KKKer. But this is just absurd, folks. It’s like saying that the tea party is made up of radical Democrats because most of the KKK were radical Democrats, such as Robert ‘Sheets’ Byrd, such as Bull Connor, all of the old segregationists were Democrats. All the KKK, the vast majority of them were southern Democrats. It’s amazing how history has done a complete 180 on all of this. These tea party people are nothing like the KKK. They are not racists or bigoted, they’re not homophobes, they’re none of these things. They did not shout the N-word at John Lewis or anybody else, or at the Reverend Jackson. They didn’t shout the F-word at Barney Frank. These people wanted that to happen. They made it up. The original targets of the KKK were Republicans or blacks who might vote for them. The KKK was in solidarity with Democrats because the Democrats were the segregationists. J. William Fulbright, Senator from Arkansas, Bill Clinton’s mentor, he says, segregationist. The history revision on this is pretty amazing.
The KKK was founded to be the terrorist arm of the Democrat Party. And now you have Democrats running around saying that some of the finest Americans — these are the people that make the country work; these are the people that want to save their country; these are the people who understand full well that they are the targets of this regime. These people understand full well that what this regime wants is a permanent underclass that has no upward mobility, and the best way to get that is to pass a monstrous health care bill with massive taxes on everybody and high unemployment. If you don’t have a job your mobility is nowhere, other than downward. The Democrats need a permanent underclass, dependent on them for their power and their election, and that’s what health care is all about. That’s what most of the regime’s agenda is all about.
This is really despicable, what these people are doing. Steve Cohen, Democrat from Tennessee: ‘The only thing different here is these people don’t wear their white robes and their hoods.’ Remember, the KKK was made up of Democrats. It was founded to be the domestic terrorist arm of the Democrat Party. Their original targets were Republicans or blacks who might vote for them, and of course blacks in general. Never forget that. Bull Connor, all of these people that John Lewis marched against, they were Democrats. He’s a Democrat now, lying about being called the N-word, all for the sake of the regime’s agenda.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay, you realize the Media Tweak of the Day happened mere moments ago when I said that the KKK was essentially the terrorist arm of the Democrat Party. You think I invented that? I didn’t. PBS. Let me read to you from PBS. They grudgingly acknowledged it on a show they did called: ‘The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Dressed in robes and sheets, intended to prevent identification by the occupying federal troops and supposedly designed to frighten blacks, the Klan quickly became a terrorist organization in service of the Democrat Party and white supremacy. Between 1869 and 1871, its goal was to destroy congressional reconstruction by murdering blacks and some whites who were either active in Republican politics or educating black children.’ PBS. KKK became a terrorist organization in service of the Democrat Party.
Now, Politico today is the source that says women are the driving force of the tea parties, not men. So these explanations of just who comprise the tea party are all over the place. All of this is designed basically to discredit them and marginalize them. I told Jonathan Martin over the weekend, doing a story on this regime business, he said, ‘Why do you think Obama called you out? Do you think he’s trying to marginalize you or does he think it’s going to elevate you?’ I said how can it possibly elevate me? I’m already at the top of the mountain placed there by the regime shortly after they took office. I said, ‘I think what Obama is trying to do is distract me, trying to get me to talk about me instead of talking about the regime’s agenda.’ This is what they do. I said, ‘It’s getting old to all of us here, Jonathan. They don’t debate us in the arena of ideas. All they do is try to marginalize us, smear us, discredit us, they describe us as demons and so forth and so on. It really has gotten old.’ Why does Chavez call out his opponents? Does Chavez call out his opponents to elevate them? Hugo Chavez. Oh, and how about this? Obama announces that we’re going to unilaterally get rid of one-third of our nukes? And the next thing we know there’s Vladimir Putin down in Caracas meeting with Chavez to help him get nuclear power and selling him combat weapons.