23 Oct 2013 Grayson’s Groundless Gripe About Tea Party Panned
Some Tea Party activists turn TEA into an acronym: Taxed Enough Already. But one member of Congress is making a much more sinister and unproven allegation about the word to raise money for his re-election campaign.
Supporters of Congressman Alan Grayson recently received an e-mail that opens to a picture of two members of the Ku Klux Klan and a burning cross. The burning cross serves as the “T” in Tea Party. Underneath, it reads, “Now you know what the ‘T’ stands for.”
Clicking the photo leads to excerpts of an interview Grayson had with MSNBC host and radical activist Al Shaprton, in which Grayson makes another KKK-Tea Party comparison and a solicitation is made for Grayson’s campaign committee.
The pitch? “Congressman Alan Grayson deserves your support, like no one else. He, and only he, is saying the things that you are thinking, and so much need [sic] to be said.”
Asked about his inciteful rhetoric, Grayson’s office replied: “If the shoe fits, wear it.”
There has never been a verifiable link found between the Tea Party movement and any organized racist institution. Andrew Breitbart’s $10,000 reward for proof that Tea Party activists spit on and hurled epithets at black members of Congress during the ObamaCare debate remains unclaimed. The NAACP’s resolution against the Tea Party in 2010 was a bust.
Grayson’s vitriol is too much for Deroy Murdock, a member of the National Center’s Project 21 black activist network. The son of a Tea Party activist (who is also a Project 21 member), Deroy is offended by the liberal lawmaker’s emotional exploitation for campaign cash.
Deroy said about Grayson:
Just when it seemed that American political discourse could not sink any lower, U.S. Representative Alan Grayson (D-FL) has stepped in with a backhoe and dug even deeper.
His fundraising appeal using the KKK’s signature burning cross as the T in Tea Party is a new low in American rhetoric.
One can differ with the Tea Party’s views on taxes and spending without associating it with a racist domestic-terrorist organization that, incidentally, was launched after the Civil War by the Democrat Party. While one might urge the Tea Party to embrace social programs or global-warming legislation, it is bizarre, twisted and repugnant to equate it with homicidal bigots who hanged blacks from trees and even bombed a basement full of young black girls in Birmingham, Alabama.
The Tea Party’s energetic support for minority lawmakers such as Alan West, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio belie Grayson’s claim of its anti-minority bias. Grayson’s fundraising pitch is light years beneath contempt. He should apologize for this despicable communication, resign from Congress and silently slither into the Everglades.