The National Tea Party Federation has expelled the Tea Party Express from the group in the latest fallout from a racially insulting letter written by its spokesman, conservative talk show host Mark Williams.
The federation had given the Tea Party Express a deadline of 3 p.m. Saturday to publicly rebuke Willams and remove him from his leadership ranks. When the group's leaders refused the demand, the federation's members voted to expel the Tea Party Express, effective immediately.
The demand and subsequent expulsion were triggered by Williams' writing of a satirical blog post describing a fictional letter from "the Colored People" to Abraham Lincoln. The letter began: "Dear Mr. Lincoln, We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!"
Williams said that the letter was a response to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's call for the tea party movement to repudiate the racist elements within it.
Williams later removed the letter from his blog and offered to meet with NAACP leaders, but by then, the damage had already been done.
Speaking on CBS' "Face the Nation" this morning, federation spokesman David Webb called Williams' post "clearly offensive."
Williams' response to the federation's move could be characterized as "What national tea party federation?"
"There are internal political dramas amongst the various self-anointed tea party 'leaders' and some of the minor players on the fringes see the Tea Party Express and Mark Williams as tickets to a booking on Face the Nation," he told the New York Daily News.
"There is no tea party leadership; every tea partier is a tea party leader."
The National Tea Party Federation currently lists 61 member tea parties and 20 affiliate members on its Web site. The group claims to represent more than 1 million individuals and activists nationwide.
The Tea Party Express - a series of national bus tours promoting a small-government agenda, including one that featured former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin prominently - is a project of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC, a political action committee headed by a self-described Reaganite and a former special assistant to Reagan. The committee has raised more than $2.3 million for favored candidates this year and helped elect Republican Scott Brown to the Massachusetts Senate seat long held by the late Ted Kennedy. Along with Williams, the PAC lists Lloyd Marcus, a black "unhyphenated American" entertainer and songwriter, as its spokesperson.
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Comments
#1 Tea Party can't get story straight
They say they aren't racists, but have to expel one of their own leaders for a racist rant. Some people in the Tea Party don't even seem to know they are racists. You call them out on some horrible things (pictures of Obama as a tribesman with bone in his nose, calling him a monkey, telling him to go back to Kenya) and all they do is get more racist in retaliation. Tea Party, police your ranks if you want to rise above your white racist reputation.
#2 The NAACP, Tea Party, and
The NAACP, Tea Party, and Black Panthers are starting to sound all the same. A lot of the beliefs and policies these groups stand up for are very valid and good, however they are letting the negativity of the fighting overshadow the good of their beliefs.
I found this here: NAACP and Tea Party feuding, but what will come of it?
Many of these groups are beginning to look less credible as they spend more time cutting down and slandering the other groups rather than promoting their ideals. While I once thought some of the groups had good ideals, you couldn't take out a unsecured loan large enough to convince me to join them because all they do now is talk about how others are worse than them and why.
#3 Tea Party Distress/Expulsion
Now, how easy was that? It's far too easy for something to allegedly be said that so enrages others that drastic actions speedily ensue. Seems like giving a troublemaker a little too much leverage to me....