Fla. congressman compares Tea Party to Ku Klux Klan (Grayson)

[Bucky]

32. Much better. Sadly, we live in an age of hysterics and hyperbole.

The KKK comparison is faulty. The Tea Party isn't advocating segregation, it isn't throwing bombs into churches, it isn't killing people (if you don't count what their health care and climate change policies will eventually do), it isn't lighting up crosses. The Tea Party isn't hiding behind sheets, isn't holding secret rallies in the forests, isn't burning out minority owned businesses, isn't hanging lovers for the crime of differing pigments.

As much as their ideas are terrifying, they are not terrorists. For all the convenient speculation around DU that they are mostly upset that the president is black, it's not an obsessive theme in their rallies and literature. If the occasional Freudian slip emerges from a Teaper in the news, be it stars and bars flying at their rallies or a skillful drop of the president's middle name in an interview, it is an embarrassment to the majority of Teapers, not a core theme behind their works.

Now, they are allied with those who are trying to suppress voter turnout. But that's mostly the efforts of mainstream conservatives, not the hysterics of the pandering Tea Party liars. I wouldn't call them enlightened or liberated on social integration or community empowerment, but they're not terrorists. You can't make the comparison without sounding like a bit of bonehead. As a liberal Democrat, I prefer to the leave the sloppy thinking and baseless name-calling to the experits.