So you think you might like to go to a Tea Party protest

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Be prepared. Things can get ugly. Fast:

Abusive, derogatory and even racist behavior directed at House Democrats by Tea Party protesters on Saturday left several lawmakers in shock.

Preceding the president's speech to a gathering of House Democrats, thousands of protesters descended around the Capitol to protest the passage of health care reform. The gathering quickly turned into abusive heckling, as members of Congress passing through Longworth House office building were subjected to epithets and even mild physical abuse.

A staffer for Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) told reporters that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) had been spat on by a protestor. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a hero of the civil rights movement, was called a 'ni--er.' And Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was called a "faggot," as protestors shouted at him with deliberately lisp-y screams. Frank, approached in the halls after the president's speech, shrugged off the incident.

But Clyburn was downright incredulous, saying he had not witnessed such treatment since he was leading civil rights protests in South Carolina in the 1960s.

Read that again. Take it all in.

And tell me that the Teabaggers are just patriotic, independent-minded Americans who love their country and who deserve all the Fox News cheerleading and all the positive, disproportionate coverage they get on CNN and elsewhere in the mainstream media -- that they're all just about taxes and "small" government.

No, they're about yelling "nigger" at a hero of the Civil Rights movement and "faggot" at a prominent gay politician. In other words, there's a darker side to them -- to who they are and to what they stand for -- and it's bigotry, plain and simple.

We've even had a commenter here, an anonymous one (of course), who resorted to ad hominem attacks and bigotry. (I've deleted those comments and will continue to do so.)

Just remember, though, these bigots haven't been shunned from the mainstream of American politics. On the right, among many conservatives, they're hailed as American heroes, as the voices of true Americanism. And while they are certainly extremist, they are becoming more and more the mainstream of the Republican Party. Far from being independent, they are trying to take over the GOP just as the GOP tries to co-opt them along with their fractious "movement" for the sake not just of electoral gain but of partisan purification.

What happened on Capitol Hill yesterday -- how the protesters behaved, what they did and said, the sheer ugliness of it all -- shouldn't surprise anyone. It's what these people, and their "movement," and, more and more, the party they align with, are all about.

As I put it almost a year ago:

The tea partiers and their cheerleaders would have us believe that what is happening now is as revolutionary as what happened way back when in Boston. Which is, of course, sheer nonsense. Today's tea parties are nothing more than contrived outlets for manufactured right-wing populist rage. To suggest otherwise, and to buy into the right-wing spin, on Fox and elsewhere, is to diminish the significance of the American Revolution and to sully the very purpose of America as an experiment in democratic self-rule and as a bulwark against tyranny.

Once again, as we see so often on the right, those supposedly fighting for America, these "patriots," are actually, unwittingly or not, working to undermine it.

In screaming bigoted obscenities, on top of everything else, they're just proving themselves to be the deeply un-American crackpots we knew them to be.