The False Equivalence: Coffee Party Edition

William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection attempts to make something out of the fact that the attendance for some recent "coffee parties" was predominantly white males. This does not mean the Coffee Parties were racist, he says, any more than the same ratios meant that the Tea Parties are racist.

Agreed.

What indicates the Tea Parties are racist can be found here.

Tea partiers should have at least flinched when Mr. Tancredo attacked President Barack Obama by invoking his middle name of Hussein -- that shopworn technique of not-so-subtly suggesting some nefarious Iraqi connection. Or perhaps when he blustered that "people who could not even spell the word 'vote' or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House."

But when the Republican bomb-thrower suggested that Mr. Obama won because the nation lacks a civics and literacy test for voters, the crowd should have been stunned and alarmed. Surely, anyone familiar with this country's civil rights history should have been. For decades, such tests had one purpose -- to prevent blacks from voting. And to make reference to them in context of the country's first African-American president? That's not some slip of the tongue or moment of political incorrectness. That's the stuff of Klan rallies.

Anyway, no matter what the coffee parties' racial mix (or shall we call it blend) it hardly matters - they were tiny, ill-attended quiet affairs where instead of blaming the government, people blamed the corporations. Why can't OUR nutty extremists get organized?