Thank you Darrell Pope, the president of the Hutchinson, Kansas branch of the NAACP. The Tea Party in his area, the Patriot Freedom Alliance, put a skunk on its website and said it represented President Obama. Why? Thomas Hymer, who runs the website, said it was because Obama was half black, half white and everything he did stinks. Mr. Pope stood up and called this symbol for what it was: a racist attack on the president.
The controversy hit the news, and judging by the comments left on his home town newspaper website, Mr. Hymer’s Tea Party did not win any popularity contest, including among area Republicans.
One post read, “This is immaturity at a distasteful level. And I am a Republican and don’t like to read this type of disrespect, even for someone I did not vote for.” Another local poster had been keeping his eye on the Hutchinson Tea Partiers a bit longer and added, “This is utterly shameful. The Hutchinson Tea Party ranks right up there with Fred Phelps [a notorious Topeka homophobe- ed] as being an embarrassment to our state. They had a Conferderate flag on their float in the Christmas parade. Jeff R, Steve D, K Ebmeier, Thomas Hymer, and Maycee, you can no longer claim that the Tea Party is not racist.”
Apparently Mr. Hymer got the message and the Tea Party has taken the skunk down off its website site as of this writing. The Hutchinson Tea Party might also reconsider flying the Confederate flag in the future as well. Kansas came into the union as a free state, and John Brown is depicted on the hallowed walls of the state capitol building, not Jefferson Davis. And while they are at it, Mr. Hymer and friends might talk to the Tea Partiers over at nearby Central Kansas Patriot Action Network.
The logo on the Facebook page of the Central Kansas Patriot Network out of Salina, Kansas pictures Barack Obama sitting at a big desk, laughing. On Obama’s right, an American flag is pictured. On his left stands unmistakably the Israeli flag, with the Star of David in blue. The picture is repeated with every posting by the Central Kansas Patriot Action Network, which describes itself as a “Social Networking and Resource Pooling for Tea Party, 9/12 and other Conservative Constitutionalist organizations.” The graphic is a piece of classic anti-Semitism, explicitly claiming Jewish control of the presidency. This graphic is of the same order, and apparently drawn by the same cartoonist, as that which was shown at an Idaho Tea Party state meeting. See the IREHR article, Tea Time with the Posse, for background.
Thank you to Mr. Pope! Now IREHR asks the question, who among the Central Kansas Patriot Action Network’s neighbors will stand up and decry the anti-Semitism this group purveys?
