Washington Post writer: "NAACP is right to call out racists within Tea Party movement"

By Jonathan Capehart

Since February, I have been sounding the alarm against the radical voices that have attached themselves to the Tea Party movement. That is, the racists and the birthers and the Tenth Amendment-types who show up at Tea Party rallies with their hyperbolic signs comparing President Obama to Hitler, Stalin and other dictators who subjugated their countries through mass murder. Not the majority of folks in the movement who have legitimate concerns about the direction and size of government and the explosion of debt undertaken to sustain it. They are tired of Washington not listening to them. Well, Washington and the nation are listening to them now -- and to the crazies among them.

It’s the racists who have compelled the NAACP to vote unanimously on a resolution calling on leaders in the Tea Party movement to disavow them. As E.J. Dionne brilliantly points out today, the venerable civil rights organization isn’t asking Tea Party leaders to do anything less than what conservatives have consistently called on liberals to do.

The NAACP is doing what conservatives have done for decades in demanding that liberals and progressives separate themselves from left-wing extremists who trashed America, burned flags and praised foreign dictators. The racists are the Tea Party's flag-burners. It's fair to ask the democratic left to condemn extremism. It's fair to ask the same of the democratic right. (Note the small "d.")

Here's a specific example: Remember in the 1990s when Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan was fanning racial animus, spewing anti-Semitism and spinning conspiracy theories about the government actively targeting black men for annihilation? African American lawmakers were called upon nationally and locally, particularly in New York, to denounce Farrakhan. It was unfair to ask elected officials to condemn his every crackpot utterance. But it was also a no-brainer for serious politicians to make clear that Farrakhan didn’t speak for them lest their work and priorities get derailed. Tea Party leaders who don’t want their real concerns crowded out by the radical elements around them must -- MUST -- do the same.