Fringe Tea Partiers toss American ideals overboard: Movement must disavow kooks like Rand Paul

Sunday, May 23rd 2010, 4:00 AM

The many politicians and activists who support the Tea Party Express organization should explain exactly what they think about the following statement that the group's chairman, right-wing radio talker Mark Williams, posted on his blog (and later removed) on May 21, 2009:If Tea Party activists want to be seen as more than a momentarily interesting collection of cranks and bigots, they have to decide what to do about the cranks and bigots who claim to represent them.

"[R]epeat after me: Islam is a 7th Century Death Cult coughed up by a psychotic pedophile and embraced by defective, tail sprouting, tree swinging, semi-human, bipedal primates with no claim to be treated like human beings."

Until somebody denounces that kind of gutter-level bigotry - which Williams has continued to spew in recent attacks on a proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan - Tea Party folks should bundle up for a chilly, extended sojourn on the political margins.

Less rowdy but even more troubling are the comments of Rand Paul, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Kentucky whose extreme views matter more because he might well end up as a Washington lawmaker.

In multiple interviews, Paul, a libertarian, has expressed doubts and hesitations about whether civil rights laws should compel private businesses not to discriminate by race.

That matter was settled by the Supreme Court - and the blood and toil of countless demonstrators, including Martin Luther King Jr. - decades ago. But Paul still clings to a legally discredited view that the federal government should not curb the rights of businesses that choose to discriminate.

Paul has also endorsed reducing or eliminating the American with Disabilities Act, the Departments of Agriculture and Education, OSHA and the EPA. When President Obama criticized BP for the continuing environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, Paul accused the President of putting "his boot heel on the throat of BP," an action Paul called "really un-American."

That a potential U.S. senator would leap so quickly to the defense of British Petroleum and call criticism of the firm "un-American" suggests an unhealthy commitment to ideology over country and common sense.

Sooner or later, leaders of the Tea Party movement - and the Republican Party bosses eager to exploit their votes and energy - will have to give the equivalent of then-candidate Barack Obama's Philadelphia speech from March 2008, in which he disavowed the ideas of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for racially incendiary sermons and remarks that threatened to sink Obama's candidacy.

Wright, said Obama of the man who officiated at his marriage and the baptism of his children, had "expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country ... As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems."

The speech didn't satisfy die-hard opponents, but it reassured fair-minded voters that Obama was sincerely appalled - and prepared to explain exactly how and where he differed with Wright.

Tea Partiers who don't subscribe to Williams's vile views or don't share Paul's waffling on civil rights laws (including the ADA) should speak up now, or get used to being portrayed as members of a lunatic fringe that is wholly unfit for national leadership.

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