CREEPY RACIST LIES

"The White House said the president is unaware of the tea parties and will hold his own event today," ABC’s Dan Harris reported on the "Good Morning America" program the morning of April 15.

This was, of course, a preposterous lie.  Mr. Obama may not approve of the Tea Party phenomenon, but he had to be aware of an event that drew hundreds of thousands of people in hundreds of cities across the country. 

But if the president is as clueless as his aides represented him to be to Mr. Harris, let’s hope his foreign intelligence is better than his domestic intelligence is.

The person most responsible for gathering domestic intelligence is the director of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, a former governor of Arizona who was a U.S. attorney before that. 

Ms. Napolitano is wholly unqualified for the post she now holds, as she demonstrated when she  told a German magazine she doesn’t use the word "terrorism." She describes events such as 9/11 as "man-caused disasters."

That was merely silly.  Ms. Napolitano descended into the creepy when she approved dissemination to local law enforcement agencies which branded opponents of abortion, supporters of Second Amendment, veterans, and those who oppose the massive increase in government spending as potential security risks.

"Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements and adherents that are primarily hate oriented (based on hatred of particular religious, racial or ethnic groups), and those that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority," the report said.

"The possible passage of new restrictions on firearms and the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks," the report said.

This last incensed David Rehbein, national commander of the American Legion: "To continue to use (Oklahoma City bomber Timothy) McVeigh as an example of the stereotypical ‘disgruntled military veteran’ is as unfair as using Osama bin Laden as the solve example of Islam," Mr. Rehbein said.

"The document’s evidence?  None," wrote retired Army LtCol Ralph Peters in the New York Post today (4/16).  "It contains no hard data, no statistics.  It’s nothing but a racist, anti-military opinion column that might pass muster in the New York Times, but shouldn’t be issued by our government."

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss), chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said he was "dumbfounded" by the DHS report: "This report appears to raise significant issues involving the privacy and civil liberties of many Americans -including war veterans…  Freedom of association and freedom of speech are guaranteed to all Americans, whatever their political orientation," he said.

Many suspect the release of the DHS report was timed to attempt to smear as "extremists" those who attended the Tea Parties.  But this was belied by the size, nature and behavior of the crowds.

Turnout for the Tea Parties was remarkable, considering that there was no national group coordinating the events, and how little publicity most in the news media gave them beforehand.

The Tea Parties were promoted hard by several Fox News personalities.  But, wrote Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz Wenesday, "there’s another side to this saga.  Most in the mainstream media fell down on the job, ignoring the growing movement or mocking it as a bunch of wingnuts." 

"The New York Times has run zero stories," Mr. Kurtz said.  "The Washington Post has done zip until today…The Boston Globe, published in the city famed for the original tea party: nothing."

It remains to be seen where the Tea Party movement goes from here.  That depends mostly on whether the massive increase in federal spending leads, as the Tea Party goers suspect, to rampant inflation, massive tax increases, or both. 

But the Tea Parties yesterday were the largest protests in America since the Vietnam war, conducted by people who rarely protest.  The Obama administration and its allies in the news media ignore them at their peril.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.