Graves, Foley, and Grim followed up with Anthony Miller, Arizona’s sole black District Chairman who resigned yesterday:
Miller, 43, told HuffPost he decided to resign after his wife expressed concern for their safety. Miller had been the target of heavy criticism from Arizona Tea Partyers, in part because he worked on Sen. John McCain’s campaign last fall. (The Tea Partyers favored McCain’s opponent, J.D. Hayworth.)
But the attacks also took on a racial hue. One critic referred to him derogatorily as “McCain’s boy,” Miller said. Other language was even less ambiguous. At an event in Lake Havasu City, Ariz., Miller said someone called out, “There’s Anthony, get a rope.”
Yet Miller balks at crying racism.
“To say that anyone has been racially motivated, I can’t really draw a conclusion,” he said. “But a lot of people told me ‘You’re not a conservative, you’re a RINO.’ In my mind, that’s just as bad as being called a n—–, honestly. When you call someone a n—–, it’s saying they’re less than, and RINO is the same thing.”
The same goes for “socialist,” “communist,” “Muslim,” “Kenyan,” and all the rest of it. Miller was exactly what the Grand Old Party desperately needs; but having achieved the American dream of becoming part of the establishment, the teabag terror denounced him as something other. Miller was not part of the “real” group. The racism is certainly present, but sublimated in a stew of insane things people pretend to believe. All of that ugliness about birth certificates, death panels, ACORN, and the rest is just rationalization, the cognitive process of excusing their own hypocrisy.
Moreover, it is a refusal to engage in conversation. One does not start a negotiation by saying “no” to every suggestion, or denouncing their counterpart as an evil person. That is not how rational human beings interact when they actually care about the stakes, and if tea parties have a unifying characteristic it is the utter lack of actual stakes in their “issues.” Noise is the whole point of teabaggery; don’t be surprised that the noises are ugly, because they are all confused or hypocritical from the outset.
