Bonus Flashback Video: Tea Party Express & 'Rise of the Tea Bags'!

Brad Friedman Byon 7/19/2010, 7:05am PT

The Tea Party Express has been expelled from the National Tea Party Federation, an umbrella group of Tea Parties, in a disturbing incident of Tea Party on Tea Party non-violence.

The weekend expulsion came in response to a so-called satirical letter written to Abraham Lincoln by Tea Party Express spokesman and Rightwing talk show host, Mark Williams.

The letter in question begins: "Dear Mr. Lincoln, We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!"

The National Tea Party Federation had called on the Tea Party Express to remove Williams as spokesperson. They didn't. So they're out. Whatever "out" means to these folks. Tea Party poopers!

Williams is also the Rightwing clown who recently called on citizens to defraud the government's $20 billion BP Fund, as The BRAD BLOG reported earlier this month. Some "conservative," eh?

Williams' high-larious "parody letter" (as he later called it when he took it off his site) was, itself, in response to the NAACP's recent resolution, condemning "racist elements" within the Tea Party. Geez, what racist elements?!...

He's also the jerk who told NPR, in response, that the NAACP are "professional race baiters" who "make more money off of race than any slave trader ever. It’s time groups like the NAACP went to the trash heap of history where they belong with all the other vile racist groups that emerged in our history." Nice.

The insane (or just hateful, you make the call) Williams has managed to convince himself that any racist signs showing up at Tea Party demonstrations were from a supposedly left-leaning initiative called "Crash the Tea Party" --- an idea which hadn't even occurred until this past spring --- meant to embarrass the Tea Partiers. "Crash the Tea Party" quickly crashed and burned itself. But even if that group had anything to do with such signs this past Spring, it doesn't explain the various racist signs and emails going all the way back to the inception of the post-2008 Tea Party (more accurately described as Tea Baggers, as distinct from the legitimate Ron Paul Tea Partiers who were decrying George W. Bush's "Big Government" and his violations of the Constitution long before the Baggers showed up in response to having lost the '08 election.)

In his continuing denial, Williams recently offered this deluded statement on MSNBC: "It's impossible for there to be a racist element in the Tea Party."

Really, Mark? Tell it to the guy in the photo below, as taken at a February 2009 "Tea Party" demonstration in Houston...

For the record, the man holding the sign in the photo above is Dale Robertson, the man who registered the domain TeaParty.org.

For what it's worth, we're agnostic on just how many of the Tea Baggers are actually racists, versus disinformed Fox "News" viewers. In truth, the common element seems to be that they are all sore-loserists, since they didn't bother to show up with their phony outrage about "out-of-control government spending" and violations of the Constitution until George W. Bush was out of office. Imagine that!

But most importantly, all of this gives us an opportunity to re-visit our own amusing experience with Mark Williams' "grassroots" Tea Party Express, when they kicked off their second national bus tour here in Los Angeles in October of last year. If you missed our short documentary interviewing the Tea Party Express supporters the first time around, it's still just as much fun. And for giving us an excuse to run it again, we have to thank the appalling Mark Williams!...



Part 1...





Part 2...





