This is the last day of the NAACP’s 101st annual convention.
The takeaway: Rather than pass the torch, the NAACP has stirred up a racial tempest in a teapot.
In his appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” NAACP President and CEO Ben Jealous said:
That, in the midst of all these horrible signs we’ve seen, a congressman being spit on, you know, civil rights icons like John Lewis being called the “N” word as he enter Congress by Tea Party activists, Barney Frank being called the “F” word, you know, a gay slur as he enters Congress by Tea Party activists.I mean, enough is enough. You know, we heard all that and we haven’t heard Dick - Dick Armey or the other Tea Party leaders come out and just say, that’s wrong, there’s no space for - for bigotry in our ranks.
But as David Webb, a co-founder of Tea Party 365, noted, there is no evidence those incidents ever happened:
I absolutely do, and the statement by Mr. Jealous that we haven’t condemned these actions when they do pop up is blatantly false. Also, what is false is that there is no empirical evidence of these racial slurs. On April 24th, I signed a letter, along with many other leaders, to the Congressional Black Caucus. There was a $100,000 reward offered as a donation to the United Negro College Fund if there could be any video with all the cell phone cameras, all the cameras, and that we would ask that they provide evidence of this so that we could denounce it if it did happen. If it happened 15 times, Mr. Jealous, there is video of it, there should be, and we have asked for it. We have searched through every video available. Many have been provided.So you are - you are attaching two things that are false, that are unproven, and that is dishonest.
The $100,000 reward was offered by Andrew Breitbart of BigGovernment.com. To date, the reward has not been claimed.
As NAACP delegates prepare to leave Kansas City, they should resolve to heed political commentator Roland Martin’s advice:
If you don’t like the Tea Party, you defeat them at the polls. If you don’t like them coming out and protesting, you counter that and you beat them at the ballot box. And if there’s anybody in the Tea Party that’s a racist, they probably didn’t like the fact that black folks got the right to vote. That’s how you beat them back, not necessarily a resolution.
Is there a second?
