TeaParty.org Founder Labels Obama With Racial Terms
Mark Potok on May 28, 2010
--splc.org--

Dale Robertson, the vitriolic founder and president of TeaParty.org, blasted out a mass E-mail today that seemed meant to convince doubters that his movement is, after all, racist at its core. Attacking President Obama for traveling home to Chicago for the Memorial Day weekend — rather than staying in Washington to lay a wreath in Arlington Cemetery as many presidents have done — Robertson falls into a string of contemptuous and racially charged terms.

Obama is going home to spend time with “his homies in the Chicago hood,” writes Robertson, who is white. The taxpayers will be footing the bill for the president to “bump and grind in the hood.” While he’s gone, Vice President Joseph Biden and his wife “will step into Obama’s sneakers” to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Obama, meanwhile, will be “shooting hoops, smoking cigarettes and goofing-off with his homies.”

Robertson, who is a contributor to the right-wing Washington Times’ “Tea Party Report” blog (and is identified there as “the Founder of the modern day Tea Party movement”), has never been a study in sensitivity. He has written that everyone who voted for the national health care reform bill is a “national socialist” — a Nazi, like those who murdered millions in the gas chambers. He says that “illegal aliens” are coming to impose socialism on the United States. But now, Robertson has gone one step further, describing Obama as the kind of person who has “homies” in the “hood,” who wears “sneakers” and “shoots hoops,” and who “bumps and grinds.” We wonder just what type of person Dale Robertson is thinking of.