Playing the bigotry card: the aces have become jokers

You know who they are, those Democrats who routinely play the bigotry card — accusing Republicans and conservatives of bigotry when it’s not warranted. Certainly, not all Democrats play that game, but the Democratic Party’s anti-Republican, anti-conservative narrative has become so replete with the bigotry bogeyman, both implicit and explicit, that it taints the party as a whole. Two-thousand-ten, however, may well prove to be the nadir of this tactic.

Democrats who play the bigotry card do so to appeal to minority voters, especially African Americans and Hispanics, and to preempt debate. They are assisted by the left-leaning media, which incorporates suggestions of right-wing bigotry into their reporting.

Case in point: the Tea Party movement. Since it appeared on the American political scene over a year and a half ago, Democrats, from Speaker Nancy Pelosi to local Democratic Party activists, have done their best to portray it as a group of angry white people and racists. Even after the peaceful, politics- and sign-free “Restoring Honor” rally on 8/28 at the Lincoln Memorial, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) said “These were people that were wearing sheets over their heads 25 years ago.”

Grayson, known for his outrageous statements about Republicans, is an extreme example; but other Democrats and the left-leaning mainstream media do the same thing with more subtlety. As Democratic pollster Doug Schoen points out in his September 3 column “The Democrats’ Big Mistake,” The Tea Party movement “. . . has been systematically ignored, belittled, marginalized, and ostracized by political, academic, and media elites who have portrayed the movement as being driven by racism, bigotry, and white supremacy.”

Charles Krauthammer, in his August 27 column “Last Refuge of a Liberal,” similarly points out how liberals reflexively pull out the bigotry charge when they’re losing the argument in the court of public opinion. “Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.”

“What’s a liberal to do?” he asks. “Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument.”

High-profile personalities and politicians on the right are the favorite targets of bigotry-card players. The more influence they appear to have the more bigotry-card players attack them. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin top their lists. Palin in particular has come under fire because off her potential as a challenger to President Barack Obama in 2012. Democrat and United Mine Workers president Richard Trumka is among the latest to attack her. He accuses Palin of using language that foments violence, and says if she keeps doing what she’s doing she’ll become the new Joe McCarthy.

The reason Democrats’ accusations that Republicans and Tea Partiers are “racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes” have increased exponentially recently, of course, is the upcoming November elections. Democrats are reading the opinion polls and listening to estimates of their loses by sage political scientists like Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, who has predicted the outcome of American elections with great accuracy. They see the tsunami of Republicans, Tea Party supporters, and Independents coming over the rise, their spirits high and confident of victory, and Democrats are panicking.