At this week’s NAACP annual meeting, members voted to censure the Tea Party as “racist.” But it’s the NAACP that’s the throwback, argues Tunku Varadarajan.

Clearly, this bozo was reading from the memo from Mark Williams, but do the teabaggers trust a guy with such a terroristy-sounding name?  Seems so.

NAACP: Can we all agree that it stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Cynical Politics?

Well, no.  It’s job, historically, has been to fight racism, which it quite evidently still needs to do.

The proper expansion of “NAACP” has a profoundly archaic ring to it. I know, I know: The retention of that primordial name—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—has to do with safeguarding history; and an irrefutably impressive history it is, too. But can anyone deny that the “colored” part of the organization’s name is no longer preservative of anything that is at all meaningful?

Oh, I don’t know.  The Republican Right has increasingly taken after brown people the world over, be they Hispanic, Muslim, or Black…  somebody still sees in color, it seems.  Why not the NAACP?  Further, these old-fashioned Constitutionalist guardians of (white) tradition can only declare themselves on the cutting edge of modernity to loud guffaws of incredulity whenever they try it, and this tendentious screed is certainly no exception.

Colored: Who the heck says that in the America of today, unless you’re a very, very old friend of the late highwayman (as in dedicated asphalt, not armed robbery) Robert C. Byrd? Which is why no member of this once-courageous black organization will spell out its full name. Everyone says, instead, “N-double A-CP”: To elongate the abbreviation is to expose oneself to derisive—or, worse, baffled—inquisition. (“Dad, Mom, what’s with the ‘colored’ thing?”)

Ah, toss in Robert Byrd, who long since repudiated the racist ideas modern Republicans increasingly embrace, and you can say the stupidest things and (almost) get away with it.  Well, on Fox News you can.

The NAACP, this vestigial bone on the American body politic, has thrust itself into the headlines by voting, at its annual meeting Tuesday, to censure as “racist” the Tea Party movement. (No, they didn’t.  They called upon the Tea Party movement to repudiate its racist elements, which have been both visible and numerous, so basically the whole argument is based on a lie….)  This controversial (with whom isn’t mentioned) public rebuke—delivered a day after the first lady, Michelle Obama, addressed the NAACP’s conference—has opened up a raw, new racial front in the run-up to the November elections. In effect, the self-congratulatory, post-racial Obama camp is reaching for the crudest weapon in the Democratic arsenal: the racial blunderbuss.

Well, given that all the black Republicans in America could meet in a phone booth, Republicans have nothing to say but, “It’s not me, it’s you,” which also a lie.

Of course, desperate times call for desperate measures, and the NAACP is going back to an old playbook. The NAACP is resorting to the Jacksonian (Jesse, not Andrew) ploy to use the race card (a) to rally blacks to the mid-terms; and (b) to intimidate the mainstream media, so that it doesn’t report critically on a liberal administration, urging it instead to focus on the perceived sins of the Tea Party movement.

The Obama Administration, liberal?  Compared to what?  And the media is intimidated by it?  Obviously, the Daily Beast has no editors.

If black Americans are suffering due to our current economic woes, Obama’s own policies are hardly helping them. The NAACP can’t bitch about “the Man” anymore because the Man is Obama. And so instead it turns its racially monolithic vituperation on the Tea Party, which has never been in power, and has had no impact on the economic condition of black Americans—except to advocate policies (smaller government, lower taxes, radically reduced deficits, etc.) that would likely improve the standard of living of all Americans (blacks included).

This likelihood is based on what evidence?  How well blacks did under George W. Bush?  Or other non-rich Americans, for that matter?  The Tea Party ideology is, basically, to bring back slavery, but in a colorblind way, and they got a long way toward that goal over the last ten years.

In fact, the Tea Party is a greater friend of black Americans, one might say, than the administration, and is much more representative of America than the NAACP. (There are many more black members of the Tea Party—however you define that movement—than there are, by definition, non-black members of the NAACP.)

One might say, indeed, but only if one wanted to reveal himself as a lying nincompoop.

The NAACP senses—knows—that the electoral momentum is building inexorably against President Obama. And they hope to slow it by playing the race card. Let there be no doubt that nothing would have been tabled at this NAACP meeting without President Obama’s imprimatur—especially with the first lady as the keynote speaker. Our first black president—with his lowest approval ratings ever—is using his race politically, through a surrogate.

Everybody knows all darkies are connected, they said so on Fox News.

But shameless as all this is, it may have some effect. As Shelby Steele, a political scientist at the Hoover Institution, told me, “racist stigma in America is so powerful that truth and reason look meager next to it. Any populist movement—such as the Tea Party—that is predominantly white, has this vulnerability of seeming to be a throwback to the nation’s racist past.”

Ah, it seems that this diligent muckraker strolled all the way down the hall at Hoover’s Last Erection and “interviewed”  a fellow wingnut welfare recipient, which is way easier than using The Google or something to “research” the story you’d planned to write anyway.  Too bad he got some unintentional honesty mixed in with the desired propaganda.

Michelle Obama’s participation as keynote speaker could prove toxic to the Democrats in the run-up to the November elections—even though she confined her remarks to obesity and the like, and steered clear of references to the Tea Party.

In other words, nothing actually happened to support the story’s whole premise, but never mind.   The good stuff comes next:

Many in America already believe that she is a black militant in mufti, and her headlining of a gathering which cast the Tea Party as racist will have been noted by a good many ordinary, non-radical, middle-of-the-road Americans—not to mention Tea Party activists, who will be sure (and who can blame them?) to put together little YouTube packages from the NAACP shindig, cutting from Michelle O to Ben Jealous, the NAACP president who was the resolution’s prime mover.

Let’s get Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe on the case, and maybe then, with a heavy assist from Fox, such delusional claptrap can be edited to seem credible for a few hours.  Honestly, how many Americans outside of the righty fever swamps really think Michelle Obama is “a black militant in mufti?”  That would be none.  How many Americans think that suggesting such a thing is both stupid and racist?  That would be most.  But do go on; this just gets better and better.

So here we have the Tea Party, one of the nation’s most organic, Athenian, democratic movements, being attacked by a political organization—the NAACP—that is among the most sclerotic, dinosaurian, and cadaverous of America’s political groupings. When race is in play, there is vulnerability all around. The NAACP, and President Obama, will learn that in the months ahead.

The surest sign of righty craziness is when they are waxing so rhapsodic about their wonderfulness that they actually call a ginned-up, Fox-sponsored astroturf organization “Athenian.”  Dick Armey probably wet himself when he read that, although Sarah Palin will undoubtedly be so impressed that she’ll announce that she can see the Acropolis from her porch.  And, like all righty diatribes, it ends with a dark threat based entirely on delusions of grandeur, with Tunku Varadarajan playing Marvin Martian, poorly, and with the same results.

It’s fitting that the Teabaggers chose Nashville for their hoedown; it’s safely within the Bible Belt, but full of enough crass, ersatz show business to offset its provincial dreariness and add to the absurd fakery of the whole event.  It’s been twenty years since I last visited that fair city, but I doubt it has changed much, and thus it is the perfect venue for a command performance of Caribou Barbie and the Bluegrass Morans.  The Opryland Hotel, like everything else in Nashville, is a cheesy box in the suburbs, surrounded by parking.  It’s a little like Wasilla, really.  Sarah will love it there.

The actual “city” itself is a lifeless, tatty, and hollowed out backwater; its majestic Richardson Romanesque train station has been turned into a hotel; what few historic buildings remain huddle in disconnected clusters around the state capitol building and the river, and a downtown “revitalization” project did the exact opposite.  It consists of an utterly charmless convention center, bland hotel, and a lame shopping mall covering several blocks, connected by pedestrian overpasses and sitting atop forbidding, windowless parking garages.  A stroll through this boring panopticon bubble came up snake eyes as far as finding a decent cup of coffee, but was nonetheless revealing.  No one except the lowliest help was anything but white, and everyone seemed oddly glum.  A pretty young (white) clerk in the shabby and dreadful department store, Castner-Knott’s, when asked about her hometown, drawled, “Ah hate it here; ah cain’t wait t’leave,” an observation that due to the glacial slowness of Southern locution, took a shockingly long time for her to utter.  She dreamed of moving to California with her boyfriend after a recent visit there, her first outside the South.  Indeed, looking at it from Castner-Knott’s in downtown Nashville even the crappy Robinson’s store at the hideous Beverly Center couldn’t help but have looked good to her, but I wondered whether that accent would go over with the 90210 crowd.  She urged me to go see the replica of the Parthenon in Centennial Park, “It’s jus’ lak th’ one in Greece, only fixed up.”

Dinner out was another baffling experience; we were encouraged to go to a district of restored cast-iron and brick buildings that somehow survived Nashville’s “urban renewal” and found a short but lively street of places that were actually open with people coming in and out, again nearly all of them white.  (I wracked my brain to figure out whether there were ever any real black people in the city to spark so much obvious white flight, but  I never found out.)   There was a brief wait at the door, and we asked some exiting patrons if the restaurant was any good.  ”S’all raht if y’lak French fude.”  Hmm.  Not a very ringing endorsement, but our table was ready, so we went in, not wanting to spend thirty bucks on a cab out to the suburbs where all the supposedly good restaurants were.  The menu consisted of standard American steaks and seafood; the only vaguely French thing I could find was French fries.  They didn’t even have bearnaise, let alone escargot or some of those spooky French things that turn out to be brains or something.  I was kind of disappointed, but by that time, not too surprised.  I had “Le New York,” medium rare.

Back in the 60′s, Jessica Mitford was writing for Esquire Magazine about the civil rights struggle and when she traveled to Nashville was as mystified as I was that such a place would call itself the “Athens of the South.”  She mused, “Do Athenians call their city  ’The Nashville of Greece?’”  I rather doubt it.  But nonetheless, all these thousands of years later, Nashville is probably the perfect choice for the teabaggers, never mind that its agora is paved, striped, and regularly patrolled to keep out darkies.  Democracy was born in Athens, but Nashville has the fake version, which is even better because thanks to Dick Armey and Sarah Palin, it’s been “fixed up.”  The teabaggers will be right at home.

UPDATE:  I just watched snippets of Palin’s speech, if you want to call it that. It was the expected mixture of resentment, paranoia, and lies, but somehow it was still worse than I imagined, especially the audience reactions.  I need to dig up a transcript and a barf bag before I can translate it, much less dissect it.  Perhaps in a nod to Nashville, her hair was considerably larger than usual.  More later on this CHNN station, and on CHNN News Overnight.