by Berry Craig

Paul Begala, the CNN pundit and Democratic political guru, wonders "if at
long last there is no decency on the far right."

He cited a professionally-printed sign from the recent Washington tea party.
"BURY OBAMACARE WITH KENNEDY," it said.

"Oh, I get it," Begala jabbed on the Huffington Post Internet site. "Sen.
Kennedy is dead, and these slugs want health care reform to be dead too.
That is so clever."

Kennedy called universal health care "the cause of my life." I suspect the
sign-toter's disdain for Kennedy has a deeper source, and ditto for many
other tea baggers.

It's race.

"Of the white Americans who did the most to help the advancement of civil
rights, Ted Kennedy would be on the short list. He may even be at the top of
it," an Associated Press story quoted Douglas Brinkley, a Rice University
historian and author.

A lot of white folks - especially in my part of the country and farther
South - despised Ted Kennedy precisely because he championed equality for
all Americans. (A lot of them also loathed the senator's two brothers,
President John F. Kennedy and Attorney Gen. Robert Kennedy, for the same
reason.)

It's hard not to conclude that many of the tea baggers hate Obama mainly
because he's our first African American president. Some of the Washington
protesters, packed signs that caricatured Obama as an African witch doctor.

Meanwhile, Rep. Joe Wilson, the South Carolina Republican who shouted "You
lie!" at the president, has become a folk hero to the tea baggers (The House
voted to rebuke him for his remark.). Maureen Dowd suspects Wilson also has
problems with Obama's skin color. I'm sure Wilson would disagree. But for
the record:

-- Wilson belongs, or has belonged, to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, "a
Southern heritage group that has been largely dominated by racial extremists
since 2002," according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

-- Wilson was an aide to the late Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who
ran for president in 1948 as a segregationist "Dixiecrat" and helped lead
much of the white South into the Republican fold in the 1960s when LBJ made
the Democrats the party of civil rights.

-- Wilson voted to keep the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina
capitol when he was in the state legislature.

".Fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!"
Dowd wrote. "..Wilson's shocking disrespect for the office of the president
- no Democrat ever shouted 'liar' at W. when he was hawking a fake case for
war in Iraq - convinced me: Some people just can't believe a black man is
president and will never accept it."

Anyway, by attacking the president on health care or on government spending
- or claiming he was born in Africa or is a closet Muslim - the racists
think they can hide their number one reason for slamming him: he's not their
favorite hue.

Of course, throughout our history, bigots have tried to lay down smoke
screens over race.

John C. Calhoun - probably one of Wilson's heroes -- and the other rich,
white slave owners who ran pre-Civil War South Carolina declared the tariffs
of 1828 and 1832 null and void. A larger issue motivated the "nullies'"
opposition to the levies. Calhoun and company feared that if the federal
government could enforce tariff laws, it could, some day, enforce measures
to abolish slavery.

In 1860-1861, 11 slave states - led by South Carolina -- broke away from
the Union in the name of "states' rights." They meant the right of states to
have slaves and seceded because they were scared that President Abraham
Lincoln and the Republicans would use federal might to end the South's
peculiar institution.

For many years after the Civil War, "states' rights" was the Southern cover
word for segregation and race discrimination. Thurmond often invoked it.

Thurmond would have been among kindred spirits in the tea party crowd in
Washington, which was almost all white. So are the tea parties everywhere
else. Nearly every one of the rowdies who showed up to shout down Democratic
congressmen and senators at the town hall style forums were white folks,
too.

For the umpteenth time, I am not saying everybody who opposes Obama on
health care or on government spending, or on anything else, or who didn't
vote for him, is a racist. The president doesn't think so either.

But the hatred for him among tea party crazies and the town hall thugs is
visceral.

It's way beyond differences of political perspectives.

Would the uber-right-wing detest Obama as deeply if he were white? I doubt
it. Would Wilson have shouted, "You lie!" at a white Democratic president?
Don't think so.

Anyway, Calhoun would be proud of the neo-Confederate Wilson, the tea
baggers and the town hall rowdies. They're his kind of white folks.