On Monday, Politico’s chief political columnist Roger Simon wrote a column in which he suggested that Tea Partiers were racists, and that Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) deserved to die. He wrote:
Question: If Ted Cruz and John Boehner were both on a sinking ship, who would be saved?
Answer: America.
Then, as if understanding that calling for the deaths of the sitting Speaker of the House and junior Senator from Texas might be construed as over the top, Simon doubled down:
Harsh? Look around you at what is happening to America and you will see harsh. I am not talking about closed parks and monuments. I am talking about the funds cut to nearly 9 million mothers and young children for food, breastfeeding support and infant formula. That is harsh. Making a war against babies is harsh….
But Simon’s radicalism was far from done. He next labeled all Tea Partiers racists because of one speaker’s ridiculous comments about the Koran and one idiot protester carrying a Confederate flag:
This weekend, racism came out of the closet. (Which assumes it has ever been in the closet.)
Protesters marched through the streets of Washington on Sunday with a Confederate flag and then a protester lounged against the White House fence with one. Displaying the Confederate flag in front of a home occupied by a black family was meant to send a particular, and particularly repellent, message.
How one protester with a flag became tons of protesters with that flag remained unanswered. But the message was clear: even if people like Simon are the ones calling for the deaths of public officials, it’s the Tea Party that represents extremism.
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
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