let me have a crack at tea party vs naacp. first off, the naacp obviously has no idea what a grassroots movement actually is, which tells you what sort of organization the naacp itself is. so president ben jealous calls on the leaders of the tea party to "expel the bigots from your ranks." well there is no hierarchy, no single organization. the media scrambled all day yesterday to get the "leaders" on, and the best you can do is, you know, "active in the memphis tea party" etc. cnn has to be frustrated because there can't be a spokesman. jealous is "ceo"  of the naacp (for god's sake; what would w.e.b. dubois say?). there is no ceo of the tea party. jealous i think is not frustrated with that, just totally uncomprehending of even that possibility. there is no organization from which to expel somebody, and no one to do the expelling. (meanwhile everyone i saw that they actually did get on tv condemned racism.) but how is a guy "associated with the tea party in south carolina" supposed to start expelling people? ben jealous can expel people from his group, or could with the approval of the board of directors etc. but he cannot conceive of a movement without a hierarchy.

now every single piece i saw on the controversy put up an image of the billboard below. equating/comparing/connecting obama to hitler and lenin is pretty silly and useless, and the meme that what's happening here is exactly what happened in germany in the thirties or something is crazily wrong. i guess it came from limbaugh or beck. so the billboard is extreme and extremely wrong etc, and i would personally try to develop some different modes of criticism and ditch that one, although it's always worth suspecting that political leaders would like to amass totalitarian power. but it's only racist insofar as any attack on obama is racist. it makes no reference to race, even by implication: indeed it equates obama to two white guys. you may suspect, or rather hope, or rather find it useful to assert, that such things are made by racists. but that doesn't make 'obama is like lenin' a racist assertion.