"The Tea Party emerges as not only outrageous, but they have turned up the volume in ways that even Code Pink have not been able to do," Rep. Maxine Waters said the other day on MSNBC. A video (warning: some adult language) from Breitbart.tv has been making the rounds interspersing quotes from that MSNBC interview with clips from a 2007 "antiwar" rally where Waters fulminated about then-President Bush and other members of his administration.
The Breitbart video very effectively makes the case that Waters is guilty of hypocrisy. Her behavior at the rally is at least as unattractive as her description of the tea partiers' conduct. On the other hand, so what? When has a politician ever complained about the other side's incivility without being guilty of hypocrisy?
But a look further back into Waters's history reveals her hypocrisy to be far worse than is typical. The last time America experienced political mob violence--the Los Angeles riots of 1992--Waters was there offering excuses and justifications.
The L.A. riots began on April 29, 1992, after a jury returned a not-guilty verdict in the trial of four Los Angeles policemen charged in connection with the videotaped beating of Rodney King. By the time the riots wound down, six days later, 53 people had been killed and thousands injured.
Maxine Waters was a freshman representative from California's 29th Congressional District (now the 35th), which covers areas of southern Los Angeles where the rioting was centered. Her own district office was burned to the ground. She quickly emerged as an advocate on behalf of the rioters.
"I accept the responsibility of asking people not to endanger their lives," the Associated Press quoted her as saying on April 30. "I'm not asking people not to be angry. . . . I have a right to be angry."
The same day, in an interview with Katie Couric on NBC's "Today" show, she described the rioting as "a spontaneous reaction to inequality and injustice." She added: "I am extremely . . . angry, and I have no problems with saying that. You know, there comes a time when it's all right to be angry, when it's all right to say this is absolutely unbelievable. That's how I feel. And I'm sure that the people that you see, no matter what you think about what they're doing, and no matter how we would not like to see that kind of violence, you can understand the anger."
You want to see what real hate looks like?
What does this leading Democrat say about violent riots?
By May 1, when she gave another interview to Couric, she was referring to the riots as "the insurrection." A 2007 Los Angeles Times article quotes her as having said in 1992, "If you call it a riot, it sounds like it was just a bunch of crazy people who went out and did bad things for no reason. I maintain it was somewhat understandable, if not acceptable. So I call it a rebellion." On May 4, 1992, the L.A. Times quoted her as saying, "Riot is the voice of the unheard."
I don't want to hear, even for one moment, some lousy pipsqueak from the MSM, or the Democrat Party or the Liberal blogosphere talk about Tea Party protests. Not after what happened back then.
There are some similarities between the events that triggered the L.A. riots of 1992 and the anti-ObamaCare protests of 2010. Both were triggered by governmental decisions that struck a significant proportion of the population as unjust. And in both cases, the procedures that led to those decisions seemed to the dissenters to have been rigged. The officer-defendants in the Rodney King beating had successfully sought a change of venue from downtown Los Angeles to Simi Valley. The jury that acquitted them was mostly white. As for ObamaCare, that ugly process is fresh in everyone's minds, so we won't rehearse it.
There was one big difference, though: While the anti-ObamaCare protests were boisterous--perhaps even "outrageous," as Rep. Waters says--they were not violent. There were a scattering of phone threats and acts of vandalism on both sides, but nothing even remotely resembling a riot.
The tea-party protesters are angry, and as Maxine Waters said in 1992, it's OK to be angry. But she has no business lecturing anyone on political civility.
Shut the fuck up.
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