So, How's That Post-Racial Left Working Out For You?

Michelle Malkin on “The Left’s shameless new smear:”

Tired of the old, sexual vulgarity “Tea Bagger” popularized by the likes of CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Matt Taibbi, the Left has concocted a new epithet for the Tea Party movement:

The “Tea Klanners” or “Tea Klan.”

The meme has been spreading on Twitter and left-wing blogs. Now, it has surfaced among Alinsky’s avenging angels at the Denver Tea Party (via Peoples Press Collective)

Click over to Michelle’s site for photos. It’s quite an Orwellian smear: comparing the Tea Partiers to the KKK, when they were Woodrow Wilson’s auxillary league and booster club in the 1910s and ’20s. But then, as Tim Graham noted today in Newsbusters, it’s amazing how fungible the various elements of the ancient Progressivism can be when needed by their modern-day media descendants:

The April 19 Newsweek cover that’s shamelessly selling the “remarkable” tale of our economic recovery also promises a story on “Hate on the Right.” In fact the word “HATE” takes up half a page, white letters on a black background, with the subhead “Antigovernment extremists are on the rise – and on the march.”Pictures illustrating the article strangely connect Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin with 1930’s socialists. The caption read: “Huey Long castigated the rich and Father Coughlin denounced Jews in the 1930s. Today, the microphones belong to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.” (Beck’s previous impassioned rebuttal of the comparison to Coughlin is ignored.) This would not be the first time Newsweek’s imagined “right wing” Coughlin as an Obama foil.

You don’t say.

Maybe the Tea Party infiltrators are friends of Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), who first dreamed up this smear — after being called a Klansman himself by a fellow racialist Democrat even further to his left.

Update: Unless you’re on the West Coast, it may be too late to use them today, but file these links away for the future: both Michelle, and Mike Flynn of Big Government offer printable signs to carry for photo-ops with these sorts of Tea Party Crashers.