The Washington Post’s Colby King took another stab Saturday at impugning and discrediting the Tea Party as a bunch of racists who are little more than an extension of the Confederacy. In a column titled “The rise of the New Confederacy [1],” King, a regular on Inside Washington, argued: “Today there is a New Confederacy, an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican Party and is taking up where the Old Confederacy left off in its efforts to bring down the federal government.”
The former deputy editorial page editor, whose column appears every Saturday, paid a back-handed compliment to House conservatives as he charged: “The New Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy’s instigated Civil War.”
King concluded his October 5 screed by cautioning readers to not “go looking for a group by the name of New Confederacy” since “they earned that handle from me because of their visceral animosity toward the federal government and their aversion to compassion for those unlike themselves.”
He asserted “they respond, however, to the label ‘tea party.’ By thought, word and deed, they must be making Jefferson Davis proud today.”
That’s the kind of desperate smear which earns journalism prizes. Ten years ago, King won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for columns which, no kidding, “speak to people in power with ferocity and wisdom [2].” Ferocity, maybe; wisdom, no way.
>> Colby King, November 2012: “WashPost Columnist: Obama Is Lincoln, Romney Is Andrew Johnson [3]” <<
— Brent Baker is the Steven P.J. Wood Senior Fellow and Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center. Follow Brent Baker on Twitter. [4]