From the April 11, 2010 CSI Walworth County Sunday "The Way we see it" column:

Now that the Democrat health care jihad is over and the truth about punitive costs and mandates trickles in from the mainstream media, Tea Party protesters are learning what their government and its sock puppet propagandists really think of them.

Verdict: You’re all a bunch of atavistic, mouth-breathing racists, enraged by the mere fact that the president is African-American. That he is presiding over an unprecedented, partisan expansion of the federal government apparently is beside the point.

It’s all so insipid and predictable. Democrats know that their radical health care overhaul is wildly unpopular, as the cratering approval ratings of the president and Congress demonstrate. What to do when your signature attempt to make history founders in the sea of public opinion? If you’re a liberal member of Congress desperate not to go down with the ship, you smear your most-vocal opponent — in this case, Tea Party types — with allusions to Jim Crow, and hope the slanders reverberate in the receptive media echo chamber.

Thus we hear, without any real evidence, that Tea Party protesters directed racial epithets at black members of Congress prior to the signing of the health care bill, and that the movement is somehow reminiscent of the segregationist uprising in the South during the civil rights movement.

This defies even liberal logic (most recently exhibited by U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat, who fretted that sending an additional 5,000 Marines to Guam might cause the island to capsize). While the Tea Party movement is made up largely of middle class whites, their objections to the Obama presidency center on government spending, excessive taxation and whether the Constitution allows for the Democrats’ sprawling health care mandate. There is anger, to be sure, but it is buttressed by informed dissent, which sets it apart from, say, the vacuous venom directed for years at George W. Bush.

Race-baiting Democrats are awash in a witch’s brew of political problems these days. They now own health care reform, along with a sputtering economy that has shed millions of jobs since Obama took office. A recent Rasmussen poll tellingly showed that 52 percent of American voters believe the average member of the Tea Party movement has a better understanding of issues than the average member of Congress.

This is a recipe for an election-day disaster, which helps explain why Democrats and their media lapdogs must marginalize the Tea Party as the racist rabble.

The guess here is that most Americans — even those who like ObamaCare  — won’t buy it.

Read more on the Outlook and Perspective pages of CSI's Walworth County Sunday e-edition on pages 8A and 9A. and add your comments below.