WHEN EXTREMISTS FIND ONE OF THEIR OWN TOO EXTREME…. Tea Party Express chairman Mark Williams has made quite a name for himself since becoming a leader of the right-wing “movement.” His CNN appearance in September is still hard to forget — Williams not only called the president a “Nazi,” but agreed with his own characterization of Barack Obama as “an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief.”
This week, however, Williams seemed to push his luck, lashing out at the NAACP, first insisting that the civil rights organization makes “more money off of race than any slave trader, ever,” and then publishing a racially-charged blog post, accusing the NAACP of being “racist.”
In the larger context, the NAACP hoped to shine a light on the racism that too often appears within the Tea Party “movement.” Williams went on the attack, and in the process, inadvertently helped bolster the NAACP’s point.
As a result, even right-wing Tea Partiers have decided they may not want to be associated with one of their ostensible leaders.
At the start of the week, Williams was listed as a “vice chairman” on the website for the Our Country Deserves Better PAC. Now, the site shows Williams listed as a “spokesperson” for the PAC. The same goes for the Tea Party Express website — it still listed Williams as the group’s chair until [Friday], when it was changed to reflect Williams’ resignation from the group in June.
Joe Wierzbicki, the coordinator for TPE and the PAC, confirmed that the changes were made to the websites Friday after press inquiries surrounding Williams’ controversial blog post. Williams removed the post Friday, but the controversy surrounding it has continued.
“That was what prompted reporters to ask,” Wierzbicki said of the controversy, “and so we thought ‘we better go get [the website] addressed right now.’”
When even the Tea Party crowd wants to keep one of their own leaders at arm’s length, it suggests Mark Williams has become something of an embarrassment, and undermined his “movement” in the process.
