"He that cannot reason is a fool. He that will not is a bigot. He that dare not is a slave."
 -- Andrew Carnegie

For a political organization whose smear tactics make cholera smell like Clorox, the tea party seems awfully upset by the self-inflicted tread marks on its banner.

Polls taken in April this year show the racial attitudes of most tea party members--except for a lot of them--are consistent with those of the general public. That's certainly half the story. But to hear tea party activists tell it, there's hardly a racist bone in their whole confederation's body politic. Now, with the cat officially out of the bag, the truth about the movement's racist undercurrents is getting impossible to conceal.

Just last week, tea party activists lashed out at the NAACP, even before the nation's largest and oldest civil rights organization passed a resolution calling on tea party leaders to "repudiate the racist elements and activities" within their ranks.

The tea party's denials and counter-charges were embarrassingly inept. While its leaders were skirting the NAACP's point by angrily claiming that racism exists only on the movement's fringes, they were simultaneously chastising Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams for publishing a series of racist screeds. By Saturday, the national umbrella group, Tea Party Federation, had ousted Williams and his group from their membership.

As a result, the movement forfeited its argument that a multitude of leaders--or no leaders at all--somehow entitles it to immunity from accountability. Presto! Change-o! Suddenly the "grassroots" organization was pulling leaders out of a hat, anointing some and excommunicating others as if struck by a bolt of religion.

The St. Louis Tea Party was positively apoplectic. In anticipation of the NAACP vote, the local group preemptively adopted its own resolution in "full condemnation of the NAACP's hatred and lies."

But as with other tea party groups, it was the St. Louis Tea Party telling the lies. In one example, mirrored across the movement, the group claimed the NAACP had "slurred" all tea party members with the broad brush of racism. In fact the NAACP went out of its way to single out only those "elements" of the tea party promoting racism.

"We do not think the tea party is a racist movement," NAACP President Benjamin Jealous told Talking Points Memo before the delegates voted last Tuesday. "Our concern is that it tolerates racism and bigotry by its members."

That distinction didn't stop the St. Louis Tea Party from blustering, in part:

Whereas the NAACP decided to launch their 101st National Convention with a resolution condemning the Tea Party movement and labeling millions of their fellow Americans who subscribe to the movement as "racists"...

...we demand that the NAACP withdrawal [sic] their bigoted, false and inflammatory resolution against the tea party for any further consideration...

The St. Louis group concluded its whereby's and whereas's by demanding the IRS revoke the NAACP's tax-exempt status.

As Adam Shriver of St. Louis Activist Hub pointed out, the St. Louis Tea Party includes several members who have risen to prominence partly through race-baiting and fearmongering. Among them is Adam Sharp, a partisan video crusader who specializes in editing truth out of his footage. Even a loser like Sharp can be hailed as a tea party leader one day, purport to show the tea party's intolerance for racism another day and then associate President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder with the New Black Panther Party yet another day.

To the casual racist looking for friends, a strong part of the tea party's appeal is this same unapologetic hostility to the nation's first black president, a deep antipathy masked by a more general anger with the president's policies and agenda. But make no mistake, this is not just about policy differences. A CBS News/New York Times poll taken in April hinted at the economic and racial resentment embodied in the self-pitying views of many tea party members:

More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites -- compared with 11 percent of the general public.

And a University of Washington poll, also taken in April, shows tea party supporters are literally twice as likely at, 64%, to believe that President Obama is immoral.

Whatever the origins of the tea party's personalized distrust and yes, hatred, of Obama, it became supercharged in the final months of the 2008 presidential campaign. It was then that John McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, who was previously unaware that Africa is a continent, incited throngs of conservative white voters into blood-thirsty frenzies with charges that Obama was "palling around with terrorists." (In a precursor to her racially-tinged criticism of Obama and to the Birther paranoia that still dogs the president, Palin's campaign for mayor of Wasilla had subtly suggested her opponent, John Stein, was Jewish (he is Lutheran) and forced him to publicly produce his marriage license.)

By early 2009, just months after losing her bid for the vice-presidency, Palin had adopted the tea party as her voter base. It was all in character with Palin's history of courting any available right-wing political party as a stepping stone to power. She has kept close ties to the Alaska Independence Party and, more recently, announced her support for creation of a third major party (perhaps a formally organized Tea Party?). She continues to inspire the movement's radical agenda through Twitter and paid speaking engagements, to fund its preferred candidates through her SarahPAC and to defend its reputation against any public recognition of its deeply resentful mindset.

"I am saddened by the NAACP's claim that patriotic Americans who stand up for the United States of America's Constitutional rights are somehow 'racists,'" Palin tweeted, seamlessly weaving her trademark indifference to truth with her trademark pseudo-patriotism.

Combined with the anti-government Libertarian philosophy of Ron Paul, who first formulated the notion of tea party-as-tax-liberation in late 2007, Palin has fueled the arrogant self-image of tea partiers that they exist as the last hard-working citizens in a nation of lazy, stupid slackers feeding at the public trough. And like Ronald Reagan's elusive "welfare queen," the effect of the tea party's Two-Minute Hate falls first and foremost on the poor and unemployed, who also happen to be disproportionately non-white citizens.

According to the tea party, if you don't like Latinos, throw them all out of the country. Incumbents? Throw them all out. No group or individual is too large or small for the tea party  to stereotype and demonize.

If sharing your lunch counter with blacks isn't your cup of tea, you might like tea party candidate Rand Paul, who didn't fall far from the tree (but apparently did land on his head). Paul is now in hiding from all but the most conservative media after being forced to backpedal from his conviction that states' rights and property rights supersede civil rights.

Which brings us to slavery.

Of all the common rhetoric that tea party racists share, none is more insensitive, inflammatory or mired in self-pity as statements equating 21st-century white Americans with slaves--a woefully delusional sentiment that, as reported by the New York Times, flies in the face of the fact that "Tea Party supporters over all are more likely than the general public to say their personal financial situation is fairly good or very good." You read that right: Even though tea party members are overwhelmingly white, mostly male, better educated and wealthier than most Americans, the poor dears feel positively in bondage! (And we're not talking about Michael Steele's entertainment account.)

Dale Robertson, a self-proclaimed tea party leader and founder of the teaparty.org website, complained of the white man's burden in February 2009 when he was photographed holding a sign saying ""Congress = Slaveowner, Taxpayer = Niggar."

Just a week ago, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, another tea party favorite, suggested that President Obama was turning America into "a nation of slaves."

And responding to the NAACP's resolution last week, Tea Party Express leader Williams stood firm with his ancestors:

"The slave traders of the 16th century should have been as good at exploiting Africans as these people are, because it's just disgusting."

As the press focused on the controversy, Williams was expelled from the Tea Party Federation last week--after he had wallowed in racism for years. Yet no one in the St. Louis Tea Party is expelling Adam Sharp for his views. As part of a movement that revels in political distortion and deception, Sharp relies on the conceit of poker-faced plausible deniability. But like so many in the tea party, his tell is obvious: He just can't resist doubling down on his race cards.