Last week the NAACP issued a carefully worded letter calling on Tea Party leaders to address racism in their own ranks. The reaction from the extreme right was immediate and vitriolic: "How dare those dirty n- I mean, how dare they?!" Within a few hours, Tea Party supporters flooded the Internet with posts using different variations on the argument that calling someone else racist is itself a racist act. There is, it would seem, a bevy of legal precedent for this, including the famous case of Smelt It v. Dealt It.

One Free Republic poster exemplified the Tea Party's new-found maturity in his reply to the civil rights group's statement: "I know you are, NAACP, but what am I?"

Moreover, the NAACP has no right to make such a claim because it is a racist organization. Not only does the group's name contain an antiquated slur for African Americans, it exists specifically to benefit one race!

Self-described Tea Party leader Mark Williams says that it's "impossible" for there to be racism in the Tea Party. According to Williams, those who look at the last eighteen months of Tea Party activity and see evidence of bigotry are like UFO enthusiasts, deliberately misinterpreting the world around them so that they can see what they wish to see. Apparently, all the epithet-hurling and symbolic lynching we've seen at Tea Party events are nothing more than a trick of the light bouncing off the upper atmosphere or perhaps weather balloons.

As Williams and others on the right assert, there is no such thing as Tea Party racism because the New Black Panther Party exists. Sure, we're talking about a group of about a dozen or so painfully disorganized people, but that doesn't do anything to alter the undeniable kinda-sorta equivalency. After all, they both have the word "party" in their names. Racism on one end, cancels out racism on the other end. It's simple mathematics. Only a moron (or in conservative protest sign parlance, a "moran") would argue with air-tight logic such as this.

As if that wasn't enough to convince you that the NAACP is dead wrong, consider the work of intellectual counterfeiter Andrew Breitbart. With just a mild exaggeration here and there, changing words like "some" to "all" and "occasionally" to "always," he can render the NAACP's carefully-worded statement easily refutable. The next step is to reverse the logic and repeat it until a critical mass of people believe it: the Tea Party isn't racist at all because the Tea Party is obviously not entirely racist. QED. It's as easy as shooting incredibly gullible fish in a blogosphere barrel.

Your heavily-medicated racist aunt doesn't think the Tea Party is racist. How can you disagree?

Members of the Tea Party have a deep reverence for the Constitution- but not the version we have today, apparently. In interviews, talk radio calls, and in misspelled messages written in feces on the walls of post office bathrooms, party activists talk about "getting back" to the Constitution, implying that we need to go back to the original unamended document (at least before the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments) back to a simpler time when the nation's founding document valuated black people at three fifths as much as whites.

In summary. Tea Party members are not racist. They're just bitterly complaining about illegal immigration during its lowest period in decades, about taxes while they are at their lowest rates for middle class families in half a century, about deficit spending after eight years of conservative splurging.

So, whom are you going to believe? The Tea Party Patriots or a bunch of people whose opinions only count for three-fifths as much?