While introducing President Barack Obama at a Labor Day rally in Detroit this past Monday, Jimmy Hoffa, president of the Teamster labor union, had some choice words for the Tea Party, who he described as being engaged in a “war on workers.”
Predicting that the Tea Party would lose that “war,” Hoffa proudly bellowed “the one thing about working people is we like a good fight,” and later added, “President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march.”
Taken alone, the above statements may not have received much attention, but Hoffa’s closing line has angered many in the conservative blogosphere and talk radio: “Everybody here has got a vote, if we go back and we keep the eye on the prize lets take these son of a b----es out and give America back to America where we belong.”
In more ways than one, this was a very poor choice of words.
Obviously, affixing middle-school epithets to people simply because you disagree with them about economic policy isn’t particularly inspiring or useful.
But in calling for the Tea Party to be “taken out,” was Hoffa really intending to incite violence, as some conservative commentators have suggested?
Of course he wasn’t.
No more than Sarah Palin’s “don’t retreat, reload” comment following the passage of ObamaCare in 2010 was meant as a literal call to arms.
The use of figurative, hyperbolic language is nothing new in politics and, given full context, it isn’t difficult to tell when certain terms are meant literally.
The truth is, most of the outrage on the right is due more to frustration over hypocrisy than genuine fear of marauding Teamsters.
If Hoffa’s comments were made by Tea Party members rather than about them, the major news outlets would be abuzz with indignation over the coarsening of our political discourse and the racist, violent strain running through conservative activist groups.
After Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a Democratic political event in Tucson, speculation ran wild that the shooter must have been motivated by what Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik described as “the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business.”
As it turned out, Loughner was not an extremist Tea Partier; he was just a psychologically troubled young man with odd, incoherent political convictions.
If conservatives really are opposed to double standards, they would be wise not to do the very thing they complain about by overstating the threat posed by Hoffa’s remarks.
Yes, they were over the top and irresponsible, but overstating their seriousness would be too. If Republicans are to be the more credible party, they would be wise to hold their tongues and allow the Hoffas of the world to discredit themselves.
Question David’s intelligence and/or character at dcolthar@asu.edu
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