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The Mid-South Tea Party in Tennessee is demanding an apology from U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen after the Memphis Democrat likened tea baggers to Ku Klux Klansmen “without hoods and robes” and said Sarah Palin, in black leather at a John McCain rally, was “dressed like Elvis in the comeback event in Hawaii.”

What apparently set off Cohen, a Jewish attorney who once told the New York Times he votes “like a 45-year-old black woman,” was the incident before the House health care reform vote in which two African-American congressmen, including civil rights hero John Lewis, were spit on and called the N-word. “We saw opposition to African-Americans, hostility toward gays, hostility to anybody who wasn’t just, you know, a clone of George Wallace’s fan club,” he said on The Young Turks, a liberal radio talk show on the Internet and satellite radio.

Mark Herr, a member of the Mid-South Tea Party, which picketed Cohen’s office, declared “The Mid-South Tea Party has never and will never condone or participate in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, the Ku Klux Klan or neo-Nazism.”

Mark A. Skoda, founder and chairman of the Memphis Tea Party, called Cohen’s remarks “hate speech” that’s “beneath the dignity of the office” in an interview with the Commercial Appeal.

One avowed tea bagger was less politick, sending the obligatory death threat, which read in part:  “If our tea parties had hoods, we would burn your ass on a cross on the White House front lawn.”

Even some fellow Democrats cringed at this Cohen crack about Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain:  “When I saw John McCain stand behind Sarah Palin, he looked more like a captured soldier in North Vietnam than he did a United States senator. It was very sad.”  Former Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton, who is running against Cohen in the Democratic primary, called the comment inappropriate.

According to the Commerical Appeal, Cohen said his remarks about McCain were intended to be understood as praise for an American hero. He said he was saddened that McCain had to ask Palin to “leave her post watching for Russians coming across the Bering Sea” to stump for his Senate re-election against “a Glenn Beck clone.”

About Ron Taylor

Ron Taylor was born and raised in Georgia and worked more than 40 years at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a reporter and editor and as an online producer for ajc.com and AccessAtlanta. He served for a time as the newspaper's regional editor, overseeing coverage of the South. He is co-author, with Dr. Leonard Ray Teel, of Into the Newsroom:  An Introduction to Journalism and has conducted workshops in the Middle East on feature writing.

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