Steve Benen Concern Trollery on Lindsey Graham Sexual Orientation

The post is really about delegitimizing the tea parties, and especially a recent South Carolina Tax Day Tea Party. As one website put it:

Tea party activists in South Carolina apparently didn’t receive the memo to tone down their incendiary rhetoric, in the wake of death threats and violent acts waged against U.S. lawmakers. A tea party rally held in Greenville over the weekend provided the few thousand in attendance a cornucopia of racism, hate, paranoia, seditious calls to take up arms against the government and anti-gay rhetoric. And the offensive remarks receiving the most attention were those made by the event’s keynote speaker, race-baiting nativist and former U.S. congressman Tom Tancredo. He took to the podium and whipped up the crowd with an anti-Obama racist birther rant: “If his wife says Kenya is his homeland, why don’t we just send him back?”

The rally was organized by the Upcountry Conservative Coalition. The group’s mission statement: “We the People…are coalescing to reclaim our God given rights by restoring our Constitutional Republic.”

But leftists have long attacked Senator Graham on his sexual orientation, often using crude homophobic stereotypes:

Lindsey Graham (R-SC), an unmarried/never married 52 year old with a funny, forced way of walking, has been far more fastidious with his homosexuality. Again, "everyone" knows-- except the voters in conservative South Carolina. Not that it doesn't come up from time to time; people talk. In fact, the head of the Democratic Party in South Carolina said something when the effeminate Lindsey decided to run for Thurmond's senate seat. "He's a little too light in the loafers" to succeed Strom Thurmond. Graham got into a really queenie tizzy fit and loudly threatened to sue-- although he didn't. (They never do.)

And thus notice Digby's total hypocrisy:

In light of the teabaggers' crude outing of Lindsay Graham, I took a little trip down memory lane and revisited the history of the right wing attacks on gays as threats to national security. I guess that Mad Men craze has unfortunately put McCarthyism back in vogue.

Yeah. Right.