Tim Bishop town hall (8/27) Out-of-town "Tea Partiers" shouted down by Patriotic Residents

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1. Phil says

   I was one of the counter demonstrators at the Tea Party in Huntington and I also attended the Town Hall hearing by Tim Bishop, altough I could not get into the school as it was too crowded. I had a chance to speak to several of the Tea Party Patriots. Although I did reach some common ground on issues (mostly related to how bad the prior administration was) I was very much concerned about their underlying resentments, which seemed to be bigotry. Let me explain why I think many in the group are bigoted.

   One tea party “patriot” was carrying a two-sided poster. After we started talking she showed me the opposite side of her poster. It was a shop-altered photo of President Obama, depicting him with a powdered white face, black make up around his eyes and very big red lip sticked lips. It was titled “Socialist”. In response to my question she said it represented the “Joker” but she could not explain the connection between the Joker or Jack Nicholson and Socialism. She said others also told her it made them look like bigots, so she was only showing that side occasionally!

   Another Tea Party Patriot (Joe) said that a means to reduce health care costs was to drop illegal aliens from medical care. Joe thought this would save 20% of overall health care costs. In response to my question “Why there were no similar protests when the Irish were the largest number of illegal aliens in the North east”, Joe said that the Irish were hard workers.

   Joe went on to explain that he was a restaurant owner in Riverhead and had about 14 Hispanic workers. Joe said that all his workers had produced papers showing that they were legal but admitted that some probably had fake papers and he did not use “E-verify”. He said it was other firms that hired the estimated 900 illegals in Riverhead. Of which he had no reason to protest, that was up to someone else.

   In response to other questions Joe said that he withheld both social security and income taxes for all his workers including all those with green cards. Joe said he didn’t care if the immigrants eventually left the country because their status changed or they were in fact illegal from the start; or if they were ever able to collect social security that they paid into; or to get tax refunds at the end of the year. In summary Joe was happy to use them as workers, take out taxes but could care less if they ever got refunds or retirement benefits. In summary Joe’s Hispanic workers paid their fair share (he made sure of that) and there is a very good chance that they won’t get appropriate payments; either with end of year refunds or with social security payments. So how are they a burden to Long Island?

   Others who I didn’t talk to in detail cared signs saying that “Obama = Hitler”. When I said this was offensive, the response, from several “patriots”, was that Stalin was even worse than Hitler. What does either Hitler or Stalin have to do with our President? At that point I gave up.

   What do you think, bigots? Or just right wing nuts?

   September 3, 2009, 5:34 pm Reply