MSNBC's Rachel Maddow: Tea Party Conventioneers Are Racists In White Hoods

Rachel Maddow said Tea Party Convention started with a racist bang and the crowd's response was muffled by the "White Hoods."

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From NewsBusters:

FMR. REP. TOM TANCREDO (R-CO): Mostly because I think we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in the country, people who could not even spell the word, "vote," or say it in English, put a committed, socialist ideologue in the White House. The name is Barack Hussein Obama.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: Just for reference here, when Tom Tancredo talks about literacy tests, that`s what they used in the south to keep black people from voting before civil rights legislation and court rulings put a stop to that.

So the convention opened with a clarion call to bring back the literacy tests for voting. And as you could hear, the tea party convention crowd erupted in cheers at the suggestion, although, to be fair, it was sort of hard to tell exactly what the sounds coming from the crowd meant. They were sort of a little bit muffled by, you know, the white hoods.