Clayton News Daily

To the editor:

"The most pivotal scene in our nation's recent civil rights history ... in fact, the self-proclaimed Tea Party protesters hurling racial epithets at members of Congress," is how a recent column (Tina Dupuy's) in your paper begins. Except, that there were no racial epithets hurled.

The fact of the matter is that Democratic members of Congress attempted to incite an incident involving Tea Partiers (walking provocatively through the Tea Party demonstration, rather than taking their normal route of using underground tunnels), and when they were unsuccessful, they made one up, and the mainstream media (yourself included) ran with it.

The area of the incident was rife with devices able to record sound and video and not a single incident of a racial or other epithet has surfaced, despite the $100,000 bounty offered by Andrew Breitbart for any such evidence.

The House Democratic leadership badly needed to discredit the Tea Partiers (who, it turns out, are 40 percent Democrats and Independents and whose views are held by roughly 65 percent of U.S. voters) and designated the execrable Rep. Clymer (D-SC and Majority Whip) to incite an incident for that purpose. His props were Reps. Lewis and Cleaver, who are currently backpedaling from the accusations against the Tea Partiers as fast as they can pedal.

By now, no serious person can believe that the Congressmen were subjected to racial or other epithets. However, this bogus story fit the template of many media personages (again, yourself included), and so you (Tina Dupuy) repeated this bogus story uncritically. You really look silly.

D. J. FULTON Jonesboro