[Note: For reasons of copyright, the cartoon image is not in this post but can be found in links in the article below.]

As MSNBC.com’s resident cartoonist, Daryl Cagle is about as close to being the Obama administration czar of mockery and hyperbole as it gets. I follow his tweets (@dcagle) for the purpose of remaining open-minded and staying in touch with what’s happening across the political spectrum.

One of Cagle’s tweets today erases the distinction between Cagle as a legitimate member of the media and any simple, slavering liberal, hate-inciting troll.

Cagle’s tweet read:

Tough cartoon about the racial bigotry that seems apparent in the Tea Party http://bit.ly/afFzvz #p2 Fair cartoon?

Seeing the key phrases “racial bigotry,” “apparent,” and “Tea Party,” I took the bait, clicked and found myself looking at a cartoon by Milt Priggee posted on Cagle’s blog that caused my jaw to hit the keyboard.

Priggee’s rough-edged scrawling depicts a mob of people holding vitriolic signs and standing around a tree on which the words “Health Care Reform” are written. From the sturdiest branch of the tree hangs a noose, the rope held by a man who says, “Well – if this is Waterloo… where’s the nigger?” [Emphasis mine.]

Because I won’t tempt a lawsuit, I can’t give you an image but you can go to Cagle’s post yourself and take a look.

The icons and language are effective because Priggee’s purpose is to malign a group that threatens to derail the agenda of the American Left. The mob is how the Left sees tea partiers, or at least how they want the uninformed public to see them. Tea partiers, having rallied around opposition to healthcare, might just want to kill the president while they’re at it, the cartoon clearly implies.

I do not claim to be a tea partier, but I did attend tea party rallies over the last year as a journalist and a concerned citizen. I never saw anything that even approached the kind of racism being alleged in a current wave of reporting by the mainstream media, a phenomenon not unlike passing vicious notes in middle school. In fact, one of my favorite photos from the tea parties is the one below in which an Asian-American man proudly and enthusiastically paced through a crowd of nearly one thousand in Bellevue, Wash., carrying two masts with historic protest flags, and the American flag raised higher than all others (just out of frame in this photo).

There can easily be made the argument that Priggee’s cartoon slaps a bull’s eye on the back of tea partiers for blacks to target, and should the Left refuse to disavow inciting hatred with such image they are guilty of hypocrisy of the highest order.

Building on predetermined and exaggerated assumptions –a practice that although not explicitly prohibited by the Society of Journalists ethical code, but almost certainly in opposition to the spirit of journalist’s core requirement to pursue the truth – Priggee adds to a culture of bullying and intimidation that Washington Examiner senior political analyst Michael Barone wrote of in October 2008 as “the coming liberal thugocracy.”

The thing is, this isn’t the first time that Priggee’s particular brand of artistic offense has caused a stir. The people of Western Washington still remember what happened on the day after Thanksgiving 2009 when Maurice Clemmons walked into a coffee shop in Lakewood, Washington and brutally gunned down four police officers where they sat. Priggee’s first visual comment was an image of four bodies, laying lifeless on a café floor, with blood spattered everywhere. Written on the backs of the four corpses were “Huckabee’s Presidential Future,” “Arkansas Parole System,” “Pierce County Bail System,” and “…If Only They Were Armed NRA Mentality.” A more brazen and disgusting example of a man using the tragic deaths of others as a convenient billboard on which to make a political statement is hard to find.

Again, for reasons of protecting myself against copyright infringement, I won’t post the actual cartoon, but you can see it here on the website of the Seattlepi.com where it remains available for people to see.

Milt Priggee is a man whose intellect has not developed the ability to distinguish his long list of hated enemies from each other. Nazis and the KKK fall in the same category as Obamacare opponents and those who feel that more government spending is bad for America.

As Priggee probably knows, what most tea partiers have in common is a distaste for the politics of race used by Democrats to pacify minority populations who are troubled by economic and social dysfunction. That is not racism, but is, in fact, the absence of it.

Tea partiers are feared by Priggee and Cagle’s friends in the Democratic Party mostly because they actually seek out the facts, read proposed legislation, and demand transparency. In response to this blatant and unfair attack on their character, tea partiers should make sure that these cartoonists are reminded of those traits. Contact your local newspaper and inquire about whether either of these two men are published in your hometown. In keeping with the spirit of the Tea Party movement, what you do with the answer to that question is your choice.

[Update 3/26/10 10:07 a.m. PDT: Michelle Malkin's column today, "How the Left fakes hate: A primer," is a great expose of the kind of tricks Cagle and Priggee are at the least cheerleaders to the deception being made to the American public. Give it a read.]

[Update 3/26/10 1:13 p.m. PDT: This post and Priggee's cartoon are the subject of a post on the Huckleberries Online blog of Spokane's Spokesman Review. Glad to see at least one traditional media outlet giving the controversy some mention.]

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