For the last two weeks it’s been a ceaseless barrage of accusations and smears flowing out of the Democrat Party directed at the Tea Party with a familiar theme – Tea Partiers are the new Ku Klux Klan.

We’ve seen it with the frothing-at-the-mouth members of the Congressional Black Caucus, with the most recent example being a statement from Andre Carson (D-IN), a Muslim convert, that Tea Party members would like to see black people as “second class citizens” who would ultimately be “hanging on a tree.”

But the fusillade isn’t over. It appears that even the hoi-polloi among supporters of the President and his party have manned the cannons.

Consider this letter to the editor at the Baton Rouge Advocate today from one “Ben Williams, Sr.,” a retired lab technician in Baton Rouge…

The tea partiers are not only radical, but racist.

In the fall of 2008 is the beginning of the tea partiers. Tea party activists truly took root when Barack Obama became president.

Their leader Rush Limbaugh tells his tea partiers to hate the black president!

Rush: “I hope he fails.” That’s a first! No other time in U.S. history.

America, be truthful. The tea party movement came about because of the black man in the White House.

Some would say there are black people in the tea party movement, and I would say there were black people in the Civil War fighting with the South.

To me the tea party is nothing but a hate group. That’s motivated by a black family in the White House.

One wonders what on earth would motivate the Advocate editors to run such an incendiary letter. It’s not like Mr. Williams is a particularly scintillating or eloquent writer or that his theory – that the Tea Party only exists because of the color of the president’s skin – is especially noteworthy.

Leaving that aside, let’s remember from whence the Tea Party came. Because Mr. Williams is either ignorant on the subject or is attempting to prey on the ignorance of the Advocate’s readers in accusing the movement of coming to life in 2008. That’s not true.

This was the genesis of the Tea Party – on February 19, 2009:

That guy was Rick Santelli from CNBC. He was ranting not about black presidents but about bailouts of deadbeat mortgagees. And then a little later, Santelli added some fuel to the fire.

Santelli – not Jim Crow – is the father of the Tea Party.

The Tea Party is a movement primarily of fiscal conservatives. They espouse the radical idea that the government shouldn’t spend more than it takes in. For that quaint notion they’re branded as racist by Williams and his betters on the Left.

If a white conservative were to say that blacks are dependent on the government, he or she would immediately be branded as Jim Crow. But to the extent we’re to give Mr. Williams credit for thinking through any of the things he says in his letter, other than just bleating “racist” at those who disagree with him, he’s saying precisely the same thing. Specifically, that regardless of whether the black community will suffer (with a 16 percent unemployment rate in the Age of Obama, it is already suffering) along with the rest of the nation under the regime of runaway government profligacy the Tea Party seeks to stop, any reduction in the size of government is an assault on Black America.

Mr. Williams sells his own people short with such a notion, if in fact his rhetoric has any basis at all.