Update February 22nd: CAIR criticizes Tancredo, here.
Tom Tancredo (I wrote about him here two days ago) spoke at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville on Thursday night and caused a stir in the mainstream media for remarks he made about how immigrants need to know how to speak English before voting.
I laughed that he did this in Nashville where businesses and leftwing open borders groups had joined forces in a heavily funded ( I researched the funding at one point and it was huge) campaign last year to defeat English-only for Nashville.
He also called Obama a socialist. Here is a portion of a text of an e-mail from Bay Buchanan a colleague of former US Representative Tom Tancredo at Team America:
The other night, Tom gave the opening remarks at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville. And the controversy was immediate. Not with attendees, let me clarify; they gave Tom three standing ovations.
He was so great! Speaking from his heart, as Tom always does, he spoke of the Founding Fathers and how they were part of a country divided into three groups–the Patriots, the Tories, and those who didn’t care. It is no different today, Tom told the crowd. Today’s Patriots, including the attendees of this convention, are fighting for our Republic, our religion and our civilization.
But those that won this election, Obama and his Democratic cronies in Washington, will bring about the destruction of our Republic if they have their way. And then there are those who don’t want to get involved in the battle.
We can’t worry about those who don’t care, Tom said, we must focus on winning this fight. We can do it, but only if we give it everything we have, and not give up until we have won. The stakes are too high for us to do less. But it can be done, and the great spontaneous uprising that has been spawned by Obama and his left wing policies proves we can win!
Tom called for the US to change the law on who can and can not vote. He said in this past election, people who couldn’t even spell “vote” or say it in English voted in our election and they voted for Obama, a “committed socialist ideologue.” He called for “Civics Literacy” tests for all citizens who want to vote.
It was this paragraph that got most of the press’ attention. The media still can’t abide any reference to Obama as a Socialist and they were laying in wait to characterize the Tea Party as racist and extremist. But there is no denying the fact that President Obama is a “committed socialist ideologue!“
And no matter how radical the Left attempts to portray Tom, the Tea Party or Americans who went to the town hall meetings and rallies and voted to throw out the Democrats in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts, they can’t change the fact that the revolution has begun. And Tom and Team America is going to do everything we can to keep it rolling, and we will not stop until American Patriots have taken the reins of power from the establishment politicians in both parties.
And I know we can count on you to be right by our sides in this battle for the heart and soul of our nation. Tom has been asked by a number of Tea Party leaders to speak to their state conventions and he has agreed to go wherever he can help build this movement.
We will let you know as soon as Tom’s speech is up on YouTube, so you can see it for yourself.
I’ll post the link to his speech when I find that it is posted at YouTube, and we can all see what the fuss is about. From what I know about Tea Partiers, his speech hit the mark. Immigration is a big issue for conservative grassroots who got their first taste of power in the summer of 2007 when the Kennedy/McCain amnesty bill went down to defeat because of a citizens’ revolt against it.