The erstwhile “700 Club” host and sometime presidential candidate claims that he has isolated the cause of the devastating earthquake that rocked Port-au-Prince this week, and it’s…Haiti. Apparently, the island made a deal with the devil several centuries ago in order to get out of the horrors of French colonialism, and now they’re paying the price.

“They were under the heel of the French,” he explained to his co-host, Kristi Watts, on an episode of “The 700 Club.”  “You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’”

Those who are trapped underneath shoddily constructed buildings must surely feel some gratification that at least they can isolate the cause of their misfortune: a curse that their ancestors may or may not have brought upon them. No mention of the punishments to be inflicted on the French, including “Napoleon III and whatever,” for their years of exploitation.

I originally found this item via NPR’s Two Way news blog, and one of the most interesting things about the story itself is that many of the comments complain about how the media is focused on nutjobs like Robertson and not the many Christians who are doing good work in Haiti right now. I’m not saying this isn’t true. But it does reinforce the fact that these fellows in the same faith are the ones who should be calling the loudest for Robertson to disaffiliate from the ideals of their beliefs. He’s getting this attention because somehow, he’s managed to stay on the Christian Broadcasting Network for years despite his frequent outbursts on things like, for example, an ancient Haitian devil curse. And by implicitly tolerating this guy, Christians everywhere are being made to look bad.

As a practicing Catholic, let me ask Robertson: please, stop claiming to be a Christian. You exemplify nothing about Christian values. And maybe if enough others join me, we’ll be able to cease his claims of being a mouthpiece for a faith that is nothing like what he professes to believe.

When Harry Reid was growing up in post-Depression Nevada, the term “negro” had not yet fallen out of common usage. As the Senate Majority Leader is now painfully aware, however, the times have changed, and such terminology has gone the way of the dinosaur and the Jim Crow law. It’s unfortunate that he didn’t seem to be aware of that back in 2008, when he described our future president as potentially successful because he was “light skinned” and “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

As usual in the game of politics, such inflammatory comments were seized upon immediately by Reid’s opponents, who accused his supporters of carrying a double standard with regard to senatorial racism. As a result, some prominent Republicans have demanded that Reid, like his predecessor Trent Lott, step down for what he said. Democrats have countered that they’re backing the senator not because he’s one of the country’s most prominent liberal politicians, but because what he said is in no way equivalent to Lott’s 2002 declaration that if the rest of the country had voted for then-segregationist Strom Thurmond back in the 1940s, our country wouldn’t have had “all these problems.”

What it comes down to is this: both sides, unfortunately, are right. What Reid said is not, in any way, equivalent to Trent Lott’s gaffe. But that doesn’t make it acceptable. And the Dems’ failure to come out and say as much absolutely proves a double standard, and seriously undermines the left’s credibility on the seriousness with which they take race issues. Which is too bad, because buried underneath the political backbiting and brawling is a conversation about race – not about when we apply our racial standards, not about when we remember or forget our core beliefs on equality, but on race itself in America – that needs to happen.

Let’s address the right’s first claim: that what Trent Lott and Harry Reid said are somehow similar. Aside from the fact that they both address the subject of race and display a breathtaking ignorance of American public sentiment, there’s no real comparison. When Trent Lott claimed that America would have been better served if Strom Thurmond had won the presidency, he wasn’t talking about old Strom’s economic platform. Thurmond was running on the strength of one issue and one issue alone: the separation of black people from white people in accommodations that were theoretically “separate but equal” but in reality were far, far apart. It’s no stretch to infer, then, that Lott was saying that a) black people were the cause of a lot of indistinct problems over the past half-century, and b) we would all be better off if minorities had just minded their own business and stopped asking for equal rights. Everyone’s entitled to their views, of course, but most voters don’t want those particular views held by a very prominent elected official, and after some pressure, he stepped down.

Harry Reid, to his credit, did not express a wish that fifty years of progress be reversed. To argue that he simply used outdated terminology, however, is disingenuous at best. What Reid said was patronizing and offensive, failed to take into account the wide variety of the African-American experience in the United States today, and showed complete insensitivity to the power that certain words still have in our nation’s troubled relationship with race. There is a reason why the term “negro” has never been reclaimed, why James Brown never sang, “Say it loud, I’m Negro and I’m proud”; the word itself is the root of several others, one particularly toxic, that have been used for decades to disrespect black people.

And if the Democrats had simply said that, that Reid wasn’t as bad as Trent Lott but that he certainly wasn’t in the right, they might be able to justify their claims that their maneuvering is based on honest racial dialogue and not on a desire to keep the national political balance in their favor. Unfortunately, they haven’t. Not a single prominent Democratic leader, African-American or otherwise, has called Reid out on comments that would undoubtedly – from a Republican – caused the candidate in question to be ridden out on a rail. And this is not the first time that they’ve conveniently kept silent on polarizing comments from their leaders. In 2001, Senator Robert Byrd not only referred to “white n*****s” – thus insinuating that to be compared to a black person was a negative thing – but also asserted on national television that “we talk too much about race” in this country. Anyone who has ever been a victim of American racism would likely agree that we still have a ways to go in terms of racial equality, and that simply not talking about it might not be the most proactive strategy. Somehow, however, no one has made the case that Byrd’s outdated views on race mean that he should step down too.

The power of these words, the way these perceptions influence our actions as a voting public, the difference between being ignorant and insensitive and actively wishing ill on others – these are the things that we, as a country, need to be talking about in order to move to that post-racial society we’ve all heard so much about. But until both sides can prove that they legitimately have race on their mind, and not just how to prove the other side wrong, we’re not going to make much progress.

“I’m not looking at it [Goldman Sachs] for that $20 million bonus,” the MIT MBA candidate says in a Bloomberg article on the popularity of such banks, despite their recent legal, financial and ethical troubles, among aspiring businessmen and -women. In a statement that proves that we have learned absolutely nothing from this financial crisis, Zenel adds, “I’m more looking at it as an opportunity to work for a solid firm that has a track record of success.”

And by “success,” she means “a slew of scandals but a lucrative entry-level salary.” Sloan School graduates who choose i-banking start out at around $100,000, according to the article.

A closer look, however, reveals that while Tea Parties slant heavily towards what Sarah Palin famously referred to as “the real America,” the suburbs and townships outside of our major metropolises, they’re surprisingly spread out – not just the provenance of the famously conservative South, but also taking root in the Midwest (Illinois and Ohio are big), even as far west as California. All of this suggests that perhaps there are, indeed, many citizens who feel their voices are not being heard, and who are eager to get themselves and their views onto the national stage.

Unfortunately, the Tea Party is probably not going to help their cause.

The Party and its affiliates purport to represent the average Joe or Jen, playing off the tension between the so-called “Washington elite” and the rest of the country that took prominence in the 2008 election. While distance between the rulers and the hoi polloi of this country has existed since its founding (see: the election of Andrew Jackson), the issue became especially toxic during the Obama-McCain race, with Palin and her ilk castigating the Democratic camp as latte-swilling liberals out of touch with the rest of America. This trend, picked up by the media, has undoubtedly contributed to the rise of the Tea Party in American consciousness, because its popularity certainly has nothing to do with the intellectual rigor of its presentation or ideas. Which means that ultimately the movement, with its disdain for intellectualism, hodgepodge of ideas, and internal contradictions, is doing a disservice to the people it is supposed to serve. In short, it’s making them look bad, and providing a distraction from the very real disenfranchisement that started the whole thing.

If the Tea Party wishes to be taken seriously, it needs to clean up its act. First step: shedding its allegiance to representatives with a strong voice but without any intellectual credibility. Exhibit A: Michelle Malkin, whose ties to VDare.com (a site that has pushed the idea, among others, that Aborigines have an average IQ of 62 – below the criteria for mental retardation) ought to be enough alone to disqualify her from being listened to, much less featured. The same goes for Palin, the convention’s keynote speaker and a woman who once referred to the protection offered the President by the federal government’s nonexistent Department of Law. Endorsements from these people are not to be sought; they are to be buried, in a closet, behind all of the other skeletons. Without the presence of a reasonable voice who does not feel compelled to rely on hyperbole and hysteria, the impression given is that this is the thought process of the whole party – a fact that does not allow any real ideas the party might have to be taken seriously.

The Tea Party also ought to consider developing a unified ideology. While it does offer a summation of core values, its supporters appear to be all over the map. A survey of existing TP affiliates suggests a broad range of thought, ranging from the overtly religious (“Get church leaders to celebrate the US Constitution”) to the anti-environmentalist (“Saying ‘no’ to this global warming hoax”) to the xenophobic and borderline incoherent (“There are to many greedy credit junkies in is this world that don’t even know they own this country because we were born here”). The featured writing on the site features similar contradictions and logical holes; the frequent references to the Founding Fathers, for instance, conveniently ignores both the ideological debates that raged within the group over the power of government and the fact that many of them believed that the average yokel was too dumb to handle government properly. Other featured writings promote, variously, the idea that extremism tends to arise from the left wing of the political spectrum, the lack of necessity of a third party (thus sort of negating the whole Tea Party concept), and the possibility of health care reform as a Communist initiative – not exactly a unified set of beliefs.

Another major factor that’s hurting the Tea Party’s presentation of its ideas is, well, the presentation of its ideas. There’s a difference between lofty political rhetoric and the speech of the common man, of course, but there’s also a difference between the speech of the common man and that which is present on the Tea Party’s official materials, which tend to be rife with triple exclamation points, egregious grammatical errors, and articles that don’t follow a clear train of thought. Image is not everything, but it makes the ideas presented therein difficult both to follow and to take seriously.

None of this is to say that the under-representation felt, if not the ideology espoused, is not real. Clearly, there is a groundswell of feeling here that is not manufactured. Which, in the end, is what makes the Tea Party such a tragedy. In a country that is, admittedly, dominated by a few news sources, in a country in which the cities tend to get all the attention, and under a liberal administration, those outside of the bubble – the working-class, the conservative, the small-town residents – are already getting short shrift in the mainstream media. (For proof, just look at the New York Times Magazine’s coverage of Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio; their description of the former borders on satire.)

But until the Tea Party and its libertarian brethren can provide a real set of defensible, intellectually sound ideas – a viable counterpoint to existing policies – no real change can be effected. Which means that the people these parties represent, people who deserve to be taken seriously, will continue to exist out on the fringe until they can find a reasonable and articulate – not hysterical and hyperbolic – voice for their concerns.

“The fact that individuals who happen to be gay want to share in this vital social institution is evidence that conservative ideals enjoy widespread acceptance. Conservatives should celebrate this, rather than lament it,” he reminds us. Highly recommended.