Rep. Maxine Waters Tells Crowd “Tea Party Can Go Straight To Hell”

The “Tea Party can go straight to hell,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) told a crowd of more than one thousand of her constituents Saturday evening, after fellow Congressional Black Caucus member Rep. Allen West had used racist and slave imagery to describe the former Chair and long-time Democratic leader. “This is a tough game. You can’t be intimidated. You can’t be frightened,” Waters added.

Rep. West called himself a “modern-day Harriet Tubman,” and attacked Waters, the Democratic Party, and President Obama at a recent meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus, of which he is the only Republican  member, and called Waters an “overseer” and likened the Democratic Party to a “21st century plantation,” which drew great ire from many, including Waters.

Politico reports “Waters mentioned in an interview that West’s own brother was at a job fair she was hosting in Atlanta, making his comments “a little bit outrageous, a little bit ridiculous and … hard to respond to because [it] absolutely does not make good sense.”

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Washington Post opinion writer and member of the Post editorial board Jonathan Capehart wrote,

“Today, I have a rule for black elected officials (and potential office seekers), especially if they are Republicans. Never invoke slave imagery or liken yourselves to historical figures from the era. You’ll never measure up and you trivialize your argument — not to mention the sacrifices made by the heroes you think you’re honoring with such a comparison.

“By calling himself “a modern-​day Harriet Tubman,” a famed “conductor“ of the Underground Railroad who freed more than 300 slaves over the course of a decade, Rep. Allen West (R-​Fla.) is a flagrant offender of this new edict.”

In the past month alone, West has associated homosexuality to ice cream, opposed gays in the military, said, “you cannot compare me and my race to a behavior. Sexuality is a behavior,” called an LGBT group “intolerable,” called Obama supporters “a threat to the gene pool,” attacked fellow Congressman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and more.