Call a spade a spade: tea partiers are "xenophobic," "racist," and "crazy"

So a high muckety-muck at NPR has been caught on tape saying the following:

The current Republican Party, particularly the Tea Party, is fanatically involved in people's personal lives and very fundamental Christian. I wouldn't even call it Christian. It's this weird evangelical kind of movement.

He also said that Tea Party people are

[x]enophobic, I mean basically they are; they believe in sort of white, middle-America gun-toting. I mean, it's scary. They're seriously racist, racist people.

So the muckety-muck, one Ron Schiller, has quit and this was a huge breaking story on MSNBC all highlighted in red and stuff.

But what's wrong with the statement? It wasn't broadcast as factual news. It was the dude's opinion. And you know, it's a pretty darn accurate characterization of the facts. The GOP's platform over the past 20 or 30 years has been taken over by evangelicals and other Christian fundamentalists. This was Jerry Falwell's goal for the Moral Majority, and he won. Tea partiers continue to obsess over the crazy idea that President Obama was born in Kenya and talk about "Second Amendment remedies" against people in Congress that they perceive as problematic. The Tea Party Caucus is insisting on cutting, cutting, cutting domestic programs, cutting upper-level income taxes, and urging military action on Libya without realistically considering that even a small increase in billionaires' tax bills, plus quitting one or two wars, would solve quite a few budget dilemmas in very short order.

This is crazy talk, and tea partiers do it with lies about Planned Parenthood and how the pensions of unionized government workers are paid. It is not unreasonable to call tea partiers "scary."