They’ve beat this one to a pulp 10 times over.

Via Colin Flaherty:

Most national reporters wait until their career is over to tell us how they really feel about the controversies they covered.

Not Douglas Blackmon, who told a conference audience:

“I was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal up until a year and half ago. During the 2010 2012 political season, I wrote a lot about the tea party.

“Now we all know a whole lot of people in the tea party movement are straight up the crazies you think they are. They are way, way crazy. A lot of them are the new Bilbos and Talmadges the representative was describing a minute ago … .”

For those unschooled in the nuances of racial grievance, Blackmon was referring to former Democrat Gov. Eugene Talmadge of Georgia and former Democrat Sen. Theodor Bilbo of Mississippi. Bilbo’s racist speeches were so egregious that Republicans in the Senate refused to seat him after he was re-elected in 1946.

That year, it was fashionable to blame the heated pro-segregationist rhetoric of those two Southern politicians for the lynching of four black people in Georgia. Some claimed at least one of the politicians may have actually met with the men suspected of the lynching.

Translation: Tea party people are crazy racist killers in word, if not deed.

Blackmon’s comments came when he was a featured panelist at a December meeting of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators Annual Legislative Conference in Memphis.