"Make America White Again" Politician Has Other Stupid Things To Say, Too

 A Tennessee politician who has LOTS of stupid
things to say put up this annoying billboard.  

Rick Tyler certainly caused a splash this week when he put up a billboard in Polk County Tennessee that says "Make America White Again."

Tyler is running for to be a U.S. Congressman, representing Tennessee's 3rd District. Almost nobody thinks he'll win that seat, which is a good thing.

Beyond the extreme offensiveness of Tyler's billboard, we can also bask in the shining stupidity of his thoughts, his quotes and his campaign web site.

First of all, Tyler told television station WRCB in Chattanooga that he has no hatred for "people of color" but that the sign's message is that America should go back to a "1960s Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It To Beaver time when there were no breaks-ins, no violent crime, no mass immigration."

Yes, Ozzie and Harriet  and Leave It To Beaver were pleasant, calm and um, pretty white, but has anyone clued Tyler in that they were TV shows. As in fiction. As in not reality.  As in viewers' escape from their day-to-day trouble.

No mass immigration? I seem to recall at that time, America saw an influx of Cubans - decidely nonwhite people coming to our shores and living here. I'm glad we welcomed those Cubans fleeing Castro's repression, but still, no immigration?

No violent crime? The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet was on TV from 1952 to 1966. To pick one year during that show's run, the murder rate in 1960 was 5.1 per 100,000 in the United States, according to Infoplease, citing statistics from the FBI.

The murder rate in 2014, Tyler's much hated modern era, was lower than in 1960, at 4.5 per 100,000 says Infoplease

OK, this next one is a smaller point, but maybe Tyler is more impressed with himself than others.

Television station WTVC in Chattanooga took a peek at Tyler's web site and found some real gems. Including this take on his billboard:

"With its towering and massive stature, the billboard sign is difficult to ignore an dits message comes across as authorative and influential."

First of all, the billboard looks a little small and lame, judging from the photos. And was Tyler just trying to ridiculously channel the 1988 song "Nothing But Flowers" by the Talking Heads.

After all, that song has the following lyric:

"Years ago, I was an angry young man
And I'd pretend that I was a billboard
Standing tall, by the side of the road.
I fell in love with a beautiful highway."

Kind of the same message as Tyler's, no?

In ever-more flowery language (Tyler needs an editor!) he goes on on his web site:

"The Make America White Again billboard advertisement will cut to the very core and marrow of what plagues us as a nation. As Anne Coulter so effectively elucidates in her book, "Adios America," the overhall of Amerca's immigration law in the 1960s has placed us on an inevitable course of demise and destruction.

Yes, the cunning globalist/Marxist social engineers have succeeded in destroying that great bulwark against statist tyranny, the white American super majority. Without its expedited restoration, little hope remains for the nation as a whole."

Wow, quite a helping of word salad there, Ricky!

So that strange performance artist Ann Coulter is right up there with the most classic of American writers writing about America? Right up there with Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman and John Steinbeck, huh?

You're also telling us that those Mexicans and other Latin American who streamed across our borders, either legally or illegally, was some evil plot by some Marxists to create tyranny in the U.S.

But what of the white Americans who seemed intent on tyranny. Does the name George Wallace ring a bell? How about Joseph McCarthy? J. Edgar Hoover?

Of course, Tyler's "Make America White Again" billboard is a play on Donald Trump's campaign catchphrase "Make America Great Again."

Tyler's an enthusiastic Trump supporter, but it's telling that a lot of people, including a pretty good sized number of Trump enthusiasts, really hated Tyler's billboard.

Here's a great example from WTVC's Facebook page which lists viewer comments:

Don Tate said, "As a Trump supporter, that is a poor excuse of a human to put a sign up like that. But that's the wonderful thing about freedom of speech. At least you know what's really in their heart."

True, that.

Tyler is a fringe candidate who will never be elected, so the temptation is to ignore him. But it's always best to look under rocks and into dark corners to see what kind of pestulence and rot is in there.

Because of if you catch it early and bring it to the light of day, you can disinfect it pretty quickly so it doesn't cause more damage.

Indeed, Tyler faces a backlash, as you might expect. The billboard has been taken down and pretty much everybody is boycotting the local restaurant he owns.

I  hope the fine folks of Polk County, Tennesee find a great candidate among the many who are ruming. I'm sure you can find somebody better than Tyler.