SAME AS IT EVER WAS IN THE GOP

So I'm reading Charles Blow's op-ed about a tea party rally he attended this week in Grand Prairie, Texas, and I'm thinking: Hmmm ... haven't I read this article before?

...I had specifically come to this rally because it was supposed to be especially diverse. And, on the stage at least, it was. The speakers included a black doctor who bashed Democrats for crying racism, a Hispanic immigrant who said that she had never received a single government entitlement and a Vietnamese immigrant who said that the Tea Party leader was God....

The juxtaposition was striking: an abundance of diversity on the stage and a dearth of it in the crowd, with the exception of a few minorities....

It was a farce. This Tea Party wanted to project a mainstream image of a group that is anything but. A New York Times/CBS News poll released on Wednesday found that only 1 percent of Tea Party supporters are black and only 1 percent are Hispanic. It's almost all white....

And then I remembered: I read this article during the Republican National Convention ten years ago -- the last time the GOP was locked out of the White House:

The African-Americans and Latinos being paraded across the stage at the Republican Convention are intended to give a hip, multicultural feel -- and dispel the pervasive notion that the G.O.P. is largely a party of, by and for white Americans. But subtract the minority props -- the break dancers and the gospel choir and the beaming schoolchildren -- and what you have is the same ultra-white party that shocked many Americans' sensibilities at the 1992 and 1996 conventions. The deluge of black and Latin faces on display in Philadelphia is deceptive, given that the party's delegates and senior managers are as white as they have ever been....

This seemingly colorized convention in Philadelphia is in fact very white, with black voters accounting for 4 percent of the delegates and Asians about 2 percent....

It's the same GOP song-and-dance (literally -- it's not really a tea party unless they drag this guy out to sing a few numbers). And, yeah, the Bush victory installed Colin Powell (for a while) and Condi Rice in positions of power -- while leaving Katrina victims to die. Republicans like "their" nonwhites. They don't really care about any others.