Rep. Yvette Clark on Tea Party: 'The Ugliest Side of the United States of America

Someone send a memo to the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives that it's not 2009 anymore. Complaining about the Tea Party protests against Obamacare is starting to sound terribly old. Speaking at a local candidate forum called "Prospect Heights Democrats for Reform," Clark had the following not terribly kind words for the Tea Party:

It's worth noting that the video cuts together several different statements from Clark about the Tea Party to make them appear to be one coherent whole. Just for the sake of noting where the cuts are in the video, we've put each of the statements as separate paragraphs in the transcript below:

When I say dealing with the Tea Party, they came up in the hundreds of thousands. So we couldn't walk outside of our office without tripping over Tea Party members. And these are individuals that had no problems with racial epithets, they had no problem with cursing, spitting and everything else, they came to intimidate members out of passing the Affordable Care Act.

But the moment that they came in and really just showed the ugliest sides of the United States of America, you can imagine -- it was clear to me that we were doing the right thing for Americans. There will always be those in our civil society who, for whatever reason, feel like something is being taken away from them when we give to others. That has always been a challenge in the psyche of many in our civil society. But, you know, you have to save them from themselves despite those inclinations on their side.

When I first encountered the Tea Party, I thought, 'Oh these people are crazy.' And you would hear everyone say, 'Oh, they're crazy.' But you know what, crazy showed up. And not only did crazy show up, but crazy elected 39 other members to the House of Representatives and took a lot of people out. So, you know, oftentimes things may look a little bit benign, but I'm finding, particularly at the Federal level now, is that if something seems threatening, most likely it is. I mean, who would've thought that we would be relitigating Planned Parenthood or contraception?

But what is the social compact that we have, one with the other? To me, there are just some key things, there are Social Security, there are Medicare, there are Medicaid. There's taking care of the least of these amongst us as part of that social compact. Well, I can tell you, all of that is under threat right now.

Whether you look at the Republican Ryan budget that has just come out, again just highlighting a number of the discretionary areas in which our budget has been slashed. I mean, we can go from things like aid to women, infant and children (sic), we can go to food stamps, we can go to EPA standards. Everything that we need to really underpin and undergird our civil society is being dismantled.

H/T: Breitbart TV