By Lee A. Daniels

Is anyone surprised?

Is anyone really surprised that Democratic legislators walking through Saturday’s Tea Party rally at the Capitol were the targets of racist and homophobic slurs, and the ugly act of spitting?

Some Tea Party apologists were quick to take refuge in the lexicon of denial – to declare these the acts of “a few,” of “idiots” and “cranks” and “misguided cranks,” for which the Tea Party itself can’t be blamed.

Others, who have spent much of the past year spinning fatuous justifications for the “anger” of the Tea Party adherents, have ignored Saturday’s actions altogether.

But it’s long been clear what this whites-only protest movement is, above all, rooted in, who its ideological ancestors are.

Not the colonials rebels who in 1773 raided ships in Boston Harbor to dump British tea overboard as a protest against what they considered he British Monarchy’s unjust taxing authority. That’s just the cloak of respectability used to obscure their true line of descent.

A half century ago, many of those at Saturday’s rally and the past raucous gatherings that is the group’s signature would have been in the jeering mob outside Little Rock’s Central High School. Or the mob that gathered to beat the Freedom Riders at depots of the interstate bus routes in the South in 1961. Or the mob that in October 1962 violently attacked the federal marshals protecting James Meredith as he readied to attend classes at the University of Mississippi. Many of today’s Tea Party males would have been among the policemen and firemen who attacked the civil rights demonstrators at St. Augustine, Florida and Birmingham and dozens of other of the Southern battlegrounds for democracy. And they would have been among those who lined the streets of Boston’s white-ethnic neighborhoods in 1974 to throw bricks and bottles and spit at the school buses carrying black children to “their” neighborhoods’ schools.

All these despicable actions and actors had their apologists, too, who glibly jerry-rigged excuses for the racism on display.

But some Americans do know and are willing to speak the truth about the Tea Party. They know what racism smells like. That stench permeated the grounds of the Capitol Saturday.