Anthony Bourdain Calls Tea Partiers "Marginal, Very Angry White People," Riles Up the Right

TV host and author Anthony Bourdain was a guest on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 on Friday, and he shared his thoughts on the Tea Party, calling their demographic "a lot of marginal, very angry white people." Not that Bourdain is necessarily wrong, but perhaps Bourdain is trying to get attention because he's got a new book coming out? Anyway, he continued:

I'm pretty happy about the Tea Party, because I think they're ensuring that no reasonable electable Republican will be -- will be president. They're taking over the party in a way that makes them look more or less crazy. If I were a conspiratorially-minded person, I think that Michele Bachmann, for instance, was a creation of some evil Democratic group to make them all look like loony tunes and dumb as a sack full of hammers.

Predictably, the Tea Party-supporting wingnut commenters have come out to bash Bourdain. People on YouTube (always a classy place) called him an "asshole," saying that "what we're witnessing is the criminalization of whiteness by the extreme left." Even not-so-veiled threats like "Bourdain is a pig and he will? live to regret making these hateful remarks!"

And then the blog NewsBusters (it gives away free bumper stickers that read "I DON'T BELIEVE THE LIBERAL MEDIA!" if that's any indication about its political leanings?) picked up the story, and tried to neutralize Bourdain (or just mock him) by quoting that recent Times story in which he talked about doing lots of drugs in the 1980s. Commenters there are overzealous too, calling Bourdain a "fringe elite" or one of the "UWS snobby fake-litists," but then they also cranked out zingers like "He couldn't make it on the Food Network so he turns to political punditry?" (OH SNAP) and "He's not even a pimple on Coliccio's [sic] *ahem*." (DOUBLE SNAP).

Video: Bourdain on the Tea Party

· AC360 Episode Transcript [CNN]
· Anthony Bourdain on Tea Partiers [NewsBusters]
· Anthony Bourdain on the Tea Party [YouTube]
· All Anthony Bourdain coverage on Eater [-E-]