“Good morning, fellow racists!” Jon Caldara crowed Thursday as he opened Colorado Springs’ second anti-tax “Tea Party” in Acacia Park.

Caldara was kidding. The talk radio host and president of the Independence Institute, a conservative think tank in Golden, was referring to an accusation leveled by former President Jimmy Carter against defenders of U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson, the South Carolina Republican who yelled “You lie!” during President Barack Obama’s Sept. 9 health care address to Congress.

Caldara said he remembered being told that dissent was patriotic. “I’m amazed now,” he continued, “that we’ve come to prove that dissent is actually racism.”

The crowd of about 250, including one man carrying a “Joe Wilson for President” sign, got the joke.

Mel Waters, emphasizing that he was speaking only for himself and not as a pastor at New Life Church, also took on the racism charge.

“I’ve come here to represent all the racists,” said Waters, who is black.

Then he launched into a spirited riff on Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

“I have a nightmare,” he said. ”I have a nightmare when I hear that CIA agents are having their pictures taken and they’re being shown to terrorists. I have a nightmare when I see that the attorney general of a certain state wants to prosecute the people who actually ran the sting against the illegal ACORN workers rather than them. I have a nightmare when I see that Americans don’t know the difference between socialism and capitalism.”

Some signs in the crowd came from deep right field — “Public School: Socialism’s Best Friend” and “Stop the Communist Takeover,” for example. Others were merely rude, like “Obama–the Anus of America.”

Though Thursday’s gathering was just as spirited, it was far smaller than the 1,500 who attended the first “Tea Party” on April 15, tax deadline day. Thursday’s event was held on the 222nd anniversary of the presentation of the U.S. Constitution, and several times the crowd chanted that document’s opening words– “We the People.” (A July 29 rally at the same location was not an official Taxed Enough Already T.E.A. Party but a protest against health care reform proposals.)

The local anti-tax gadfly Douglas Bruce greeted the crowd as “my fellow mobsters,” then proceeded to berate them for not turning their attendance at the April event into grassroots activism.

Caldara was more encouraging. “We are the last line of defense in this country,” he said. “This line is holding.”

The event drew about 20 counterdemonstrators, carrying signs like “Profiteering From the Sick Is Not Godly” and engaging in a running debate with the anti-tax, anti-Obama majority that nearly drowned out parts of some speeches. State Rep. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, was heckled by a man carrying a “Health Care Not Warfare” sign.

After Cheri Ofner, the event’s organizer and final speaker, finished telling the crowd that she agreed with Wilson, somebody yelled, “You lie!”—Contact the writer at 476-1654

People gathered in Acacia Park Thursday, Sept. 17, 2009, for Constitution Day, recognizing the signing of the Constitution in 1787. KEVIN KRECK, THE GAZETTE Photo by KEVIN KRECK, THE GAZETTE

Kevin Kreck