The mainstream media and Democrat figureheads have become particularly adept at assigning racist foundations to Romney campaign maneuvers and other newsworthy events. It reminds me a lot of the Kevin Bacon game where tortuous connections tie any celebrity to Kevin Bacon. I have a few examples here, but the ones that originated from the RNC speeches this week, courtesy of Chris Matthews, are the most disgusting. Take a look:
RNC Example 1:
Mitch McConnell's speech takes a jab at Obama's constant golf playing by stating, "President Obama is working to earn a spot on the PGA tour" --> Tiger Woods plays golf --> Therefore, this is racial innuendo that seemingly links Obama to Tiger's personal trangressions as well. Huh???
RNC Example 2:
Connecting Obama to corrupt Chicago politics is also racist.
Chicago --> lots of black people live in Chicago --> Racism. Wow
The only racism I heard from the convention came from the left:
Yahoo! News Washington Bureau Chief and former ABC New political director David Chalian was heard off-mic on the first night of the convention as Hurricane Isaac was making landfall: “They aren’t concerned at all. They are happy to have a party with black people drowning.” Sam Donaldson, by the way, has come out in support of Chalian. Thank you, Yahoo! for canning Chalian right away.
Other Example 1:
Voters should be required to show ID at the polls. --> IDs cost money --> According to the Democrats, minorities (and senior citizens) don't have money --> Therefore, proposed Voter ID laws are racist. (Showing ID, however, to buy alcohol, board a plane, conduct a bank transaction, or even to buy spray paint or Sudafed is not racist.)
Other Example 2:
Mitt Romney gives a speech to the NAACP. --> Romney declares that he will overturn Obamacare --> [at this point, Newsweek and Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky directly jumps to racism, because according to him, "Obamacare" is a "heavily loaded word" and an "insult".] --> the NAACP loudly boos Romney --> With poise, Romney waits for the boos to die down and finishes his point. --> The pundits heap all kinds of praise on Romney --> Nancy Pelosi accused Romney of knowing the NAACP was going to boo him. --> Therefore, Romney planned the whole thing and is a racist.
Other Example 3:
President Obama announces in the Rose Garden what amounts to amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants by not deporting them and granting them work permits. --> Daily Caller's Neil Munro interrupts the President's announcement to ask about the policy's impact on American jobs. --> Congressman Elijah Cummings (D), among others, concludes that the disrespect was possibly because of Obama's race
Other Example 4:
Fast and Furious is an ATF program where guns were intentionally supplied to Mexican drug cartels. --> An American Border Patrol agent is shot and two of the guns found at the scene were traced to the program. --> A Congressional committee conducts an investigation and demands records from Attorney General Eric Holder about the the program. --> Eric Holder refuses and eventually convinces President Obama to declare the documents sealed using Executive Privilege (which by definition would imply direct knowledge by the President) --> The House of Representatives votes to hold Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. --> Since Eric Holder is black, the Republican Representatives are racist.
Needless to say, any suggestions by conservatives of racially motivated policies enacted by the Democrats are either also racist or simply buried by the media and, for the most part, unreported. For example, Eric Holder and the Department of Justice have come under attack for failing to condemn seemingly serious infractions by the New Black Panther Party. In one instance, the New Black Panther Party was reported to have intimidated voters in Philidelphia polling stations in 2008. The same group also got a pass when the publicly announced a $10,000 bounty for the vigilante capture of George Zimmerman, the "white Hispanic" shooter of Trayvon Martin. Eric Holder did make public comments, but only to praise Reverend Al Sharpton for his efforts in vilifying George Zimmerman in spite of the unknowns in the case. Finally, it's just a matter of course for 85 or 90% of the African American vote to go to Obama. Can you imagine if the white vote was that lopsided against Obama?
Welcome to post-racial America. I'm all for Freedom of the Press - just don't call it news.
On the other hand, the Republican party has a pretty solid history of racism since the 1960s that they haven't quite disavowed, and which doesn't get pointed out in the media much. Y'know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
ReplyDeleteAlso, voter fraud has been shown to be nearly non-existent in this country nowadays. http://votingrights.news21.com/ It's accurate to observe that (a) suppression of such fraud is pursued vigorously by Republicans, and it (b) actually reduces the number of votes submitted by poorer and more urban (less likely to have cars) people, who disproportionately vote for Democrats, and (c) have a higher minority population than more rural or richer people. Yeah, "racism" is only a hypothesis, but you have to admit that with all that, it's a pretty solid one.
Is the Republican party racist? I'd think it more accurate to say that they favor ensuring that money and power stays in the hands of people (and families) who already have the money and power. The Democrats only mostly want to do that, but do defend equality of some constituents (like women). Arguably it's more about class than race, and in that mode, I say fuck 'em all. Some Republicans would surely argue that all the really rich people don't have (does html take? let's check) to be Romney-white, but of course that doesn't change the fact that they mostly are.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's also true darker-skinned people really are jailed and impoverished disportionately under the current power structure, and I've never encountered a remotely plausible Republican-themed answer to just why that may be. If you catch them resorting to laziness, criminality or other endemic character flaw (often done with openly coded references, as Reagan did with his welfare talk--introduce yourself to Mr. Lee Atwater someday if you doubt this), then dude, that's racism.
It's Keith, by the way, from the old job, followed in from Facebook. More than welcome to check me out too, but we, uh, evidently don't agree on much, politically.
Hey Keifus! Yeah, being in Mass. I'm used to not agreeing on much politically with the people around me lately - but I'm glad you checked out my blog!
DeleteJust to be clear, I'm not charging Democrats with being racists - I think Dems and Repubs alike for the most part are ready to move on to a post-racial America. I'm just saying that the liberal media is making it really hard to do that when they constantly level charges of racism at any conservative they disagree with. It sounds like we might agree that the greater inequality of opportunities we need to address is socioeconomic inequality - I think it'd make sense to tweak Affirmative Action to address that instead of race. Then I'd care less if Elizabeth Warren claimed to be an Indian!
The Democratic and Republican parties both have a checkered past on civil rights issues. Southern Dems were the main holdout on Civil Rights in the 60's and until he died recently, we still had a former Ku Klux Klan officer (Exalted Cyclops) in the Senate - Democrat Robert Byrd! After Civil Rights, the Dems have done more for racial equality with Affirmative Action. As of today, I think both parties have moved past discrimination for the most part, though. Anymore, a lot of the racially targeted programs look more like a hand out than a leg up.
I don't think either party has an answer for inequality when it comes to incarceration rates and harshness of sentences. That's a tough one. I think there absolutely is a potential for voter fraud, though. The many thousands of fraudulant voter registration forms turned in by ACORN convinced me of that. If we want to give everyone the tools they need to succeed, it seems like a photo ID would be a good place to start. Think of all the things you do as an active member of society (many of which are much less important than voting) that require a photo ID. I say start by putting a picture on EBT cards. That'd help EBT fraud, too.
You touched on the equality of women, but that's for another post! TTYL
Okay look, the political party divide in this country has, more or less, been rural vs. urban styles of government, and it once varied a lot more than it does today. There used to be progressive Republicans, violently racist southern Democrats, which are rare birds indeed nowadays. One major political transition of the 20th century was that the Democrats slowly aligned themselves with the civil rights movement. They weren't always happy about doing so, but it was Kennedy and that hardass Lyndon Johnson that finally cajoled all that stuff that people had been agitating for in the last decade and a half into written law. Taking on that mantle really shook up the Democratic party. Lots of the southern Democrats--the raging bigots--up and left the party, joined the other side. In 1968, the Nixon campaign tried to tap into this division, and actively and consciously solicited the racist south. People don't look at Republican Southern Strategy as practiced decades later and try to find racism in the tea leaves, they remember that its origin only 40 years ago was, in point of fact, shamelessly racist. A couple relics here and there [Robert Byrd had publicly repudiated that, for what it's worth] doesn't change that large historical trend.
DeleteOne signature piece of legislation in that time was the Voting Rights Act, and it's worth mentioning how that one came to be, a response to how southern black people had been systematically barred from voting for nearly a century, using literacy tests, poll taxes, or whatever excuse was handy. Voter ID laws, in addition to simply being ineffective at preventing voter fraud (but which work for keeping the urban poor from voting!), carry this evil historical baggage too. The last time we had requirements like this, the explicit goal was to keep people down. And now there's a movement to bring it back? Fuck that.
Yeah, and just a note on voting as well as EBT cards: how the hell is making everything harder for people supposed to help them?
I'm not going to deny that the Republican Party hasn't undertaken some shamelessly racist policies in its past, but I wouldn't put those tactics past the Democratic Party, either. Heck, I think Affirmative Action in its current form is a case in point. I can only hope that the whiteness of my kids' skin doesn't bump them out of any important opportunities in their lives. Today's Affirmative Action doesn't help the urban poor escape poverty - it mostly boosts the minorities (or part minorities) already growing up in middle and upper class families. If it comes down to it, I suppose we can always just check a box like the fake Indian Elizabeth Warren. If she can make racist policies work in her favor, who can't?
DeleteBut a bigger threat to my family's opportunities than Affirmative Action is the financial ruin that will result from the course that Obama is on. Obama's budgets are so irresponsible, not a single Representative or Senator in either party has voted for them. I realize George Bush started us down this path, but Obama's not flinching. His idea of reform is amnesty for millions more, advertisements for every welfare program imaginable - even free cell phones, free birth control pills for aspiring law students that are above handouts already available at Planned Parenthood, and "doing to every industry what he did to GM". That's some real Chavez-speak there. 2012 will be my first vote for a Republican president and hopefully a return to a less racial post-racial America.
In terms of making EBT cards a form of photo ID - I thought that was a pretty practical idea for minimizing fraud and helping those without a photo ID already. How else are they going to get a legitimate job - I had to show a photo ID when I got mine. Sustaining policies that have resulted in the urban poor not having a photo ID all these years probably isn't going to bring them any more success moving forward. I've been through the administrative hoops when living in a country where I wasn't fluent in the language, so I can relate. If you want to make it easy for the poor to get photo IDs, then give them out in the same place you go to get an EBT card, wherever that is - or we could keep it difficult if it serves a certain purpose.
1. I don't think that there's any evidence the Elizabeth Warren thing was any more than an honest error, and not anything that showed up on any application of any kind. Why wouldn't she believe it? "Fake Indian" isn't exactly a sign that one is open to reasoned discussion.
DeleteMy dad has told me often that my great grandparents met on either side of occupied Northern Ireland and emigrated from from there during the famine. I believed this for years (why not? it's romantic), however, the details almost certainly don't work out. The famine was too early, happened 40 years before Ireland was formally partitioned, and I never found the right Higginson on the immigration rolls. I don't think I was lied to though, you know? I think some details got munged up along the way.
My wife has some Native AMerican ancestry too. Not sure precisely where, because her father wasn't an especially communicative sort, but she's been told the same thing.
2. The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. It was before your time and mine, but not before that of your average senator. (Although I think the actual Dixiecrats are finally all thankfully dead.) Again, people get sick in the guts about voter id not (only) because of high principles, but because of what it actually was used for in this country when these people were young.
3. Massive peacetime deficit spending to support top-margin tax cuts? Reagan started us on this.
4. Birth control is cheaper than pregnancy. Socialized medicine (or socialized insurance) is a lot cheaper than private medicine, which you'd think would torture fiscal conservatives a lot more, but it doesn't seem to.
5. The whiteness of your kids' skin (and mine), and probably more to the point, the upper-middle-class-connectedness of their parents is going to help them more than affirmative action ever would.
For shiggles, try imagining who your parents don't know if you're growing up in downtown Detroit, or if you're working the fields illegally in California's central valley. Or who your parents didn't without conntections to the big players in politics and finance.
It's true - I have made up my mind on Elizabeth Warren. She committed a fraud when she checked off that she was Native American. It absolutely helped her get a job at Harvard and it absolutely helped Harvard in its diversity reported. Why else would the Harvard Law School taut her as their "first female faculty of color"? She took the spot meant for someone who actually had to deal discrimination because of their minority background. It caught up with her and I would so disappointed to have her as my senator. Besides being a fake Indian, she started this socialist rant of "You didn't build that". I have the video on my "Well said Scott Brown!!" post. Watch it - she's despicable. Scott Brown is doing just fine. He's well within the 40-yard line. Elizabeth Warren is on the goal line of the left.
DeleteIn response to Affirmative Action helping kids growing up in downtown Detroit or migrants in California - I don't think so. I went to graduate school at a university that had an assistant dean dedicated to "diversity", so I've been in a community defined by Affirmative Action. The minorities I met came from backgrounds that were pretty similar to the white kids as far as I could tell. They don't go trolling the inner cities and migrant fields to fill their quotas.
Some form of Affirmative Action is needed to give people a way out disadvantaged backgrounds. It should be based on socio economics and not race, though. There are plenty of poor whites in rural America with prospects as bleak as minorities in the inner city. Fairness is blind and ends at equal opportunity, not equal outcome. Affirmative Action for minorities has done its job - people know the drill and strive to mix up their hires without lowering their standards. Workplace discrimination doesn't come up much anymore - it's not a problem that has the same urgency it once did and I think we should move on. The problem now is getting opportunity, not welfare, to those in poverty.