“No Longer Code, It’s Now In Your Face”: GOP’s 2016 Festival Of Hate”; It’s Already The Most Racist Presidential Campaign Ever
It appears that the GOP has traded in its dog whistle for a bullhorn when it comes to bigotry in the 2016 race for president. It’s as if the Republican presidential candidates are regressing to a time long gone.
There was a time decades ago that conservatives, and even Democrats like George Wallace, could and would openly demonize minorities in the most vile terms to attract white voters. But soon they realized the need to be subtler because times were changing.
The late GOP strategist Lee Atwater summed it up as follows (and forgive me for the blunt language, but it’s what he said): “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.”
So began the racial “dog whistle,” or the politically acceptable way of telling white people in a coded message that we will keep you safe from blacks, immigrants, etc. The first Republican to utilize this is generally seen as Barry Goldwater during his run for president in 1964. Goldwater’s campaign sought to capitalize on the backlash among conservative whites to the recently enacted Civil Rights Act. One famous example came shortly after the July 1964 riots in Harlem when he stated, “Our wives, all women, feel unsafe on our streets.” The message being that blacks are coming to rape your women and I will protect you.
In 1968, Richard Nixon ushered in the Southern Strategy, which Nixon’s special counsel, John Ehrlichman, candidly summarized as, “We’ll go after the racists.”
Nixon used the dog whistle of opposing “forced busing” and promising “law and order,” which were polite ways to say he would slow down desegregation and protect white America from black criminals.
And it has gone on from there in varying degrees. There was Ronald Reagan’s invocation of “states rights” in his speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, and 1988 of course we had George H.W. Bush’s infamous Willie Horton campaign commercial.
Interestingly, during the 1996 presidential race, Bob Dole steered clear of dog whistles during his losing campaign. And George W. Bush, while supporting a constitutional amendment opposing gay marriage in 2004, refused to “kick gays” as some on the right urged him to do. Bush even rejected Muslim bashing after 9/11, instead making it clear that, “The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends.”
Now, there’s no longer a need to be politically correct when demonizing minorities. The GOP has gone full bigotry.
GOP frontrunner Donald Trump appears to have cherry-picked the most effective dog whistles from past GOP campaigns and then injected them with steroids. Trump has plagiarized Nixon’s practice of appealing to the “silent majority” (white people) and promising “law and order.”
But he has gone much further. Trump not only released a Latino version of Bush’s Willie Horton ad which featured images of three scary-looking Latino men who had committed crimes, he has made stoking the flames of fear of Latino immigrants a central tenet of his campaign.
Trump told us in his very first speech as a presidential candidate that Mexico is “sending people” to America who “are bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And on the campaign trail he has continued telling crowds that “illegals” had “raped, sodomized, tortured and killed” American women. (The GOP loves to invoke rape.)
Jeb Bush said over the weekend that Democrats lure black people to support them with the promise of “free stuff.” At least when Mitt Romney made his infamous comments that 47 percent of Americans support the Democrats because they “are dependent upon government,” he only implied it was minorities. But not Bush. (By the way, Goldwater made a similar remark in 1964 when he said, “We can’t out-promise the Democrats.”)
And Ted Cruz has unequivocally stoked the flames of hate versus the LGBT community with his recent remarks that the gay activists are waging a “jihad” against “people of faith who respect the biblical teaching that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.”
Then there’s Ben Carson, running neck and neck with Trump. Carson declared last week that Islam is incompatible with the Constitution and he would not support a Muslim American for president. On Sunday, Carson inadvertently summed up the GOP’s theme in 2016 when he told CNN’s Jake Tapper that only the media types are upset with these intolerant comments, “because the American people, the majority of them, agree and they understand exactly what I am saying.”
Yes, we do understand exactly what Carson and the other GOP candidates are saying. It’s no longer code; it’s now in our face. The GOP’s 2016 platform is that Latino immigrants are coming to rape you, blacks want handouts, gays are waging a holy war versus Christians, and Muslims are not loyal to America.
The scariest part of all this is that we are just a few months into the race. Who knows how much more ugly and hateful this campaign could get before November 8, 2016? But given the frontrunners in the GOP race, I would predict it might just become the most bigoted and vile campaign in the modern era of American politics.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, September 29, 2015
“How Can You Resolve This Contradiction?”: How Is Ben Carson Both So Incredibly Smart And So Spectacularly Stupid?
There are a lot of scientific prerequisites if you want to go to medical school — not just biology, but also chemistry and physics, even some math. By the time you get there, and certainly by the time you leave, you’ll be long acquainted with the scientific method and the broad contours of scientific knowledge on those topics.
So imagine it’s 1970 or so, and you’re young Ben Carson, sitting in a biology class at Yale University. With your sharp mind and strong study habits, you don’t have much problem understanding the material, grasping the copious evidence underlying the theory of evolution, all the fossils going back millions of years, how it all fits together in an endless process that affects everything from a towering redwood down to a microscopic virus. And yet, the whole thing sounds like an attack on the beliefs about the universe you were taught your whole life from your family and your church. How can you resolve this contradiction?
The resolution came somewhere along the way for Carson: Satan. Evolution is Satan’s doing.
The fact that Carson believes this is a true puzzlement. Because Carson is an undeniably smart man. You don’t get to be one of the world’s most renowned neurosurgeons without the ability to understand complex systems, evaluate evidence, sift the plausible from the implausible, and integrate disparate pieces of data into a coherent whole. And yet he thinks that the theory of evolution is not just a great big hoax, but a hoax literally delivered to us from Hell.
Forgive me for my contemptuous tone, but that is what Carson actually believes. In a 2012 speech put up this week by Buzzfeed‘s Andrew Kaczynski, Carson says, “I personally believe that this theory that Darwin came up with was something that was encouraged by the adversary,” and reveals that he plans to write a book explaining how the organs of the human body refute evolutionary theory. He also says the Big Bang is bunk, because the second law of thermodynamics says that entropy always increases, and there’s too much order in the universe, what with things like galaxies and solar systems and planets. “Now that type of organization to just come out of an explosion? I mean, you want to talk about fairy tales, that is amazing.” Someone should explain to him that order didn’t arrive right out of the explosion, but over billions of years. You see, because of gravity…oh, never mind.
Carson’s ideas about the Big Bang are quite similar to his beliefs about Islam, in that he picked up a snippet of information somewhere — there’s a passage in the Koran that says this or that, there’s a thing called entropy — and that snippet seemed to take hold of his rational faculties and beat them to a pulp.
To be clear, this isn’t just about religious faith. There are millions upon millions of people in the world who believe fervently in a divine power, but who also acknowledge the truth of evolution. The Catholic Church, for instance, is quite clear that there’s nothing incompatible between its theology and evolution. You can believe God set the process in motion or that God guides it down to the smallest detail; nothing about a belief in God prevents you from understanding and accepting what generations of scientists have discovered about the history of life on Earth.
So how do we explain this contradiction? All of us have some things we know a lot about and some things of which we’re ignorant. Some of us are extraordinarily good at reading people and understanding social relations, but are helpless when it comes to math; others are just the opposite. Some of us pick up languages easily, others don’t. Intelligence is complex and varied.
But what’s so odd about Carson is that science is the very thing he was trained in, and the thing at which he excelled. Yet his religious beliefs are apparently so powerful that they completely overwhelm his ability to look objectively at any scientific area that might give some answers to what people once thought were purely metaphysical questions.
Training in science is also training in how to think — what sorts of questions can be answered in what sorts of ways, and how you know what you know and what you don’t. That’s why it’s nearly as surprising to hear Carson offer as justification for his belief that no Muslim should be president, “Taqiyya is a component of Shia that allows, and even encourages you to lie to achieve your goals,” as it is to hear him dismiss the Big Bang with a line about entropy. It isn’t surprising that Ben Carson knows next to nothing about Islam; what is surprising is that, despite a career immersed in a very specialized field, he would think that he could listen to a couple of Glenn Beck rants and come to a deep understanding of a 1,400-year-old religion.
That’s not to mention the fact that Carson’s entire campaign for president is built on the rejection of knowledge and experience, in that he argues that all you need to succeed as president is common sense, even if you’ve never spent a day in government. That opinion, unfortunately, is widely held. As is, we should mention, belief in Satan — according to polls, a majority of Americans believe in the devil, so Carson is hardly alone.
If the Father of Lies is amongst us, I’m sure he’ll take a keen interest in the presidential campaign. And when Carson’s candidacy immolates, as it certainly will, he’ll have someone to blame it on.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, September 23, 2015
“Quick Lesson In Political Language”: The Resurgence Of The America George Wallace Once Knew
A quick lesson in political language.
In 1958, Democrat George Wallace, running as a candidate for governor of Alabama and racially moderate enough to be endorsed by the NAACP, was swamped by a strident white supremacist whose campaign played shamelessly to the basest hatreds of the electorate. Afterward, Wallace complained bitterly to a room full of fellow politicians that the other guy had “out-n—-red me.” And he vowed he would never let it happen again.
As history knows, of course, he never did.
But the point here is that, 10 years later, the social and political landscape had changed so dramatically that no serious politician would have ever thought of using such intemperate language so openly. Mind you, they were not above making appeals to base animosities, but the language became benign and opaque, a “dog whistle” pitched for those with ears to hear.
Thus, Nixon had no need to curse unruly militants and longhairs. He simply spoke of “law and order.” Reagan didn’t call anyone a lazy N-word. He spoke of “welfare queens.” The Bushes didn’t have to slur gay people. They spoke of “family values.”
But for some of us, it appears coded language is no longer enough.
“We have a problem in this country,” said a man in the audience last week during a Q&A session with GOP frontrunner Donald Trump in New Hampshire. “It’s called Muslims.” He went on to ask, “When can we get rid of (them)?”
Trump’s flaccid response: “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things.”
Nor is that even the most appalling recent bit of Islamophobia from the campaign trail. That dishonor goes to Ben Carson, who said Sunday on Meet the Press that no Muslim should be president. “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” he said. “I absolutely would not agree with that.”
Later, facing a firestorm of criticism, Carson told Sean Hannity of Fox “News” that he would accept a Muslim who rejects Islam “and clearly will swear to place our Constitution above their religion.” Given that “our” Constitution explicitly forbids a religious litmus test for elective office, that hypothetical Muslim should respond to Carson as follows: You first.
In tacitly endorsing bigotry on the one hand and enthusiastically embracing it on the other, Trump and Carson provide redundant proof that they are manifestly unfit for the presidency. One is sobered, however, by the renewed reminder that such bigotry no longer automatically disqualifies them from it. Indeed, experience suggests that some people will even see it as the sign of authentic truth-telling unencumbered by political correctness.
Make no mistake: Every adult American who uses language — and particularly, those who do so for a living — has at one point or another been bedeviled by political correctness, by the sometimes persnickety mandate to craft what you say in ways that are fair and respectful to everyone who might hear it. What Carson and Trump represent, however, is not solely about language, but about the ideas language encodes.
Which means it is ultimately about what kind of country we are and want to be.
Land of the free, except for Muslims?
With liberty and justice for all, except for Muslims?
All men are created equal, except for Muslims?
Any little girl might grow up to be president, provided she is not a Muslim?
If it is sad that some of us think that way, it is appalling that prominent aspirants to the nation’s highest office can now think that way openly. It suggests the resurgence of the America George Wallace once knew. In that America, there was no need of racial and religious double entendres.
In that America, one entendre was enough.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, September 23, 2015
“The Roots Of Political Correctness”: Those Complaining Are Suggesting They Want Freedom To Say Obnoxious Hateful Things
It seems that one of the issues that unites almost all the Republican candidates who are running for president is disgust with the idea of political correctness. It has especially become the rallying cry for Trump and Carson.
When I think of the term, I am immediately reminded of how Lee Atwater described the Southern Strategy in 1981 (excuse the language – it is his, not mine).
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.” By 1968 you can’t say “n****r” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.”
That, my friends, is the root of political correctness. Conservatives recognized that an openly racist platform backfired.
Republicans are more than welcome to go back to the language they used in 1954. Not many of us have been fooled by their “dog whistles” since then anyway. But when they do, they can also expect to be called out as the racist bigots that kind of thing demonstrates. You see…free speech doesn’t simply apply to those who want to be free to say obnoxious things. The rest of us are also free to exercise our own rights to call them out.
We’ve all been witness lately to the fact that Donald Trump is free to suggest that Mexican immigrants are criminals and racists. He’s even free to run for president on a platform of “deport ’em all.” And Ben Carson is free to suggest that the United States should discard things like the Geneva Conventions and torture prisoners of war.
When people complain about political correctness, they are suggesting that they want the freedom to say obnoxious hateful things. But they have always been free to do so. Just don’t expect the rest of us to be quiet when they do. In other words, expect it to backfire.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 30, 2015
“Very Little Blowback From His Own Party”: Trump Has GOP Defenders Despite Racially Charged Rhetoric
In his presidential announcement speech, Donald Trump wasted no time in creating controversy. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” the Republican candidate said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Offered a variety of opportunities to walk the comments back, Trump has, at least for now, refused. This week, he insisted his remarks were “totally accurate.”
As Rachel noted on the show last night, this has led a variety of businesses, including NBC/Universal, to end their relationships with the controversial candidate. But what remains striking is the degree to which Trump is facing very little blowback from his own party.
Fox’s Sean Hannity has defended Trump, as has Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). “I like Donald Trump. I think he’s terrific,” the Republican senator said, “I think he’s brash, I think he speaks the truth.”
Last night, Politico published a piece by National Review editor Rich Lowry on the candidate. The headline read, “Sorry, Donald Trump Has A Point.”
As for his instantly notorious Mexico comments, they did more to insult than to illuminate, yet there was a kernel in them that hit on an important truth that typical politicians either don’t know or simply fear to speak. “When Mexico sends its people,” Trump said, “they’re not sending their best.”
This is obviously correct. We aren’t raiding the top 1 percent of Mexicans and importing them to this country. Instead, we are getting representative Mexicans, who – through no fault of their own, of course – come from a poorly educated country at a time when education is essential to success in an advanced economy.
As for Trump’s assumptions about these immigrants being drug-running rapists, Lowry didn’t dwell on these details while praising the candidate’s broader immigration argument.
This is not a wise strategy.
Even if we put aside the fact that Trump’s argument is factually wrong, and he most certainly does not “have a point,” the truth remains that the Republican Party has alienated immigrant communities in recent years, and the latest Trump fiasco offers the GOP an opportunity to distance itself from offensive, racially charged rhetoric.
But for many Republicans, it’s an opportunity better left ignored.
In fairness, Trump has not enjoyed universal praise among conservatives. Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee’s Chief Strategist & Communications Director, conceded two weeks ago that Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric is “probably something that is not helpful to the cause.”
Probably.
Look, I’m not suggesting the onus is on Reince Priebus to pick up one of the Trump pinatas that have become popular in some circles, and destroy it on camera, but I am suggesting leading Republican voices show some courage and denounce offensive rhetoric from one of their own.
Trump, obviously, is pushing Latino voters away. But the more voices on the right defend Trump, and the more Republican voters express their support for his candidacy, the broader the damage will be to the party.
Indeed, as msnbc’s Amanda Sakuma noted yesterday, Trump’s antics raise “uncomfortable but genuine questions over how Republicans expect to make inroads with Latino voters in light of the harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 2, 2015
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 