“Tortured Arguments And Code Words”: Is Karl Rove Really A Hardcore Racist — Or Is He Just Lazy?
Occasionally I’ve heard black people mention that they respect a racist who owns up to his prejudice forthrightly more than a hypocrite who uses tortured arguments and code words. Like many of President Obama’s right-wing critics, Karl Rove still falls into that latter dishonorable category.
But Rove was scarcely subtle in his latest attempt to agitate the drooling bigots in the Fox News audience. (Not every Fox viewer is a white racist, of course, but every white racist with cable watches Fox. As Karl knows.) Last night on Fox, he barked that the president has “a lazy attitude toward the job that he’s got.”
The Republican boss is himself evidently too lazy to come up with a different line of innuendo — possibly involving watermelon, fried chicken, welfare, or basketball. Wait! He actually did use the basketball meme to slam Obama in a Wall Street Journal column in 2008 – and then added, in case any readers missed the point: “He is often lazy.”
Well, Obama was energetic enough to kick the butt of Karl Rove’s preferred candidate in that election and again in 2012, but that hasn’t discouraged Rove, Hannity, Palin, Beck, or a million other wingnuts from repeatedly using that same slur. (Doesn’t that mean they’re all lazy?)
If we have to measure the industriousness of presidents – and it’s a stupid exercise, but they insist – then let’s examine two of their favorites. It is established fact that George W. Bush took more than three times as many vacation days as President Obama, probably more than any president since that other great GOP success, Herbert Hoover. Rove ought to know, since old “Turd Blossom” was largely responsible for foisting the Dubya disaster on his country.
And let’s not forget the late Ronald Reagan, who spent plenty of recreational time at his California ranch — and made sure to take a nap without fail every day. The sainted Ronnie once explained that the White House job wasn’t really too taxing on him because…
[He] had a great routine: he walked to the office before nine and was home in the residence by 5 or 5:30. He ate dinner and often watched a movie with his wife, then went to bed. “I have three guys who mostly run things for me.”
But then Reagan was a white man, which apparently means he’s always working hard, even when he’s napping.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, October 2, 2014
“The Fox News Apology Tour”: It’s Interesting To Observe What They Are And Aren’t Sorry About
What a week for Fox News! The “fair and balanced” network was transformed into the “I’m totally sorry” network after we were treated to four—yes, four—on-air apologies from different Fox personalities.
First, we had “The Five’s” Greg Gutfeld and Eric Bolling mock a female air force pilot with some really sexist jokes. Now, they probably thought no one would care because she’s Arab. But luckily it seems that the outrage against sexism applies to women of all ethnicities and races.
Bolling and Gutfeld’s comments came during a discussion of the United Arab Emirate’s Major Mariam Al Mansouri, who flew missions as part of the United States-led coalition bombing ISIS. Al Mansouri might be heralded in the UAE for being the nation’s first female fighter, but to the comedy duo of Bolling and Gutfeld, she’s just a punch line.
Gutfeld quipped: “After she bombed it, she couldn’t park it.” (Referring to her plane.) And then Bolling, whom I often find funny although he’s trying to be serious, tried to top Gutfeld with the crack: “Would that be considered boobs on the ground or no?”
The backlash was swift. Even some of these two frat boys’ colleagues were upset. And then it built as Americans who had served in the military voiced their objections.
The result was Gutfeld and Bolling offered what appear to be sincere apologies. In fact, Bolling offered two different ones on air, so he singlehandily represents 50 percent of the Fox News apologies for the week.
And then we have a comment that comes under the category of not trying to be funny but trying to see how much red meat you can offer viewers. Last Saturday, Fox News regular guest Jonathan Hoenig commented in essence that the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was a good thing for America with his boastful statement: “The last war this country won, we put Japanese Americans in internment camps.”
Why would that even come up, you ask? Because the four panelists—anchored by King of Comedy Eric Bolling—were talking about how law enforcement must absolutely, positively profile Muslim Americans. During their discussion regaling the joys of profiling a minority group, Bolling offered a comment that truly showcased his talent for nuance: “We know how to find the terrorists among us: profile, profile, profile.”
Hoenig, apparently wanting to continue being booked on Fox News, felt the need to up the anti-Muslim ante. Picking up where Bolling left off, Hoenig remarked, “but aren’t all Muslims suspect…given the history of Islamic threats towards this country?” That’s when Hoenig touted the upside of interning Japanese Americans, with his point apparently being it’s a possible model to follow today with Muslim Americans.
Cue another backlash. This time it was led by civil rights groups and even members of Congress like Rep. Mike Honda of California, who as a child had been held in an internment camp. Over the weekend Hoenig went on Fox News and offered an apology for his remark that interning Japanese Americans was something we should be proud of.
Look, we all make mistakes—not only in real life but also on TV. In fact, I have made jokes/comments on television and on Twitter that have landed me in hot water. Consequently, I have apologized on more than one occasion for my own idiotic remarks.
But Fox always manages to push the boundaries and make things just a little surreal. So it was that in the same week these Fox “journalists” were dishing out a bevy of apologies, several different Fox shows slammed President Obama for what they dubbed his “apology tour” after his speech Wednesday at the United Nations.
Even apologist Greg Gutfeld slammed this so-called apology tour. You see, the Fox News peeps were upset that Obama would go before the United Nations and mention the protests that had taken place in Ferguson, Missouri. Apparently the geniuses at Fox believe that the world leaders have no idea that we have racial problems in the United States.
But pointing out hypocrisy at Fox News is like pointing out gaffes by Sarah Palin. Too easy. Of course, Fox News could have just stuck to its guns and not apologized. Bolling could have simply gone on air and exclaimed, “Hey, we are Fox Fucking News, we don’t apologize for shit!” Ratings would have shot to the heavens.
However, what I find more interesting than the Fox News apologies is the recent comments made by Fox News personalities that they would not apologize for.
First, there was the now well-known and awful remark a few weeks ago by Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade after viewing the video of Ray Rice in the elevator punching his then-fiancée Janay Palmer in the face. Kilmeade responded to the horrific image with the joke: “I think the message is, take the stairs.”
While Kilmeade walked back the comment the next day after an uproar, he did not apologize. Instead, he said, “Some people feel like we were taking this situation too lightly. We are not.” No, you did—you told a joke about it. That’s the very definition of taking something lightly!
And the second remark came during the Japanese internment conversation. While Hoenig apologized for seeing the upside to internment, no one thought it was important to apologize for advocating that we should tear up the U.S. Constitution and treat American Muslims differently simply because of our faith.
Not that I expected a Fox News anchor to apologize for that comment—after all, this is the same network that not only trashes Muslims almost daily, it gives the nation’s biggest anti-Muslim bigots a platform to spew hate.
So what have we learned? Fox News is a special, almost magical place. It’s a world where jokes about sexism are apologized for but ones about domestic violence are not. It’s a place where minorities are degraded and maligned for fun. And it’s the highest-rated cable news channel in the nation.
By: Dean Obeidalla, The Daily Beast, October 1, 2014
“They Don’t Have Google In Kentucky?”: White Supremacist Runs For Senate In Kentucky
Ahhh, election season. That time between late summer and November when candidates are most likely to knock on your door or send robo-calls to your home; and patches of grass, stabbed with metal-boned campaign signs, become the literal embodiment of grassroots politicking with their messages of hope, change, and…anti-Semitism?
“WITH JEWS WE LOSE” is the message, displayed on stark black and white placards, that Robert Ransdell, a write-in candidate for the Senate in Kentucky is using to bombard unassuming passersby. In an interview with the NBC-affiliate WLWT, he said: “Online, we’ve had a lot of positive feedback. We’re going to find out what kind of feedback we get once we go out and take it to the people here in the state of Kentucky.”
Ransdell — whose name will not appear on the ballot — is a coordinator for the National Alliance, a white nationalist political organization characterized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a Neo-Nazi group. He is technically running against incumbent Republican Mitch McConnell and Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan.
“One would hope that this sort of thing would never make it’s way into any modern day discussion, let alone a U.S. Senate race,” said Allison Moore, the spokeswoman for the McConnell campaign.
On Constitution Day, Ransdell addressed a room full of high school journalism students at the University of Kentucky. From behind a podium, in a room decorated by shiny red and blue star balloons, he told them about the “organized and ongoing war against white people,” and decried the fact that white people are “constantly under attack by black criminals.” In a video of the speech, students at first talk amongst one another without paying Ransdell any attention, but as he descends further into racist rhetoric, they begin to look around, alarmed. One student can be seen staring with her mouth agape in horror. After about one minute of rambling, a woman runs up on stage and directs someone to turn his microphone off. As Ransdell walks off, students can be heard muttering “go away,” and “shut up.” The incident forced a school spokesperson to make a statement claiming the institution “was not aware of the content of his remarks prior to him speaking and does not condone or endorse any political platform or agenda.” They don’t have Google in Kentucky?
Ransdell has publicly acknowledged that he has no chance of winning, but would like to use his campaign to publicize his message — a suggestion of demented optimism that believes people are merely unfamiliar with white supremacy, but maybe once they find out about it, they’ll get on board. On his website, “The White Guard,” Ransdell has an entire page devoted to the badge of honor that is the negative coverage of his campaign.
Ever the versatile bigot, Ransdell hates gays, African Americans, and immigrants, in addition to Jewish people. His platform includes: stopping immigration entirely until the economy improves, “halt[ing] the tolerance and promotion of this sickness in the nation” (by which he means homosexuality), and protecting the Second Amendment.” According to Ransdell: “If you want to keep your firearms you had better also support the immediate annihilation of racial integration in America because the savage and uncivilized nature of most Blacks will soon lead to laws that severely restrict or ban firearms.”
The Daily Beast reached out to Ransdell to ask if he has ever been diagnosed with a mental illness. Ransdell responded with an anti-semitic term, a Yiddish word, and an accusation about rhinoplasty: “Before I let you in on whether or not I have one, why don’t you kindly inform me of who removed the hook from your schnozz first, promise to get back and answer your inquiry, really I promise.”
If you have any questions you would like to ask Ransdell, or thoughts you would like to share about his platform, his website has helpfully provided a phone number where you can leave him a message: 1-800-488-1363. Be creative!
By: Olivia Nuzzi, The Daily Beast, September 21, 2014
“The Not-So-Soft Racism of Tom Cotton”: A Deliberate Divisive Form Of Racial Politics
Reagan adviser Lee Atwater:
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, “N—–, n—–, n—–.” By 1968 you can’t say “n—–” — 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—–, n—–.”
GOP representative Tom Cotton, telling a gross lie:
“(My dad) taught me early: farmers can’t spend more than they take in, and I listened,” Cotton said in the ad. “When President Obama hijacked the farm bill, turned it into a food stamp bill, with billions more in spending, I voted no.”
Of course, Cotton isn’t even in the ballpark of truth here. Food stamp bills have long been attached to farm bills in a cat’s cradle knot to encourage urban and rural legislators to vote for each others’ programs. It was the GOP who dissociated them in the hope of cutting food stamps. Obama had nothing to do with it.
But it’s worse than that. It’s no secret that food stamps (now called the SNAP program) have long been racial code for Republicans, even though a large plurality of SNAP recipients are white. When a Republican politician tells his base that he favors cutting food stamps but not farm subsidies, he’s using Atwater’s dog whistle, promising to deliver the pork to rich (white) agribusiness to boost their profits, while stiffing a lot of minorities (most of whom do work at least part-time) who would actually benefit the broader economy by receiving spending money.
Republicans bristle at being called racist in their policies: they feel that Democrats use every opportunity to brand any conservative policy as racist. But that’s because they’ve grown so used to their own dog whistles that they don’t even realize that other people can hear them and take offense.
Tom Cotton isn’t just lying to rural voters about the history of the farm bill. He’s also playing a deliberately divisive form of racial politics that has no place in modern America.
By: David Atkins, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 20, 2014
“When Whites Just Don’t Get It”: After Ferguson, Race Deserves More Attention, Not Less
Many white Americans say they are fed up with the coverage of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. A plurality of whites in a recent Pew survey said that the issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves.
Bill O’Reilly of Fox News reflected that weariness, saying: “All you hear is grievance, grievance, grievance, money, money, money.”
Indeed, a 2011 study by scholars at Harvard and Tufts found that whites, on average, believed that anti-white racism was a bigger problem than anti-black racism.
Yes, you read that right!
So let me push back at what I see as smug white delusion. Here are a few reasons race relations deserve more attention, not less:
- The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data. The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid. (Whites in America on average own almost 18 times as much as blacks; in South Africa in 1970, the ratio was about 15 times.)
- The black-white income gap is roughly 40 percent greater today than it was in 1967.
- A black boy born today in the United States has a life expectancy five years shorter than that of a white boy.
- Black students are significantly less likely to attend schools offering advanced math and science courses than white students. They are three times as likely to be suspended and expelled, setting them up for educational failure.
- Because of the catastrophic experiment in mass incarceration, black men in their 20s without a high school diploma are more likely to be incarcerated today than employed, according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Nearly 70 percent of middle-aged black men who never graduated from high school have been imprisoned.
All these constitute not a black problem or a white problem, but an American problem. When so much talent is underemployed and overincarcerated, the entire country suffers.
Some straight people have gradually changed their attitudes toward gays after realizing that their friends — or children — were gay. Researchers have found that male judges are more sympathetic to women’s rights when they have daughters. Yet because of the de facto segregation of America, whites are unlikely to have many black friends: A study from the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that in a network of 100 friends, a white person, on average, has one black friend.
That’s unfortunate, because friends open our eyes. I was shaken after a well-known black woman told me about looking out her front window and seeing that police officers had her teenage son down on the ground after he had stepped out of their upscale house because they thought he was a prowler. “Thank God he didn’t run,” she said.
One black friend tells me that he freaked out when his white fiancée purchased an item in a store and promptly threw the receipt away. “What are you doing?” he protested to her. He is a highly successful and well-educated professional but would never dream of tossing a receipt for fear of being accused of shoplifting.
Some readers will protest that the stereotype is rooted in reality: Young black men are disproportionately likely to be criminals.
That’s true — and complicated. “There’s nothing more painful to me,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson once said, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery — then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”
All this should be part of the national conversation on race, as well, and prompt a drive to help young black men end up in jobs and stable families rather than in crime or jail. We have policies with a robust record of creating opportunity: home visitation programs like Nurse-Family Partnership; early education initiatives like Educare and Head Start; programs for troubled adolescents like Youth Villages; anti-gang and anti-crime initiatives like Becoming a Man; efforts to prevent teen pregnancies like the Carrera curriculum; job training like Career Academies; and job incentives like the earned-income tax credit.
The best escalator to opportunity may be education, but that escalator is broken for black boys growing up in neighborhoods with broken schools. We fail those boys before they fail us.
So a starting point is for those of us in white America to wipe away any self-satisfaction about racial progress. Yes, the progress is real, but so are the challenges. The gaps demand a wrenching, soul-searching excavation of our national soul, and the first step is to acknowledge that the central race challenge in America today is not the suffering of whites.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, August 31, 2014
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