“Rudy Lied. Let’s Start With That”: Giuliani’s Hate-Mongering Shows The Right Wing Will Never Stop Trying To Scare Whites About Obama
Rudy Giuliani lied. Let’s start with that. After the heinous murder of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos a week ago, Giuliani spewed the following bit of hate about President Obama: “We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police.”
For the record, the president did absolutely no such thing. If you want the details of what he has actually said about law enforcement officers over the past four months — i.e., since Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — Politifact and the Washington Post‘s Fact Checker have compiled them as part of their respective evaluations of Giuliani’s claim (the WaPo‘s article also includes more, similar statements by Giuliani about Obama and the police, made after the initial one cited above). Politifact found the claim to be a “pants on fire” lie, while the WaPo gave it four (out of a possible four) Pinocchios. As I said, Rudy Giuliani lied.
But of course it’s about much more than just the lie, it’s about the kind of race-baiting lie he told, and how it fits into an eight-year-long campaign by the right to draw on the worst fears of white Americans about a black president, in particular a liberal black president. You see, Giuliani’s comments about the police killings weren’t even the worst ones uttered. Among others, Ex. Rep. Joe Walsh accused Obama of having “blood on his hands.” Erick Erickson said the president has “created a situation where Americans cheer police officers being gunned down.”
As egregiously wrong as these are, I want to focus now on some remarks made by Rush Limbaugh that didn’t get, as far as I can tell, any broader media coverage, but which were heard by his 12.5 million listeners (he’s still got the biggest talk radio audience out there). What Giuliani only implied, Rush came right out and said — after first echoing the point that the president has “blood on his hands” and placing his picture next to that of Al Sharpton just below that statement on his website’s show transcript:
We are all headed in an accelerated pace for anarchy. That is where all of this is headed. The primary agents of this anarchy are militant Islamists, militant civil rights coalition types, the New Black Panther Party and ancillaries. And who are their enablers? The Democrat Party and the American left, from college professors to pop culture false idols to elected Democrats, and of course the media, the left has and is, I believe — and I really believe this, and I’m not using a single word for exaggeration purposes — I really believe that college professors, these pop culture false idols, elected Democrats, the media, are literally making their followers, i.e., base voters, insane with rage and anger. I don’t think there is any other conclusion.
No, Rush is not exaggerating. This is exactly what is behind the statements — as hateful as they were on their face — made by Giuliani. And notice what Limbaugh has done here, building on Giuliani’s demonstrably false accusation that the president has been telling people to hate the police. He hits on racial boogeymen like the New Black Panther Party, a teeny-tiny organization (which the Southern Poverty Law Center has defined as a hate group) about which the right has long stoked anxiety among whites. But Rush also connects the New Black Panthers to civil rights activists (not to mention militant Islamists, triggering a whole other set of fears), and says that elected Democrats — led by the chief elected Democrat — have been “enabling” them and pushing our country into “anarchy.” Oh, and as a college professor myself I’m proud to note that he mentioned us twice. Finally, since this is a race-based, “civil rights”-based anarchy, Rush’s listeners know that he’s talking about the thing he’s talked about so many times before: a race war.
This is by no means the first time Limbaugh has invoked the specter of race war. Just after the president was inaugurated a second time, in January 2013, he declared: “We’re in the midst here of designed class and race wars,” and this was only a week after he claimed that Louis Farrakhan was “in preparation for a race war.” Rush also talked on July 30, 2009, about how the media were promoting a “race war.”
But Limbaugh doesn’t have to use the words race war to make his listeners afraid of big, bad, black Barack Obama and his radical, militant allies. In my book about President Obama and American national identity, I examine numerous examples where Rush (and other right wingers) practiced race-baiting. I’ve shared what I then called his most egregious example here on Daily Kos before (although what he said last week certainly gives this one a run for it’s money), but I want to cite it again here because it ties together all the hateful things — starting with the remarks by Rudy Giuliani — said about the president (not to mention Eric Holder and Bill de Blasio) since the murder of NYPD Officers Liu and Ramos. This is from my book:
Limbaugh summarized this perspective on June 4, 2009, in one of the most pernicious formulations heard from a major media voice since Obama became a national figure–one that could have no purpose but to sow the toxic combination of hatred and fear among white members of his audience and pit Americans against one another along ethnic lines: “The days of them not having any power are over, and they are angry. And they want to use their power as a means of retribution. That’s what Obama’s about, gang. He’s angry, he’s gonna cut this country down to size, he’s gonna make it pay for all the multicultural mistakes that it has made, its mistreatment of minorities.”
In this brief, vitriol-laden rant, Limbaugh defined Obama and his nonwhite supporters (“they”) as anti-American and angry, and set their interests in opposition to those of whites, whose interests he defined as in line with those of America. It’s Obama and his people vs. America. Moreover, Limbaugh insinuated or perhaps tried to subconsciously evoke the idea that this was a street fight by using the term “gang.” In his view, the battle between Obama’s and Limbaugh’s gangs would determine whether whites or nonwhites will ultimately wield “power.”
Limbaugh did not choose these words lightly. His statement resembles rhetoric that goes back to the eighteenth century, according to which poor whites should rally together with slave owners around their shared whiteness, because if black slaves ever got free they would enact vengeance on all whites. It draws on the image of blacks as bloodthirsty savages bent on destroying the white civilization that has oppressed them for so long, without of course mentioning what that oppression says about how “civilized” are those who have carried it out. The greatest fear of the slave-owning elite was always an alliance of the common folk of all races. Limbaugh’s use of the trope of white racial unity as the only defense against retribution for past mistreatments is not original, but that makes it no less disgraceful.
And this is exactly what the right has sought to do to Barack Obama since before they had even heard of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Rudy Giuliani does it his way, and Rush Limbaugh does it his. But make no mistake, both of them — along with every other right winger who engages in this kind of race-baiting — have but one goal in mind, and that is to draw on and even heighten already existing fears held by too many white Americans that the day is coming for, in Limbaugh’s own words, “retribution.”
And they have the nerve to say Obama’s the one spreading hate.
By: Ian Reifowitz, The Blog, The Huffington, December 29, 2014
“Rudy Giuliani Crosses Line On Race”: Why GOP Must Finally Push Back On His Recklessness
Quite appropriately, considering how terrible much of the news this year has been, it looks like the last big story of 2014 will be the horrifying murder of two NYPD officers this weekend by Ismaaiyl Brinsley, an unhappy and mentally unstable 28-year-old man who had a history of trouble with the law and a propensity for violence. Claiming on social media beforehand that he was doing it in the name of avenging Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Brinsley approached a squad car in Brooklyn on Saturday and pitilessly killed the two unsuspecting officers within before killing himself after a brief attempt to escape. Like Shaneka Thompson, the Air Force reservist and former girlfriend he’d shot in the stomach earlier that day (who is in critical condition but expected to recover), neither Officer Wenjian Liu nor Officer Rafael Ramos was white.
The worst thing about this terrible event is, by far, the fear and pain that has been visited on those who care for Thompson, Ramos and Liu. On a human level, that’s what most matters. But on the level of politics — which occasionally intersects with that of humanity, but far less often than you’d hope — a terrible development was the response. As my colleague Joan Walsh explained already, a truly surprising and disappointing number of high-profile conservatives and Republicans didn’t even wait until the public knew Brinsley’s name before they began using his atrocity for their own, tangentially related purposes. New York City Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association head Patrick Lynch, for example, almost immediately integrated the attack into his ongoing campaign against Mayor Bill de Blasio. Former Gov. George Pataki, meanwhile, used it to bash de Blasio and test the waters for the latest iteration of his quadrennially threatened (and quadrennially ignored) potential White House run.
Yet even though blaming New York’s mayor for Brinsley’s actions is irrational (and so opportunistic that it borders on the obscene), even more shocking, even more inexcusable, and even more disturbing were the comments from ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The failed presidential candidate and well-compensated consultant to Serbian nationalists trained his fire not so much at Mayor de Blasio as President Obama, whom he charged with fostering an atmosphere that made actions like Brinsley’s seem OK. “We’ve had four months of propaganda, starting with the president, that everybody should hate the police,” Giuliani said on Fox News Sunday morning. “The protests are being embraced, the protests are being encouraged,” he continued. Even the peaceful protests, he said, “lead to a conclusion: The police are bad, the police are racist.” Giuliani all but laid the slain officers’ caskets at the president’s feet.
While it should not surprise us that a man who once, in complete earnestness, said “[f]reedom is about authority” thinks all forms of organized dissent against law enforcement are illegitimate, we should be shaken and concerned by the complete lack of pushback from other elite Republicans that Giuliani’s comments received. Despite the fact that nothing — absolutely, positively nothing — the president said in response to the turmoil in Ferguson or the outrage in Staten Island could be reasonably construed as even tacitly endorsing violence, no high-profile GOPer even tried to scold “America’s mayor” for his brazen claims. In spite of the fact that Giuliani’s comments could only make sense if you accepted a racialized and erroneous subtext (black protesters and president vs. white police), no Republican publicly disagreed. And when Erick Erickson, predictably, brought Giuliani’s insinuation to the surface, saying Obama “does not like the United States,” the silence remained.
When we think of the ways in which Obama’s most virulent enemies have sought to delegitimize him, to depict him not only as wrong on various issues as well as lacking in character but as fundamentally deceitful and un-American, we conjure up images of the birthers. We think of claims that he’s actually from Kenya and/or Indonesia, that he’s lying about his Christianity and/or as his name. But even though the Democrats, the mainstream media and elements of the Republican establishment have managed to push the birthers to the fringes of the GOP, there’s little reason to think Giuliani, Erickson and others who make arguments like theirs will be ostracized from polite society. That’s a great injustice — because what they’re doing now and what the birthers do is, fundamentally, the same.
Granted, alleging President Obama is on a decades-long mission, which began at the time of his birth, to destroy the United States from within is much more superficially outlandish than alleging that he encourages the murder of police. But both claims, at their essence, depict the president as alien from the rest of American society, as an interloper with nefarious designs. For the birthers, Obama is a secret Muslim or Marxist or lizard (or a combination of all three) who wants to weaken the U.S. in order to implement some shadowy scheme. And for Giuliani and Erickson, he’s a secret radical, a crypto-black nationalist, the New Black Panther Party’s best friend in D.C. He’s not a milquetoast liberal technocrat reformer, but an extremist in camouflage, inciting a race war and the murder of police.
These wild, bigoted fever dreams are dangerous accusations for anyone to excuse or ignore, no matter the target. But they’re especially unacceptable when the accused is the first African-American president of the United States. This country has a long, ugly history of treating people of color — but especially black people — as somehow less than fully American. That’s part of what made Obama’s ascension to the White House so important and extraordinary. The prospect of the country’s first black president being repeatedly accused by his political opponents of stoking a race war and sowing disorder is therefore a scary one; and if it came to pass, it would be a clear step back from where we were as recently as 2008. And this is why it’s imperative that all the key players in the political elite push these sentiments back underground, as they (mostly) did with the birthers.
If they’re serious about wanting to strive for national unity and reconciliation on race in America, Republicans and conservatives need to distance themselves from Erickson and Giuliani’s comments — ASAP.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, December 23, 2014
“Some Profoundly Un-American Responses”: The False Choice Of Protesting For Justice And Supporting Our Police
I’m one of the millions of New Yorkers who woke up heartbroken today thinking of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos who were shot dead yesterday while sitting in their car in Brooklyn by Ismaaiyl Brinsley.
As the news unfolded, we learned the briefest details of the two men’s lives such as the fact that Liu was married just two months ago, and that Ramos has a wife and a 13 year old son who “couldn’t comprehend what had happened to his father”, according to NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio who met with the families before a press conference last night. I offered prayers for the men, and their widows and son.
Liu and Ramos were not the only victims of Brinsley’s deadly rampage yesterday. Earlier that day, the Atlanta resident had allegedly shot his former girlfriend in Maryland, who apparently now is in “serious condition“. After killing the two police officers, Brinsley fled and apparently killed himself in a nearby subway station.
The assassinations come at a particularly tense moment in America. Recent deaths of black citizens at the hands of police in Ferguson, Cleveland and here in New York have sparked protests and calls for investigation of racism within our policing and criminal justice system. I have been part of those protests. One week ago, I was in Washington, D.C. along with thousands of other Americans of all ages, races and religions who came together in peaceful protest and to listen to the mothers and wives of those men whose lives had been lost.
Never once did I hear any suggestion of violence against the police either in the march or from the microphone. The consistent call was to work with our elected officials, courts and police departments to improve our criminal system. The goal of this movement is justice — its means are non-violent, prophetic action. When I heard the news about the Ramos and Liu killings, I prayed that it was not linked in any way to the peaceful protests that I had been a part of.
But horrifically, the assassin made the connection himself.
He wrote on an Instagram account: “I’m putting wings on pigs today, They take 1 of ours, let’s take 2 of theirs #ShootThePolice #RIPErivGardner #RIPMichaelBrown”.
When I saw that I felt sick. And even sicker because the post had 17 Likes, meaning that 17 people read this obviously violent post and supported it and urged him on. And now they have blood on their hands as well.
Unfortunately, the person NYC Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association president Patrick Lynch blamed was not Ismaaiyl Brinsley, or any accomplices that may have known about his alleged intention to kill his ex-girlfriend and two police officers. Instead, he, Pataki, Giuliani and and other pundits declared that the people to blame were Obama, Holder, de Blasio and all those who have been involved in the nation wide protests.
“There’s blood on many hands tonight,” Lynch said last night, “That blood on the hands starts on the steps of City Hall, in the office of the mayor.” Lynch went on to blame those who “incited violence on the street under the guise of protest.”
I guess he means me?
The response Lynch and some conservative commentators have had to the horrific killing of these two police officers and the alleged attempt to kill a woman is profoundly un-American. It is meant to chill any criticism or efforts to improve our country and only serves to divide an already deeply divided country and to increase tensions in an already tense time.
Instead of having the deaths of Liu and Ramos further tear us apart, could this serve as a moment of bringing us together? Liu and Ramos are reminders to any who would demonize the police, that our law enforcement is made up of people of all races and backgrounds, who have families and who feel called to this duty to protect and serve.
The families of Eric Garner and Michael Brown were among the first to condemn the killing of Ramos and Liu last night. The protests around the #BlackLivesMatter movement was never against the police, but it was a call to acknowledge that we can do better as a society that continues to bear the scars of racism.
That effort must continue; we can and must do better as a nation. But it will only be successful if everyone comes together and recognizes one another as human beings, deserving of respect, dignity and life.
Instead of pitting the deaths of Liu and Ramos against Garner and Brown, we can join them together, understanding them as martyrs who inspire us on both sides of the blue line to work for a more just, safe and united America.
By: Paul Brandeis Raushenbush, Executive Religion Editor, The Huffington Post, December 21, 2014
“Two Grand Juries, The Same Disappointing Result”: The Criminal Justice System Is One Of The Last Bastions Of Blatant Racism
No expressions of sympathy or regret can resurrect Eric Garner, the New York City man killed by police in July. Garner died after an officer placed him in what appears to be a chokehold during an arrest for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes, an offense not usually regarded as a capital crime.
But, at the very least, officer Daniel Pantaleo (or his representatives) showed a spark of decency after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict him for any crime. “I feel very bad about the death of Mr. Garner,” he said in a statement. “My family and I include him and his family in our prayers and I hope that they will accept my personal condolences for their loss.”
That’s just one contrast to events in Ferguson, Missouri, where Officer Darren Wilson showed no hint of sympathy for teenager Michael Brown or his family. “I don’t think it’s haunting. It’s always going to be something that happened,” Wilson said in a televised interview.
There were other equally stark contrasts. While Brown’s response to Wilson will always be the subject of dispute, bystanders recorded video of Garner’s arrest and posted it on the Internet, where it went viral. There is no disputing Garner’s tragic last words as Pantaleo’s arm lingers around his neck: “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” Even Fox News’ bellicose Bill O’Reilly was moved to observe that Garner “didn’t deserve what happened to him.”
But the greatest contrast between the deaths of Garner and Brown may have been in the reactions of elected and civic leaders. Backed by its politicians, Ferguson’s police force responded to criticism of Brown’s death with excuses, equivocation and armored personnel carriers.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio took to the podium to express sympathy for Garner’s loved ones, and equally important, a simple shared humanity. Compassion. Understanding. Empathy. “This is now a national moment of grief, a national moment of pain,” he said. Members of Congress — liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats — joined to criticize the grand jury’s decision.
That matters. All citizens, regardless of color or creed or religion, want to believe that the people who govern them share their fears, their hopes, their aspirations. Or, at the very least, that their leaders can understand their frustrations.
Even now, that’s not always the case in the United States, especially when it comes to law and order. The criminal justice system is one of the last bastions of blatant racism, a tangled net of explicit prejudices and implicit biases, of rank stereotypes and unfair perceptions, a web that ensnares black men disproportionately. Countless studies conducted by experts have borne out the view held by so many black Americans: We do not stand equally before the bar of justice.
Black motorists are subjected to more traffic stops than white drivers. Black men and women are arrested more often for drug offenses, even though we are no more likely to be drug users than whites. And the use of the death penalty tilts against black defendants and devalues black lives: It is more likely to be meted out if the victim is not white.
Has there been progress? Of course there has. The nation’s top law enforcement official, the attorney general, is a black man. But the nation’s criminal justice system started out in a hellishly low place — where officials were complicit in lynchings, where the wealthy extracted unpaid labor from black men by having them arrested, where black crime victims were ignored. De Blasio referred to that unfortunate history: “We’re not dealing with years of racism leading up to it, or decades of racism — we are dealing with centuries of racism that have brought us to this day.”
For all the striking contrasts between the reactions to the deaths of Brown and Garner, there was one stunning consistency: Grand juries saw no evidence of wrongdoing by a white police officer who killed an unarmed black man. Bear in mind that a New York City medical examiner, citing “compression of his chest and prone position,” ruled Garner’s death a homicide. Still, a Staten Island grand jury found nothing to suggest that Pantaleo committed any criminal offense.
Some things haven’t changed at all.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor, The University of Georgia, School of Journalism; The National Memo, December 6, 2014
“Disrespect, Race And Obama”: This Is Not President Obama’s Doing, But The Simple Result Of His Being
In an interview with the BBC this week, Oprah Winfrey said of President Obama: “There is a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that occurs, in some cases, and maybe even many cases, because he’s African-American.”
With that remark, Winfrey touched on an issue that many Americans have wrestled with: To what extent does this president’s race animate those loyal to him and those opposed? Is race a primary motivator or a subordinate, more elusive one, tainting motivations but not driving them?
To some degree, the answers lie with the questioners. There are different perceptions of racial realities. What some see as slights, others see as innocent opposition. But there are some objective truths here. Racism is a virus that is growing clever at avoiding detection. Race consciousness is real. Racial assumptions and prejudices are real. And racism is real. But these realities can operate without articulation and beneath awareness. For those reasons, some can see racism where it is absent, and others can willfully ignore any possibility that it could ever be present.
To wit, Rush Limbaugh responded to Winfrey’s comments in his usual acerbic way, lacking all nuance:
“If black people in this country are so mistreated and so disrespected, how in the name of Sam Hill did you happen? Would somebody explain that to me? If there’s a level of disrespect simply because he’s black, then how, Oprah, have you managed to become the — at one time — most popular and certainly wealthiest television personality? How does that happen?”
No one has ever accused Limbaugh of being a complex thinker, but the intellectual deficiency required to achieve that level of arrogance and ignorance is staggering.
Anyone with even a child’s grasp of race understands that for many minorities success isn’t synonymous with the absence of obstacles, but often requires the overcoming of obstacles. Furthermore, being willing to be entertained by someone isn’t the same as being willing to be led by them.
And finally, affinity and racial animosity can dwell together in the same soul. You can like and even admire a person of another race while simultaneously disparaging the race as a whole. One can even be attracted to persons of different races and still harbor racial animus toward their group. Generations of sexual predation and miscegenation during and after slavery in this country have taught us that.
Alas, simpletons have simple understandings of complex concepts.
But it is reactions like Limbaugh’s that lead many of the president’s supporters to believe that racial sensitivity is in retreat and racial hostility is on the rise.
To be sure, the Internet is rife with examples of derogatory, overtly racial comments and imagery referring to the president and his family. But the question remains: Are we seeing an increase in racial hostility or simply an elevation — or uncovering — of it? And are those racist attitudes isolated or do they represent a serious problem?
Much of the discussion about the president, his opposition and his race has centered on the Tea Party, fairly or not.
In one take on race and the Tea Party that went horribly wrong this week, Washington Post opinion writer Richard Cohen wrote:
“Today’s G.O.P. is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the Tea Party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.”
What exactly are “conventional views” in this context? They appear to refer specifically to opinions about the color of people’s skin.
Cohen seemed to want to recast racial intolerance — and sexual identity discomfort — in a more humane light: as an extension of traditional values rather than as an artifact of traditional bigotry. In addition, Cohen’s attempt to absolve the entirety of the Tea Party without proof fails in the same way that blanket condemnations do. Overreach is always the enemy.
I don’t know what role, if any, race plays in the feelings of Tea Party supporters. It is impossible to know the heart of another person (unless they unambiguously reveal themselves), let alone the hearts of millions.
But nerves are raw, antennas are up and race has become a lightning rod in the Obama era. c.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 15, 2013
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