“Purveyors Of Garbage”: Right Wingers Hitting Rock Bottom, Then Crawling Beneath The Rock
I have, at times, marveled at some of the more ridiculous efforts to smear President Obama and his family. Dinesh D’Souza, for example, wrote a strange book attacking Obama for trying to carry out an “anti-colonial” agenda he inherited from his Kenyan father. It’s a thesis as silly as it is ugly, based on bizarre assertions about the president having the mindset of an African “Luo tribesman.”
The Weekly Standard criticized it for “misstatements of fact, leaps in logic, and pointlessly elaborate argumentation.” When D’Souza’s thesis first appeared as a piece in Forbes, one of the magazine’s own columnists blasted D’Souza’s “intellectual goofiness,” “factual problems,” and “unsubstantiated ideological accusations.” The Columbia Journalism Review called D’Souza’s piece “a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia” and a “singularly disgusting work.”
By the time the disgusting attack was turned into a movie, it was tempting to think the deranged attitudes of Obama’s most over-the-top detractors couldn’t get any worse. Michelle Goldberg’s latest report proves otherwise — now they’re launching nauseating attacks against the president’s mother (thanks to my colleague Vanessa Silverton-Peel for the heads-up).
For a while now, pictures purporting to show Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, modeling in 1950s bondage and fetish porn have been floating around the darker corners of the Internet. Now, though, they’ve made their way into a pseudo-documentary, Joel Gilbert’s Dreams From My Real Father, which is being mailed to voters in swing states, promoted by several Tea Party groups and by at least one high-level Republican. At the same time, Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, Obama’s America—the first of all his works to hit the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list—has a chapter essentially calling Dunham a fat slut. […]
What matters here is not that a lone crank made a vulgar conspiracy video, one that outdoes even birther propaganda in its lunacy and bad taste. It’s that the video is finding an audience on the right. Gilbert claims that more than a million copies of Dreams From My Real Father have been mailed to voters in Ohio, as well between 80,000 and 100,000 to voters in Nevada and 100,000 to voters in New Hampshire. “We’re putting plans in place, as of next week, to send out another 2 [million] or 3 million, just state by state,” he told me.
It may seem hard to believe that even the most gullible, wild-eyed fools would find such garbage credible, but there are those on the right who are actually embracing this. Goldberg added, “[T]he fact is, people are reporting receiving the disc in the mail. Tea Party groups and conservative churches are screening it. It was shown at a right-wing film festival in Tampa during the Republican National Convention, and by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Council in Missouri. Alabama GOP Chairman Bill Armistead recently recommended it during a speech.”
We’re well past the point at which these right-wing activists care about basic levels of decency, but if there’s any justice, this kind of attack will backfire, and make the purveyors of the garbage look far worse than their intended targets.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 28, 2012
“The GOP’s Dangerous Animals”: Mitt Romney Needs To Keep The Animals In Their Enclosures
At this week’s Republican National Convention, a pair of attendees found a novel game to play: They threw nuts at a black camera operator for CNN and told her, “This is how we feed animals.”
Convention officials evicted the tossers, who, like almost all of the delegates in the Tampa Bay Times Forum, were white. The Romney campaign condemned the antics as “deplorable” and “reprehensible.”
It’s good to know that some behavior on the far right exceeds Mitt Romney’s tolerance, but this episode of “animal” feeding was, well, peanuts compared with the broader issues restraining racial politics in the party. In his acceptance speech Thursday night, Romney became more than the Republican Party’s nominee for president; he became its zookeeper. To win the presidency and to become successful in the Oval Office, Romney must keep the animals in his own party in their enclosures — and that’s no easy task.
Hours before Romney’s speech, about 100 GOP delegates from the Western states assembled for a “special reception with elephants” at Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo, hosted by Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and the state GOP. There, in the faux-adobe Safari Lodge, delegates mingled with Chanel the East African crowned crane, Pita the South American porcupine, Bo the African martial eagle — and Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz.
Arpaio, you’ll recall, is the guy who claims that Barack Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery, who calls for the arrest and deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, who is being sued for racial profiling, and who has been an outspoken champion of the Arizona immigration crackdown largely invalidated by the Supreme Court.
At the zoo, Arpaio argued that there is no daylight between him and Romney. “The governor’s stance corresponds with my stance,” the sheriff said. “Everything he says, I agree with him.” He further boasted that he was Romney’s “campaign guy in Arizona” in 2008 and that he conferred with Romney during this year’s debates, during which Romney buried other opponents for being insufficiently tough on immigration.
Arpaio justifiably took credit for establishing the party’s position on immigration. “I don’t know how to say this without being egotistical,” he said, but “I have a lot of support across the nation from all these delegates.” Asked if he was hurting Republicans, he scoffed. “If I’m hurting the party, why did all the people running for president either visit my office or call me?” he asked. “And they all want my endorsement.”
He’s right — and it’s a shame Romney won’t send Arpaio where convention officials sent the nut-throwers. Romney needs urgently to broaden his appeal beyond the white faces on the convention floor, and he made a nod in that direction in his acceptance speech, reminding delegates that “we are a nation of immigrants.” Romney’s advisers filled the program with leaders of color such as Marco Rubio, Condi Rice, Ted Cruz and Nikki Haley.
But such gestures are easily undone by others. Romney has long lacked the courage to stand up to the more dangerous beasts on the right, from birther Donald Trump to the woman who accused President Obama of “treason.” In some cases, Romney has encouraged these sinister elements, with his recent quip in Michigan that “no one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate” and his false claim that Obama is gutting welfare reform. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews got into a tense standoff with Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus this week when he accused Romney of playing the “race card.” Priebus called that “garbage.”
No, “garbage” is what Arpaio was tossing around at the zoo on Thursday afternoon. The sheriff let everybody know “my mother and father came from Italy — legally, of course.” And he gave them an update on Obama’s birth certificate. “We’re just looking at forged documents,” he said. “Fraud, that’s what we’re looking at.”
He discussed his round-’em-up views on illegal immigrants, he voiced his opposition to driver’s licenses or other benefits for the children of illegal immigrants, and he assured his audience that Romney was of like mind. “He’s not just talking,” Arpaio said. “I’m convinced that, the first year at the White House, he will bring this issue out.”
It’s easy to dismiss Arpaio as, er, nuts. He went on a paranoid rant about how “I’ve got demonstrators I hear out there. . . . They’re the same ones who go in front of my church.” But there wasn’t a single demonstrator outside.
Romney should be making clear that Arpaio doesn’t speak for his Republican Party any more than the nut-throwers do. Instead, the sheriff wore a convention floor pass that said “honored guest.”
BY: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 31, 2012
“Activating And Motivating The Base”: Racism Plays A Big Part In Our Politics, Period
If you haven’t read it, Ta-Nehisi Coates has a fantastic essay on Barack Obama’s relationship to race and racism in the latest issue of The Atlantic. There’s too much to quote, but this paragraph captures the thesis:
In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offense, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration indeed, revealing a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard.
The power and symbolism of Obama’s election is compromised by the extent to which his presidency has been shaped by white expectations and white racism. Obama can’t show anger, he can’t propose policies tailored to African Americans and he can’t talk about race. In other words, he can’t remind white Americans that their president is a black man as much as anything else.
At the risk of sounding cynical, I expect that Coates will inspire howls of unfairness from the right. It’s almost forbidden to discuss the role racism has played in shaping opposition to Obama. Conservatives dismiss such concerns as “playing the race card”—and use it as an opportunity to accuse liberals of racism—while more neutral commentators note that Bill Clinton also faced a rabid conservative opposition. But as Coates points out, no one called Clinton a “food stamp president” or attacked his health care plan as “reparations.” Local lawmakers didn’t circulate racist jokes about the former Arkansas governor, and right-wing provocateurs didn’t accuse Clinton of fomenting an anti-white race war.
Of course, race isn’t the reason conservatives oppose Obama, but it shapes the nature of their opposition. The right wing would have exploded against Hillary Clinton as well. But they wouldn’t have waged a three-year campaign to discredit her citizenship.
With that said, I’m honestly amazed that—for many people—it’s beyond the pale to accuse a political party of exploiting racism for political gain. We’re only 47 years removed from the official end of Jim Crow and the routine assassination of black political leaders. This year’s college graduates are the children of men and women who remember—or experienced—the race riots of the late 1960s and 70s. The baby boomers—including the large majority of our lawmakers—were children when Emmett Till was murdered, teenagers when George Wallace promised to defend segregation in perpetuity, and adults when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed for his belief in the humanity of black people.
Five and a half million Americans are 85 or older. In the years they were born—assuming the oldest is 110 (several thousand Americans fit that bill)—1,413 African Americans were lynched. And that’s a rough estimate; the number is almost certainly higher. For nearly a third of our country’s history, this was a common occurence:
Interracial marriage was illegal in large swaths of the country when Barack Obama Sr. married Ann Dunham.
Mitt Romney was 31 when the Church of Latter Day Saints allowed African American priests, and repudiated early leader Brigham Young’s pronouncement that “The Lord had cursed Cain’s seed with blackness and prohibited them the Priesthood.”
Nancy Pelosi grew up in segregated Baltimore.
Mitch McConnell was sixteen when his high school admitted its first black students.
Of course there are politicians and political parties that capitalize on racism. Why wouldn’t they? The end of our state-sanctioned racial caste system is a recent event in our history; more recent than Medicare or Medicaid, more recent than the advent of computers, more recent than the interstate highway system, and more recent than Social Security. Taken in the broad terms of a nation’s life, we’re only a few weeks removed from the widespread acceptance of white supremacy.
Race remains a potent way to activate voters and motivate them to the polls—see Mitt Romney’s current campaign against Obama’s fictional attack on welfare. To believe otherwise—and to see this country as a place that’s moved past its history—is absurd.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, August 23, 2012
“Dubious Legal Tactics”: How Mitt Romney’s Millions Went Tax-Free Overseas
On the same day that Mitt Romney cracked his birther “joke,” new evidence indicated that he and his partners at Bain Capital have used questionable methods to avoid federal taxes – including a scheme that transforms corporate stock into untaxed offshore “derivatives,” and a practice that converts management fees into capital gains, which are taxed at a far lower rate.
While nobody has asked to see the Republican candidate’s birth certificate, as he said at a Michigan rally on Friday, everybody has a renewed interest in examining the tax returns he continues to withhold.
The complex and tricky tax shelters used by Bain Capital continued to emerge from as lawyers and other experts examined the hundreds of pages of previously confidential company documents uncovered by the Gawker website in an exclusive series this week. The authenticity of the documents was confirmed by a Bain spokesperson, who said that the company deplores the public posting of its proprietary materials.
In a sense, the latest revelations about how Bain protected its vast income from taxation are scarcely surprising to anyone familiar with the world of private equity where Romney made his fortune, estimated at $250 million or more. Avoiding taxes is among the most important attractions of that industry for the wealthy clients it aims to attract.
But several experts who have looked over the new Bain documents have warned that dubious legal tactics may have been employed by some of the company’s investment vehicles, including several that are listed on the partial returns that Romney has already released. Those experts, such as Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of Colorado, and Daniel Shaviro, who teaches tax law at New York University’s law school, have raised questions about both the equity “swap” and fee conversion maneuvers.
Companies like Bain make money both from investment income, which is taxed at the lower capital gains rate, and from management fees, which are taxed as ordinary income like wages. If the firm can somehow transform its management fees into capital investments, then it can avoid the 35 percent top federal income tax rate, and pay the 15 percent capital gains rate instead. That is what Bain evidently does to keep its partners’ taxes low – around the 13 percent rate that Romney admits to paying. But critics like Fleischer say this is an abusive tactic that cannot be justified by law, even though the IRS has never attempted to stop companies that use it.
“Unlike carried interest, which is unseemly but perfectly legal, Bain’s management fee conversions are not legal,” the Colorado professor wrote on his blog. “If challenged in court, Bain would lose. The Bain partners, in my opinion, misreported their income if they reported these converted fees as capital gain instead of ordinary income.”
Equally troubling is the use of offshore accounts to avoid taxation on stock holdings. This tactic is called a “total return equity swap,” because it involves swapping real equities for derivative paper investments that provide all the same dividends as the stock itself – but aren’t subject to federal taxes. According to Shaviro, this practice was sufficiently blatant to elicit a warning from the IRS two years ago. He wrote recently that those who used it over the past decade “were coming perilously close to committing tax fraud, in cases where the economic equivalence to direct [stock] ownership was too great.”
In the complex territory of tax law, precise boundaries aren’t always clear. What makes the “total return equity swap” potentially perilous for Romney, however, is the use of foreign accounts to avoid taxes, which is what many Americans suspect him of doing. Despite the accounts that he has maintained in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, Bermuda and other tax havens, Romney’s campaign has repeatedly denied, with little credibility, that his wealth was invested abroad to evade taxes.
The proof may well lie within the tax returns that he is so determined to conceal. Wisecracks about the president’s alleged foreign birthplace may not distract concerned voters from the overseas accounts where Romney’s money has been hidden.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, August 25, 2012
“A Shared Tribal Identy”: Romney’s Birther “Joke” Wasn’t A Joke
After weeks of false attacks on welfare, Romney has lost the benefit of the doubt.
This afternoon, while campaigning in Michigan, Mitt Romney made a little joke about President Obama’s birth certificate: http://youtu.be/cht3bitxknI
Here’s the text:
I love being home, in this place where Ann and I were raised. Where both of us were born … No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised.
Here’s the Obama campaign’s response:
Throughout this campaign, Governor Romney has embraced the most strident voices in his party instead of standing up to them. It’s one thing to give the stage in Tampa to Donald Trump, Sheriff Arpaio, and Kris Kobach. But Governor Romney’s decision to directly enlist himself in the birther movement should give pause to any rational voter across America.
Naturally, Team Romney is trying to stop this from becoming a national story, and the campaign has offered a variety of excuses why Romney made the joke. My favorite comes from Romney advisor Kevin Madden. “The governor has always said, and has repeatedly said, he believes the president was born here in the United States,” Madden said. “He was only referencing that Michigan, where he is campaigning today, is the state where he himself was born and raised.”
Right.
Now, it’s unquestionably true that Mitt Romney isn’t a birther. He knows that President Obama was born in the United States and is fully eligible to serve as President of the United States.
But that isn’t an excuse, it’s an indictment.
Romney’s problem, throughout this campaign, has been his inability to seal the deal with skeptical conservatives. In the primaries, this forced him to take far-right positions on issues like abortion and immigration—he endorsed personhood amendments and “self-deportation”—and in the general election, it has led him to make a huge gamble by choosing Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan—whose plan for Medicare plan and views on reproductive rights are widely unpopular—as his running mate. If Romney were confident in his ability to win the GOP base, he would have gone with someone more moderate. But as it stands, he needed a conservative ideologue on the ticket to show his fealty to the movement.
The birther joke is further evidence that Romney is uncertain of his standing with the Republican base. It’s clear from the video that this was an intentional move to establish a shared tribal identity, and—judging from their laughter and obvious approval—that’s how it was understood by the largely white audience.
A plausible objection to this view is that Romney wasn’t trying to make a dogwhistle—that it was a harmless joke which went awry because of a bad delivery. Indeed, to push back against the emerging outrage, some journalists noted occasions when President Obama made birther jokes, while others set this as the other side of Obama’s snarky comments about Romney’s infamous incident with the family dog.
A few thoughts.
First, the video strongly suggests that this wasn’t a joke. Romney assumes a certain demeanor when he is joking in public—”ingratiating” is the word that comes to mind—and this had more in common with the Romney of debates and speeches: cool, controlled and confident.
But even if it was a joke, it’s important to understand the context. For the last month, Romney has devoted his campaign to falsely accuse Obama of gutting welfare’s work requirements (“You wouldn’t have to work, and wouldn’t have to train for a job”) This claim has been debunked by independent fact checkers, pundits, and major news organizations.
In each instance, analysts have noted the extent to which this attack is meant to play on racial fears and resentments. Romney’s welfare ads are meant to conjure images of “young bucks” and “welfare queens,” and are a callback to Newt Gingrich’s declaration of Obama as a “food stamp president.” Romney’s line on welfare is a mainstay of his stump speeches, and has been deployed whenever he’s addressing a crowd of working-class whites. Romney’s victory depends on winning a huge share of the white vote, to do so, he’s decided to play the politics of white resentment in the most explicit way possible.
If this were a stray remark, I would be willing to give Romney the benefit of the doubt. But given the background and context, I simply can’t believe that Romney made a mistake with his birther joke. It fits too well with everything else he’s done.
Between birtherism, the accusations of illegitimacy and the constant recourse to racialized attacks, it’s hard to deny that there’s something ugly lurking beneath right-wing opposition to Obama. Mitt Romney, who seeks to represent the 300 million people of this country, has decided to unleash it.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, August 24, 2012
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