“Saying What Everyone Felt”: Uncle Ruslan And Big Papi Remind Us That We’re All In This Together
From California to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.
–Woody Guthrie, 1944
For what it’s worth, almost everybody in Arkansas who can find Massachusetts on a road map was appalled by state Rep. Nate Bell’s grotesquely inappropriate Twitter post. (Of course not everybody can, but that’s a different issue.) At the height of the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers, the Mena Republican informed the world, “I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?”
Reaction from New England was swift, often witty and rarely polite. “Go put on a pair of shoes and fry me up some squirrel, Gomer,” my pal Charles Pierce wrote on his Esquire blog. In a post entitled “Bite Me,” he urged readers to remind Bell “that God loves him as he loves all mouthy hicks.” Joe Koehane, the Boston-bred columnist, was less circumspect: “Might want to take a flight up north and try saying that in person, you waterheaded, little-d**k hillbilly a**hole.”
Note to Nate: Anybody who thinks Boston’s a city of Perrier-sipping pantywaists has clearly spent no time there. It didn’t help that in photos, Bell looks less like a Navy Seal than a guy who’s never personally assaulted anything more lethal than the buffet table down at the Squat n’ Gobble Barbecue Shack. Many Bostonians speculated that his fondness for big guns originated in less-than-robust manliness. Southerners are sometimes surprised to learn that when provoked, New Englanders remember the Civil War too—particularly the Irish.
Back home, Arkansans long sensitive to being caricatured as ignorant hayseeds urged Bell to resign. My sainted wife, a lifelong Arkansan (apart from our three long-ago years in Massachusetts), summed things up wearily. “Oh my God,” she said. “He’s just pathetic.”
It’s merely ironic that “redneck” remains the last socially-acceptable ethnic slur in American life. Fools like Rep. Bell help make it so. It’s a wonder the Arkansas Chamber of Commerce or the Parks & Tourism people didn’t have him kidnapped and transported to Mississippi.
Then after the big dope said he was sorry for the unfortunate “timing” of his remarks, Davy Carter, the Speaker of the Arkansas House, and also a Republican, had the decency to post a proper apology:
“On behalf of the Arkansas House of Representatives and the state of Arkansas, I want to extend my deepest apologies to the people of the City of Boston and the state of Massachusetts for the inappropriate and insensitive comment made this morning by an Arkansas House member. I can assure the people of Boston and the people of Massachusetts that Arkansans have them in their thoughts and prayers during this tragic time.”
Of course they do.
Indeed, if there’s any good to come from evil acts like the Boston Marathon bombing, it’s to remind Americans that the things binding us together as a people far outweigh our differences. In all the rage and sorrow, the words that rang truest to me came from the bombers’ immigrant uncle Ruslan Tsarni and a baseball player from the Dominican Republic.
Uncle Ruslan spoke with rare passion. He urged his surviving nephew Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to turn himself in and beg forgiveness. Maybe he needn’t have said that his brother’s sons had shamed and embarrassed all Chechen immigrants, because we don’t do—or we’re not supposed to do—collective racial and ethnic guilt here in America. But anybody who grew up with first- and second-generation immigrant families knows exactly where he was coming from. Better to hear it raw than listen to mealy-mouthed apologetics on MSNBC.
Uncle Ruslan allowed his nephews no excuses. He found their alleged religious motives fraudulent and contemptible. More than that, he spoke in terms of bedrock Americanism common to Boston, Little Rock and his Maryland home. He said he teaches his own children that the United States is the best country in the world. “I love this country which gives (everybody) a chance to be treated as a human being.”
And then came Big Papi, David Ortiz, a beloved bear of a man who briefly addressed a Fenway Park crowd after a pregame memorial service. Gesturing to his chest, Ortiz pointed out in Spanish-accented English that on that day his uniform shirt didn’t say Red Sox.
“It says Boston,” he said. ““This is our f***ing city, and nobody is going to dictate our freedom. Stay strong.”
Expletive and all, he said what everybody felt. The crowd erupted in a spontaneous roar.
Sitting halfway across the country in front of a TV set at my home on a gravel road in darkest Arkansas, I have to tell you, I damn near cried.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, April 24, 2013
“Loons And Wackos”: In GOP Civil War, It’s Limbaugh vs The Consultants
The last time we checked in with the post-election GOP civil war, Herman Cain was threatening to form a new party to compete with the GOP, Bill Kristol sparked a schism over tax increases, and Grover Norquist, the high priest of anti-tax dogma, was losing his grip on congressional Republicans.
This week, the Republican soul searching and polite recriminations via anonymous quote exploded into an all-out war of words between representatives of two wings of the party that have never gotten along, but largely kept quiet for the good of the conservative cause.
In one corner are the consultants, Steve Schmidt, who managed John McCain’s 2008 campaign, and Mike Murphy, who advised Mitt Romney. In the other corner is Rush Limbaugh, the embodiment of the conservative id in human form. We don’t have a dog in this fight as there’s blood on both of their hands, so just sit back and enjoy.
Schmidt threw the first punch in this battle on “Meet the Press” with a left, left combo strike against the right flank of his party. GOP leaders have “succumbed to the base,” he said last Sunday, arguing that “to too many swing voters in the country, when you hear the word ‘conservative’ now, they think of loons and wackos.” As if that weren’t enough, when host David Gregory played a clip of Limbaugh, Schmidt took the bait. “Our elected leaders are scared to death of the conservative entertainment complex, the shrill and divisive voices that are bombastic and broadcasting out into the homes,” he said in a clear reference to the radio host.
A week later on the same show, Murphy tagged in and continued the pummeling, this time calling out Limbaugh by name. “If we don’t modernize conservatism, we can go extinct … we’ve got to get kind of a party view of America that’s not right out of Rush Limbaugh’s dream journal,” Murphy said. He continued to deliver the blows:
“We alienate young voters because of gay marriage, we have a policy problem. We alienate Latinos — the fastest growing voter group in the country, because of our fetish on so-called amnesty, when we should be for a path to immigration. And we’ve lost our connection to middle-class economics. We also have an operative class and unfortunately a lot of which is incompetent … The biggest problem Mitt Romney had was the Republican primary. That’s what’s driving the Republican brand right now to a disaster.”
It’s a rather stunning rebuke from someone who was a top strategist to the Republican Party’s standard bearer just a few weeks ago. And it’s a surprisingly earnest, clear-eyed diagnosis of the party’s problem — its policy — from a leader in a party that has spent a lot of time after the election talking about superficial fixes that won’t change much. (That said, it’s more than a little ironic for him to attack an operative class that doesn’t know how to win considering that he … is an operative who just lost.)
Limbaugh didn’t hesitate to fire back. “What, folks, did I or any of you have to do with the Republican primary? Did not Murphy get the candidate he wanted?” the radio host said Monday. Indeed, Limbaugh is right, at least in that he was never a fan of Romney during the GOP primary.
“All these consultants, do you realize they get rich no matter who wins or loses? Little-known secret,” Limbaugh said (right again). “We need to get rid of conservatism, is what is he’s saying. We need to get rid of all these people shouting stupid conservative stuff,” the radio host added.
Limbaugh then went after Schmidt personally, saying, “I don’t know where Schmidt has a victory to hang his hat on.”
Yesterday, he also put to bed any rumors that he would support tax increases, as he had hinted at earlier.
Schmidt’s membership card to Limbaugh’s conservative movement was revoked four years ago after McCain’s loss and when Sarah Palin seemed to make it her mission to destroy him. So it’s not particularly surprising that he would tangle with Limbaugh. But the addition of Murphy, and the openness and viciousness of the conflict, illuminates the front lines in the civil war as the party tries to remake itself for future elections.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, November 21, 2012
“Striking And Ominous”: Bourbon Democrats On The Rise Again
The parallels between today’s conservative-dominated Republican Party and southern “Bourbon” Democrats in the post-Civil War era are striking and ominous.
The Bourbons — as conservative Democrats in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were known — were prosperous property owners in the South who set out to end Reconstruction and bring back the good old days of domination by upper-class whites. The Post’s Charles Lane alluded to them in his April 17 column, “A ‘white man’s party’?”
Historian Harvey H. Jackson III captured the objectives of the Bourbons in a 2004 article:
“Among their many goals was to keep Bourbon money in Bourbon pockets. They limited the state’s taxing power, abolished boards and offices (including the board of education), allowed the state debt to be settled in ways not fully understood today, and prohibited state support for projects such as river improvement and railroad construction.” Any of that sound familiar?
“The Bourbon [Democratic-written] constitution of 1875 was a victory for prosperous . . . Alabamians who did not want to pay taxes to improve the lives of those less fortunate than themselves and who did not want to finance commercial development that did not benefit them directly.” What contemporary political party comes to mind?
The Encyclopedia of Alabama, developed by the Alabama Humanities Foundation and Auburn University, puts it that “low taxes (particularly on property), weak government, and white supremacy — the core concerns of the Bourbons — became of the law of the land.”
The term Bourbon was most likely associated with the reactionary Bourbon Dynasty of France that attempted to undo the effects of the French Revolution. “In Alabama and the South,” the encyclopedia says, “Bourbon Democrats worked to undo what was done by the Civil War and Reconstruction.”
Conservative Republicans undoubtedly will take umbrage at any suggestion they belong in the same camp as post-Civil War conservative Democrats who proudly favored white supremacy and life before Appomattox.
So, let’s see. Are today’s conservatives big champions of states’ rights, a smaller and weaker federal government, less taxes, and more individual liberty? Yes, they will agree. But those goals, they would insist, are not racial in nature; they reflect a philosophy and set of values.
Yet even House Republican leader Eric Cantor acknowledges the existence of a “darker side” in this country. Asked this week by Politico’s Mike Allen if he has felt anti-Semitism from his GOP colleagues, Cantor, the lone Jewish Republican in Congress, first said no.
Then Cantor said, “I think that all of us know that in this country, we’ve not always gotten it right in terms of racial matters, religious matters, whatever. . . . To sit here and say in America that we’ve got it all right now, I think that pretty much all of us can say we’ve still got work to do.”
Indeed.
What’s more, the net effect of goals espoused by today’s conservatives is to achieve some of the outcomes sought by Bourbon Democrats. President Obama described their philosophy in a speech last month:
“If you’re out of work, can’t find a job, tough luck; you’re on your own. If you don’t have health care, that’s your problem; you’re on your own. If you’re born into poverty, lift yourself up out of your own — with your own bootstraps, even if you don’t have boots; you’re on your own,” he told a crowd in Burlington, Vt. “They believe . . . that’s how America has advanced. That’s the cramped, narrow conception they have of liberty.”
Conservatives today, of course, reject that characterization.
But conservative Democrats of the late 19th and early 20th century and today’s Republican conservatives would probably agree that:
America is better off when the federal government leaves people to fend for themselves;
Markets that are free from government regulation and taxes will produce prosperity;
There are rungs on the ladder of opportunity, but many at the bottom are too lazy to climb;
The wealthy, to whom much has been given, have no stake in anybody else’s success;
A business’s obligation is to those who own it;
We will not as a people go up or down together; in the end, each is on his or her own.
Yes, there are differences between the United States at the turn of the 20th century and today. But there are similarities too.
Protecting the interests of the propertied and the politically powerful may be a legacy handed down from yesterday’s conservative Bourbon Democrats to today’s conservative Republicans.
By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 20. 2012
Newt Gingrich And South Carolina Were Made For Each Other
Hot-headed South Carolina and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are made for each other. The state first to secede from the Union about 150 years ago remains defiant, mischievous, and unreconstructed. Not all states are created equal.
South Carolina, shall we say, made its name early as the troublemaker. To this day, it doesn’t like to fall in line and sends elected representatives to Washington cut from that cloth. Down home in Charleston, men especially still brag on the firing on Fort Sumter, the shots and blockade that started the Civil War. Very nice.
So natch Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina Republican presidential primary over the front-runner, former Gov. Mitt Romney. There was no way the most viciously verbose and confrontational politician in our time was not going to win over the weekend. Just like the confident, beautiful people of the New England Patriots were going to see their football team beat the sincere, scrappy Baltimore Ravens, any which way. Gingrich’s victory was destined by the order of the political court.
The 243,398 Republicans who voted for Gingrich in the Palmetto State gave him the first statewide win of his life. Remember, the former speaker only ever faced voters in a congressional district in Georgia. He is not necessarily a man of the people, no matter what the South Carolina verdict. Not that I care, but Romney does not need to fear the writing on the wall yet.
Gingrich, like his new best friend state, is an outsider of the establishment. Gingrich, like South Carolina, home to the the Citadel, likes starting the political equivalent of war, although he never did military service. Gingrich, like South Carolina, is steeped in history which each are capable of entirely misreading and handing down like lore.
A few facts on Gingrich’s own history. As House speaker, he was awed by President Clinton’s political prowess and brilliance, as Washington Post associate editor David Maraniss pointed out on Sunday’s Post op-ed page. He knew he had met more than his match. Later in Clinton’s presidency, he masterminded the House impeachment strategy, carried out by then-Rep. Henry Hyde, that nearly doomed Clinton’s fate. The Monica Lewinsky affair was only a vehicle. No moral umbrage was involved, as we now know Gingrich was then having an affair with an aide on the Hill, now his third wife Callista Gingrich.
Vengeful hypocrisy still cuts deep. If Gingrich had his way, Clinton would be as gone as the good King Duncan in Macbeth. Sen. Lindsay Graham, then a South Carolina congressman, was one of Hyde’s dozen helpers. This was only over a dozen years ago, but it seems like “history” we have forgotten. That’s what Gingrich is counting on when he talks about God’s forgiveness and “despicable” debate queries. That’s what columnists forget when they write that Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr was solely responsible for the whole tragic circus.
Some more history on South Carolina. When the greats gathered in a room to invent the Republic and its rules, South Carolina’s men were most adamant about protecting slavery as an institution. That was formative fruit on the tree since. A South Carolina congressman caned a Massachusetts senator for his abolitionist views on the Senate floor before the Civil War broke out. As noted, they were first to fight “the Yankees” and call themselves another country. Over much of the 20th century, the stubborn Strom Thurmond of South Carolina made an indelible mark as an arch-segregationist, a senator, and a presidential candidate. Former Sen. Ernest Hollings, the bright and capable junior senator with the low country in his voice, was thankfully a reminder of the good men and women from that state.
The Confederate flag has flown over South Carolina for too long. Not only up in the air but in the hearts of men. Gingrich won in a state that is, in a sense, another country.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, January 23, 2012
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