“Relentless Racial Hostility”: GOP Has Done Everything It Can To Make Sure Obama Is The Wrong Color
Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller said what’s been said countless times and worse acted on by the GOP countless times. That is that more than a few of their numbers have reflexively dithered, delayed, and flat-out tried to torpedo every policy initiative or piece of legislation that President Obama has backed solely as Rockefeller said, “because he’s the wrong color.” Rockefeller should know. He sits on a number of Senate committees and subcommittees and he’s undoubtedly seen and heard the blatant displays of not-so-subtle bigotry from more than a few of his GOP congressional adversaries. But Rockefeller is only the latest political luminary to state the obvious. Former Florida Governor Charlie Crist bluntly told an interviewer that he got out of the GOP because of its open hostility to Obama. Crist made sure that he meant hostility based not on legitimate political disagreements but on race when he specifically referred to Obama as the “African-American President.”
The relentless racial hostility toward Obama goes far beyond simply the routine racial lampooning and mocking of Obama in grotesque signs, posters, chants and harangues by loose-hinged tea party elements and unreconstructed bigots. It has been subtly stoked and orchestrated by the GOP with the clear political aim of disrupting, destabilizing and rendering politically impotent Obama’s program, initiatives and proposed legislation.
The final presidential vote in 2008 gave plenty of warning of the lethalness of the GOP’s core conservative white constituency when aroused. Overall, Obama garnered slightly more than 40 percent of the white male vote. Among Southern and Heartland America white male voters, Obama made almost no impact. The only thing that even made Obama’s showing respectable in those states was the record turnout and percentage of black votes that he got. They were all Democratic votes.
A Harvard post-election assessment of the 2008 presidential vote found that race did factor into the presidential election and that it cost Obama an added three to five percent of the national popular vote. Put bluntly, if Obama had been white the election would have been a route. During the GOP presidential primary campaign, GOP presidential candidates made sure of that with the stream of race-tinged references Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney made to food stamps, welfare, work ethics and an entitlement society. Then there were the racially-loaded newsletters from Ron Paul that resurfaced. The candidates when challenged ducked, dodged and denied any racial intent, or in the case of Paul’s newsletter, that he even penned them.
His 2012 reelection victory gave even more warning that little had changed. In fact, it got worse, he got a smaller percentage of the overall white vote than he did in 2008, and that included a small but significant defection of younger white voters who backed him in 2008.
There has not been a moment that has gone by that top GOP congressional leaders have not called Obama out on some issue. The framing of their criticism has not been polite, gentlemanly or exhibited the traditional courtesy and respect for the office of the presidency. This has done much to create a climate of distrust and vilification that has made it near legitimate, even expected, that Obama be heckled. The GOP’s official heckling has taken many forms, all mean-spirited and petty, rather than purely the customary expression of opposition to policies that clashing political parties and their leaders show toward each other.
The near textbook example of how the GOP has subtly used race to sledge hammer Obama has been its take-no-prisoners drumbeat attack on Attorney General Eric Holder. He’s been called on the GOP congressional carpet in countless hearings, and pilloried, insulted, and abused for every concocted sin from his alleged master mind bungling of the fast and furious gun sting to his supposed politicizing of the Justice Department. The attacks have all been punctuated by screams for his resignation or firing. Holder is not just a convenient surrogate punching bag for Obama. He is the one top administration official who’s not afraid to punch back at the GOP for its blatant play of the race card. He’s as much said so and this has only made his inquistors even more manic in their racial assault on Obama vis-a-vis Holder.
The GOP also in a cynical, thinly transparent move has even tried to turn the racial tables on Obama by tarring him as the race divider and baiter. His lambaste of the GOP at a keynote speech at Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention in April for doing everything humanly possible to subvert voting rights through its endless legislative ploys and constructing every obstacle it can to enforcement was the opening needed to use this tact. It won’t be the last time for this.
Which just proves again that Rockefeller and Crist as so many others before them got it right. For many in the GOP, Obama is simply the wrong color and that won’t change.
By: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, The Huffington Post Blog, May 8, 2014
“From Farsightedness To A Laughingstock”: There Are No Mainstream Republicans Left In North Carolina
The national Republican Party is exulting that the “establishment” won in North Carolina’s Senate primary yesterday. That’s only because they have redefined the term “Republican establishment” to include adamant adherents of a far-right ideology.
In yesterday’s voting, state House Speaker Thom Tillis won the right to face Senator Kay Hagan, a Democrat, in November. He beat a series of fringe candidates like Greg Brannon, who believes food stamps are a form of slavery and wants to save the poor by abolishing the Department of Agriculture. But in fact Mr. Tillis is a far more dangerous candidate than Mr. Brannon and the other Tea Partiers. While he generally refrains from nutty soundbites (though not always), he has been quite effective as the point man in the state party’s anti-government project.
As speaker, Mr. Tillis has helped preside over what our editorial last year called “the decline of North Carolina.” State government, we wrote, “has become a demolition derby, tearing down years of progress in public education, tax policy, racial equality in the courtroom and access to the ballot.”
Mr. Tillis cut federal employment benefits, and refused to pay back what the state owed Washington, leading North Carolina to become the only state at the time to lose long-term benefits. He cut back on education spending, prompting many talented teachers to leave the state, and repealed the Racial Justice Act, which gave death-row inmates a shot at proving they were victims of discrimination. He allowed new restrictions on abortion, blocked the expansion of Medicaid and rewrote the tax code for the benefit of the rich. He and his colleagues imposed also one of the most restrictive voter ID requirements in the nation, intended to keep Democratic voters, including minorities and the poor, away from the polls.
In February, a state judge blocked a program passed by the legislature to spend $10 million on school vouchers, allowing taxpayer money to go to private and religious schools. But Mr. Tillis and his counterpart in the state Senate tried to implement the program over the judge’s ruling. That led the editorial writers of the Raleigh News and Observer to say last month:
“It really is time to stop calling those who run the N.C. General Assembly conservatives. They are not conservative. They are reckless.”
On top of his actions, Mr. Tillis has made his own share of outrageous comments, suggesting in a 2011 video that Republicans need to get the truly needy to turn against those who are soaking government assistance programs.
“What we have to do is find a way to divide and conquer the people who are on assistance,” he says in the video. “We have to show respect for that woman who has cerebral palsy and had no choice, in her condition, that needs help and that we should help. And we need to get those folks to look down at these people who choose to get into a condition that makes them dependent on the government and say at some point, ‘You’re on your own. We may end up taking care of those babies, but we’re not going to take care of you.’ And we’ve got to start having that serious discussion.”
The right-wing project led by Mr. Tillis, which turned a state with a reputation for farsightedness into a laughingstock, has infuriated many North Carolinians, leading to regular protests at the state Capitol. Ms. Hagan will have a great deal of material to use against her opponent in the coming campaign, if she can scale the wall of unlimited money that he and his wealthy supporters around the country are about to construct.
By: David Firestone, Editors Blog, The New York Times, May 7, 2014
“What White Folks Get Wrong About White Privilege”: For White People, Society Pretty Much Works As Advertised, Not So For Others
Tal Fortgang, a Princeton undergraduate, has become something of a hero on the right for bravely standing up for embattled whites everywhere who have been told to “check their privilege” when discussing politics. In a head-shakingly dense essay that tracks his family’s own underdog roots as poor Jewish immigrants, Fortgang says, “[T]hey can’t be telling me that everything I’ve done with my life can be credited to the racist patriarchy holding my hand throughout my years of education and eventually guiding me into Princeton.”
Perhaps. But Fortgang’s essay doesn’t even begin to scratch at the problem of white privilege. On a purely functional level, society simply works for white folks in a way that it doesn’t for others.
On the extreme end, just imagine if a black family had confronted law enforcement with a heavily armed militia, a la Cliven Bundy. Would the feds have simply walked away? Would conservatives be comparing them to Mahatma Gandhi and George Washington?
On the more mundane side, just consider this brilliant and terrifying post by Tressie McMillan Cottom about being confronted by an angry cab driver, in which she has to weigh the imperative to call the police against the consequences of putting a black man in contact with the criminal justice system:
As a black woman, I am the keeper of many things. Chief among them is the hope of black men. A black man introduced into the criminal justice system for any violation, no matter how minor, becomes a son who cannot care for big momma, a brother who can’t hold down his siblings, a mate who can’t promise a paycheck, and a father who is a parent only when the penal system says he can be.
Black women calling the police on black men has a long, tragic history. That history isn’t just about protecting black mens’ futures. It’s also about how that leaves black women trapped between a rock and a hard place beneath an open sky.
Last night I called the police on a black man. [Some of us are brave]
I highly encourage you to read the rest — it’s bracing stuff. What jumped out for me was that I have never in my life been burdened with such an excruciating decision. I can scarcely imagine what it would be like to experience the extreme emotional stress of violent confrontation, while simultaneously calculating the risk of getting yet another black man pulled into the crushing vortex of the prison-industrial complex.
This is the kind of situation that makes Fortgang’s “check your privilege” complaint even more petty. It also simplifies the issue for liberals, who often speak of their privilege with a distinct air of hair shirt self-flagellation, as something that must be constantly apologized for. In many cases, the system simply needs to work for everyone in the way that white folks take for granted.
How to achieve that is a more complex question, of course. But the end goal is obvious. Nobody should have to worry about calling the police if some strange, threatening man is banging on the door. Nobody should have to worry whether that person will be punished wildly disproportionately, by being put away for half a lifetime, or beaten to death for “resisting arrest,” or shot and killed.
They should be able to call for help without a second’s hesitation. This is just a case of bringing everyone up to the same basic level.
Of course, American law enforcement is by no means scrupulously fair when it comes to white folks either, especially not poor ones. In fact, as Radley Balko and others have long been documenting, cops are increasingly treating everyone with the same preposterous hyper-aggressiveness that has traditionally been reserved for minorities. Even being the white mayor of a city won’t save you these days from the SWAT team doing a no-knock raid on the wrong house and shooting your dogs for no reason. Or consider Cecily McMillan, convicted of felony assault yesterday for elbowing a police officer when he allegedly violently groped her.
It’s all the more reason for whites to be wary of the cruelties of the U.S. criminal system — and to understand what white privilege really means.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, May 6, 2014
“To Boycott Or Not Boycott”: Why Should Democrats Participate In The Ridiculous Republican Benghazi Charade?
House Republicans, as expected, are moving forward with yet another committee to investigate the deadly terrorist attack in Benghazi in September 2012, intended to complement the seven other congressional committees that have already held hearings on the attack. For House Democrats, there’s a straightforward question: is there any point in participating?
The answer isn’t necessarily obvious.
Objective observers can probably agree in advance that the new “select” committee is intended to serve a political, not a fact-finding, purpose. If the goal were to simply get objective information, lawmakers could rely on the existing congressional process and consider the independent, comprehensive reports that have already been published. After 13 hearings, 50 briefings, and 25,000 produced documents, the official record is already quite complete.
But since the available information doesn’t tell far-right conspiracy theorists what they wanted to hear, conspiracy theorists demanded a select committee, which in turn suggests this new investigation will be a partisan exercise – Republicans are starting with the answer they want, working backwards to find evidence to bolster the agreed-upon conclusion.
Why should Democrats participate in this ridiculous charade? Some are arguing that they shouldn’t – let Republicans play their election-year games, the argument goes, exploiting a terrorist attack for electoral gain, but let them do it alone.
For that matter, even if Dems do participate, is there any credible chance they’ll be treated fairly as part of a respectful and responsible analysis of the events in Benghazi? I suspect even many Republicans would find the very idea amusing.
Democrats could boycott the scheme and let the GOP committee members do what they intend to do anyway: keep the fundraising machine humming, give allied media outlets fodder, and use the process to keep the Republican base agitated in an election year. Why legitimize a probe with a fraudulent foundation? Why lend credence to an endeavor that appears to be scripted by Fox News producers?
There is, however, a flip side to this.
Greg Sargent had an interesting chat with Norm Ornstein.
In purely political terms, this isn’t necessarily an easy call for Dems, because there is some benefit in participating, even if the committee is constructed in a ridiculously partisan fashion. “Some of these hearings are going to be televised,” Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein tells me. “The question is, does it make more sense to be in there, participating in the process and pointing out Republican overkill again and again, or does it make more sense to further destroy the image of the committee by staying out of it?”
Of course, the question of how to construct the committee also presents Republicans with a dilemma. “The more the committee overreaches and tries to find a big scandal where there is none, the more Republicans run the risk of the American people seeing the Congress they run as utterly unconcerned about the things that matter to them,” Ornstein says.
If Dems are in the room, they can at least occasionally highlight facts for anyone watching the process unfold. During testimony, Fox will probably break for commercials whenever Democrats ask questions of witnesses, but for anyone else paying attention, at least a little pushback during the hearings might at least add some variety to the charade.
I’ll confess that I’m torn, and if I were in Democratic leaders’ shoes, I’m not sure what I’d do. Keep in mind, however, that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) argued today that Dems could participate, and in the interest of fairness, she called for parity – Pelosi suggested the committee, if it’s serious about getting at the truth, could be split evenly between Republican and Democratic members, who would share resources and information. If it’s not a political scam, she said, it should be a bipartisan, cooperative process.
Republicans are already poised to reject Pelosi’s idea.
Imagine that.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 6, 2014
“Down Another Political Blind Alley”: Three Reasons Why Reviving ‘Benghazi’ Is Stupid For The GOP
House Speaker John Boehner has made what appears to be the remarkably stupid decision to set up a “select” committee of the House to once again “investigate” the 2012 Benghazi incident in which U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stephens was killed.
He apparently believes that another “investigation” of this tragedy will be politically advantageous to Republicans in the mid-term elections — and somehow tarnish the reputation of the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she prepares a potential run for the White House in 2016.
Already the GOP has bet heavily that its obsession with Obamacare will bolster its political position — a bet that increasingly looks like a loser. Now, in its never-ending attempts to mollify the tea party fringe, the GOP leadership has turned down another political blind alley.
There are at least three reasons why their renewed obsession with “Benghazi” is politically stupid for the GOP.
Reason #1: There is no “there,” there. The Benghazi attack has been investigated over and over and there is simply no evidence that there is any scandal to be had at all.
The latest “revelation” is that Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes wrote an email aimed at helping former ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice frame her description of what happened in Benghazi before she went on various talk shows. Problem is that his suggestions were entirely in line with the talking points produced by the intelligence community — which believed early on that the attack was mainly the result of reaction to an anti-Muslim videotape and demonstrations that had erupted in Cairo in protest.
Of course, it turned out later that there was more to the story — though both The New York Times and the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation of the event did in fact confirm that the response to the video tape did play a role — and Al Qaeda did not.
David Corn of Mother Jones pointed out that The New York Times, after a comprehensive investigation, reached this conclusion:
Months of investigation…centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.
The Times continued:
Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs…
The violence, though, also had spontaneous elements. Anger at the video motivated the initial attack. Dozens of people joined in, some of them provoked by the video and others responding to fast-spreading false rumors that guards inside the American compound had shot Libyan protesters. Looters and arsonists, without any sign of a plan, were the ones who ravaged the compound after the initial attack, according to more than a dozen Libyan witnesses as well as many American officials who have viewed the footage from security cameras.
The Senate intelligence committee report released in January concluded that the attack was, “not a highly coordinated plot, but was opportunistic.”
It went on to say:
It remains unclear if any group or person exercised overall command and control of the attacks or whether extremist group leaders directed their members to participate. Some intelligence suggests the attacks were likely put together in short order, following that day’s violent protests in Cairo against an inflammatory video.
And is anyone really surprised that the actual circumstances surrounding the attack were unclear at the outset? The same was true of the circumstances surrounding the Boston bombing and the Newtown shootings that took place right here in the United States — events involving our own law enforcement. That is the nature of chaotic violent events.
The right wing has done everything in its power to turn “Benghazi” into a politically salient scandal without success. CBS’ Sixty Minutes even bought into the right wing narrative when correspondent Lara Logan based an entire story on a tale about Benghazi that turned out to be entirely fictional. The story was fabricated by contractor Dylan Davies in order to sell his book. Ultimately CBS suspended Logan as a result.
On its face, the loss of life at Benghazi demonstrated a breakdown in diplomatic security. That’s why the independent State Department Inspector General did a study of what went wrong and how to prevent a future loss of life. Procedures needed to be changed. But there was never a shred of evidence that any U.S. official did anything intentionally — or because of some political motivation — that caused this event.
And what did the Republicans who are so fixated on embassy security do in response? They actually cut the budget for State Department security.
If you were in the position of making it harder to prevent future attacks like the one at Benghazi would you really want to focus attention on the subject?
Reason #2: The “Benghazi scandal” does not resonate with most voters — except, of course, the extreme right wing.
Republicans counter that polls show a plurality of Americans disapprove of the way the Benghazi attack was handled. In fact, a Huffington Post/You.gov poll show showed 42 percent disapprove and 27 percent approve of the way “Benghazi” was handled by the administration. But of course people are dissatisfied with the way the event was handled — four people were killed.
The real question is whether “Benghazi” is an issue ordinary people care about. The fact is that the Benghazi issue has no political saliency. It never appears on the list of major concerns the voters express might affect their choices in the 2014 mid-terms. That is partially because there is no real “Benghazi scandal.” It is also because ordinary people have much more important questions on their minds like the need to increase their wages and standards of living.
The fact is that “Benghazi” does not have the elements that have made “scandals” of the past — like Watergate or the Monica Lewinski affair — relevant to the voters.
To be politically salient, a “scandal” must include two key elements that are not present in “Benghazi”:
- Real “scandals” do not involve flawed procedures. They must involve actions taken — or not taken — for improper or immoral reasons. There is no indication whatsoever that the American ambassador or anyone in the administration short-changed security in Benghazi to advance their political fortunes or to make money. Instead you have a brave American Ambassador who was willing to risk harm to himself to accomplish his mission but with inadequate security procedures. The ambassador was President Obama’s personal emissary — the last thing he wanted to do was risk his death.
- To have staying power, real “scandals” generally involve a cover-up. The Republicans argue that the administration’s taking points after the event somehow constituted a “cover-up.” But instead they reflected the best information from the intelligence community at the time. Instead of a “cover-up,” what followed was an independent State Department Inspector General report that was very critical of procedures and proposed changes — but found no “scandal” whatsoever.
By reaching out for “Benghazi” the GOP looks desperate for something to talk about. And that’s for good reason. On virtually every other major issue that is really of concern to ordinary Americans, the Democrats have the high political ground — e.g. the minimum wage, unemployment benefits, the power of big money in government, immigration reform, equal pay for equal work, voting rights, reproductive choice, contraception, gay and lesbian rights, and increasingly even Obamacare — which by Election Day could actually help Democrats (especially with turnout).
Reason #3: Do the Republicans really want to turn the conversation to foreign policy?
The GOP launched the Iraq War — the most disastrous foreign policy catastrophe in the last half-century — and they want to talk about competency and honesty in foreign policy?
In fact, some of the same people who regularly go on Fox News to rail on about the “Benghazi conspiracy” helped promote the notion that we were invading Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — the most pernicious lie ever used in recent American politics.
The War in Iraq was an unmitigated disaster — killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, costing thousands of American lives, costing our economy trillions of dollars, and spoiling America’s reputation throughout the world.
Frankly, no self-respecting media outlet should allow any of the people who intentionally lied to the American people about Iraq on the air ever again.
If you were the political party that presided over such a horrific foreign policy disaster would you really want to turn the political conversation to the question of who is best equipped to conduct America’s foreign policy?
Apparently so. It appears possible that the Republican leaders are just as inept at formulating their own political strategy as they were at conducting America’s foreign policy.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, May 5, 2014
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