mykeystrokes.com

"Do or Do not. There is no try."

“Mean Mike”: How Can “The Base” Fully Get On The Bandwagon Of Anyone Smiled Upon By The Godless Liberal Media?

An examination of the rather different tone associating Mike Huckabee’s proto-candidacy for 2016 was inevitable, and it’s been served up usefully by David Freedlander at The Daily Beast. In 2008, he observes, Huck had quite the reputation for being sunny:

Frank Rich, in The New York Times, wrote that Huckabee was the Republican Obama. Rich attributed Huckabee’s rise in the polls to “his message,” which “is simply more uplifting—and, in the ethical rather than theological sense, more Christian—than that of rivals, whose main calling cards of fear, torture and nativism have become more strident with every debate. The fresh-faced politics of joy may be trumping the five-o’clock-shadow of Nixonian gloom and paranoia.”

It was an idea that ricocheted around liberal blogs and talk radio outlets. Sure, Huckabee’s views on social issues were a bit out of right field, but they weren’t appreciably different from those of the rest of the GOP field. And the rest of his policy ideas, even when right-leaning, were bathed in a soft, summer camp biblical glow. People of faith, he said in one memorable speech, need to show that they “are not just angry folks mad about some things we don’t like, but people who have joy in our hearts. People who want to help those without housing to find it, those without drinking water to drink it, to help people who are hungry at night to know what it is to have food.”

Contrast that with today’s Angry Huck:

This new Huckabee told the New Hampshire Freedom Summit, “I’m beginning to think that there’s more freedom in North Korea than there is in the United States.” It’s the Huckabee who said Democrats want the women of America to “believe that they are helpless with Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government.” Gone is the talk of evangelicals approaching the political sphere “with joy in our hearts.” Instead, Huckabee now wonders, “Why is it that Christians stand back and take it in the teeth time and time and time again?” It is this Huckabee who defended the Duck Dynasty reality star’s comments on gay marriage and civil rights in the South but accused those who criticize Chick-fil-A’s corporate anti-gay marriage stance of engaging in “vicious hate speech.”

Freedlander bats around several possible explanations for this new, more saturnine Huckabee, from the most obvious (the mood of “the base”) to the more personal (Huck’s furious at himself that he didn’t run for president in 2012). My favorite is the claim from an old rival in Arkansas who says it’s the Happy Huck that was a pose:

“He might have been a Baptist preacher, but he had a mean streak a mile wide,” said Jimmy Jeffress, a former Arkansas lawmaker who served in the statehouse during Huckabee’s tenure.

I’m guessing Jeffress isn’t a Baptist, since he seems to be unaware that meanness is a prized quality in some ministers of that faith community. I once saw a cap on sale at a convenience store in South Georgia with a message that expressed the approach perfectly: “Read the Bible daily. It will scare the Hell out of you.”

In any event, it will be interesting to see if the new Mean Mike persona cuts into the relatively good press Huck is used to getting from people who don’t actually agree with him on much of anything. Indeed, that could be part of the idea: How can “the base” fully get on the bandwagon of anyone smiled upon by the godless liberal media? If that doesn’t work, maybe Huckabee will have to put away the bass guitar.

 

By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 6, 2014

May 9, 2014 Posted by | Election 2016, GOP, Mike Huckabee | , , , , | Leave a comment

“Crises Beyond Duck Dynasty”: If GOP Devoted It’s Intensity Towards The Jobless And Uninsured, They Might Actually Do Some Good

I’m just back from a week out of the country, and it appears I missed some major happenings.

Political news sites report a significant development in the Pajama Boy controversy (involving a promotion for Obamacare) and the “Duck Dynasty” flap. There’s apparently a new scandal, as well, over the Obama family’s failure to attend church on Christmas. Then there’s the brouhaha about a church in California putting a likeness of Trayvon Martin in its Christmas manger.

From the Drudge Report, meanwhile, I learned the naked truth about two other incidents: a Louisville man who ran through a bingo hall with his pants down yelling “Bingo!” and police in Portland, Ore., who used a sandwich to convince an unclothed man not to jump off of a building.

According to ABC News, the man reportedly requested a cheeseburger but eventually settled for turkey and bacon.

That the headlines are about pajamas and bingo is both good and bad. Good, because it means we have no crisis during this holiday season; Congress is in recess, the president is on the beach, and there is no imminent standoff in Washington. Bad, because we’re letting ourselves be distracted again.

In the weeks before the 9/11 attacks in 2001, President George W. Bush was on his ranch in Texas, the big news was about shark attacks, and nobody connected the terrorists’ dots. This time, there’s more than just the theoretical possibility of a crisis to worry about.

On Saturday, 1.3 million unemployed Americans were kicked off unemployment benefits. And if our vacationing lawmakers don’t do something about it when they return, millions more will follow. The matter is getting less attention than Phil Robertson of “Duck Dynasty,” but it’s a real crisis for those affected and a disgrace for the rest of us.

As The Post’s Brad Plumer expertly outlined on Friday, there are 4 million people who have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer, translating to the highest long-term unemployment rate since World War II. These people — young, old and from all kinds of demographics — have a 12 percent chance of finding a job in any given month, and, contrary to the theories of Rand Paul Republicans, there’s little evidence that they’re more likely to find work after losing benefits. Cutting off their benefits only causes more suffering for them and more damage to the economy.

Also last weekend, the Obama administration reported that 1.1 million people had signed up online for coverage under the new health-care law. That’s a dramatic acceleration in enrollment, but it also leaves uninsured millions of people who are eligible for coverage. Some of them are working poor in states where Republican governors have refused to implement the law’s Medicaid expansion, and many more are being discouraged from enrolling by Republicans’ incessant opposition. This month’s CBS News-New York Times poll found that a majority of uninsured Americans disapprove of the new law, even though nearly six in 10 of the uninsured think insurance would improve their health.

These real outrages make the Christmas-week controversies seem like tinsel.

“Can you guess what key thing Obama did not do on Christmas Day?” asked Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze, full of outrage that the president didn’t go to a public worship service. Breitbart.com found it “ironic” that Obama had “recently asked all Christians to remember the religious aspects of Christmas.”

What did they expect from a Muslim born in Kenya?

While that was going on, David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times was deflating an earlier scandal hawked by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of a House committee that had been examining the killing of Americans in Benghazi last year. Issa had charged that the attackers were affiliated with al-Qaeda, and he disparaged the administration’s claim that the attack had been stirred up by an anti-Islam video; Kirkpatrick, after an extensive investigation in Benghazi, found no international terrorist involvement but did find that the video played a role.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Issa offered the more qualified claim that while there was no al-Qaeda “central command and control,” some of the attackers were “self-effacing or self-claimed as al-Qaeda-linked.”

Those self-effacing terrorists are so beguiling.

No doubt Issa will continue to pursue the Benghazi “scandal.” Others will look deeper into Pajama Boy, or Obama’s religion. If they’d devote a similar intensity toward the jobless and the uninsured, they might actually do some good.

By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 30, 2013

January 2, 2014 Posted by | GOP, Republicans | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“2013, The Year In Whiteness”: Grievance Mongering Became An Uglier And Even More Lucrative Racket

Maybe it was the very fact of enjoying a wonderful Christmas with my family and friends, against the manufactured backlash to a nonexistent “War on Christmas,” that let me appreciate the perilous mental state of a small but noisy and paranoid swath of white America. Somehow over the holiday it became clear: 2013 was the year white grievance mongering became an uglier and even more lucrative racket.

Fox News has been peddling the phony “War on Christmas” for years, of course, but it took new Fox phenom Megyn Kelly to give it an explicitly racial cast. Not only did Kelly wage war against the menace of a black Santa – declaring nonsensically that the fictional character of Santa Claus “just is white” – but when she was called on it, she made herself out to be the victim of politically correct bullies, race-baiters and Fox haters. Suddenly it was clear: The imagined war on Christmas has become an equally farcical war on whiteness in the minds of those sad right-wing warriors.

The next week, “Duck Dynasty’s” Phil Robertson also became a martyr for the white right, after A&E briefly suspended him for holding forth on the nastiness of gay sex while insisting African Americans were happy in the Jim Crow South.

The new hysteria and hypocrisy was crystallized by one surreal fact: While paranoid white righties were fighting for their allegedly endangered right to celebrate Christmas (with their white Santa), they could watch a “Duck Dynasty” Christmas marathon on A&E, underscoring that there’s neither a war on Christmas nor on bigoted pseudo-Christians like Robertson. But there’s a lot of cash to be made, and fear to be stoked, by claiming both.

Kelly and Robertson and kindred spirits like Sarah Palin charted a bold new civil rights frontier in 2013: fighting for the right of white people to say false, stupid and bigoted things without facing criticism, let alone paying any real penalty. Palin has long made herself out to be a victim of mean liberals, but this year her anger-mongering took on a more explicitly racial tinge. She bashed Jeb Bush for casting aspersions on the fertility of white people — Bush did make an admittedly stupid remark about immigrants being “more fertile,” but if you thought that would get him in trouble with immigrant groups, not whites, you thought wrong – and later in the year declared her inviolable right to equate the federal deficit she wrongly blames on our first black president with “slavery.” She closed the year announcing she stands with Phil Robertson, even though she had to confess to Fox’s Greta Van Susteren that she hadn’t read the GQ interview that got him in minor temporary trouble.

2013 was also the year that George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of an unarmed black 17-year-old, Trayvon Martin, allegedly in self-defense, becoming a cultural hero to some of that same paranoid white right. If you have the misfortune of stumbling into the Twitter sewer that is TheRealGeorgeZ’s timeline, you’ll find an exaggerated sense of white grievance (please spare me the insistence that Zimmerman is Latino; he has seemed uninterested in identifying as such, at least publicly, and in any case his Latino heritage wouldn’t necessarily erase his whiteness).

TheRealGeorgeZ alternates between tweeting Bible verses and attacks on his “haters.” Of course, like Sarah Palin he’s a big Phil Robertson supporter, tweeting Dec. 20:

I guarantee everyone 1 thing, Phil Robertson is not losing sleep over getting to spend more time fishing, loving his family and The Lord.

— George Zimmerman (@TherealGeorgeZ) December 21, 2013

Robertson has come in for more criticism of his anti-gay remarks than his inanity on race, although it’s a little hard to take any of it seriously. Apparently the Robertson boys are yuppies dressing up as rednecks for profit, and A&E is laughing with them all the way to the bank. But the way the right has made Robertson a hero for his crude racial and homophobic remarks shows the way victimhood has become a crucial part of the white grievance industry.

Of course the stoking of white grievance is nothing new. It was at the heart of the GOP’s so-called Southern strategy, which always had a crucial Northern component: deliberately inflaming the anxieties of white working-class Southerners and Northern “ethnics” about racial and economic change. I have been someone who tried to see and point out the elements of those grievances that weren’t racial, but real: the genuine erosion of economic stability and opportunity for the white working and middle classes. (I wrote a book about it.) And early in 2013 I endured my own mini-backlash for suggesting, in “How to talk about white people,” that sometimes Democrats and social-justice advocates talk about race in ways that are unnecessarily divisive and punishing to whites.

I was honestly unprepared for the criticism, but I understand it better now. To suggest that there’s any way that the rhetoric of either “people of color” or racial liberals is to blame for white paranoia and racism seems like the essence of victim blaming. Of course that wasn’t my intent; I would argue that it stemmed from a very human impulse to try to feel you have some kind of control over forces you don’t. Sadly, or not, I realized this year that liberals have very little control over the way white people respond to racial change (though I will always argue that economic populism has more power to build cross-racial coalitions than the pro-Wall Street, multiracial neoliberalism practiced by too many Democrats over the last 20 years.)

I’m optimistic nonetheless. A little under a year ago I wrote an obituary for former New York Mayor Ed Koch, outlining how the formerly liberal Democrat rode a wave of white fear and grievance into Gracie Mansion in 1977. I couldn’t know it at the time, none of us did, but New York was about to elect its first Democratic mayor in 24 years, a staunch progressive on racial issues with an African American wife and two biracial children. An ad that tried to depict Bill de Blasio as an anti-police lefty who’d lead New York back to the crime and chaos of the ’70s and ’80s backfired; so did the ravings of Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which did so much to help elect Koch.

De Blasio’s landslide win, among every racial and ethnic group, showed that white New Yorkers are ready to embrace the city’s multiracial future and tackle its lingering racial and class inequities. The mayor-elect’s influential “tale of two cities” is largely, though not exclusively, a tale of white and non-white New York. Red state demagogues can mock New York as a lonely blue island irrelevant to the rest of the country. But the city helped invent both liberalism and the backlash that tore it down. I’m going to bet that the de Blasio coalition has more influence, in the end, than Phil Robertson or George Zimmerman, Megyn Kelly or Sarah Palin. A noisy, paranoid white backlash against racial change may be inevitable, but it will also pass. That’s what scares them.

 

By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, December 31, 2013

January 1, 2014 Posted by | Bigotry, Racism | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Duck Call Is The New Dog Whistle”: What Conservatives Support Is Not “Freedom”, But “Conformity” To A Conservative Culture

Put those dog whistles away. Judging by the hordes of red neck fans who rose up in angry protest after the star of the popular reality show Duck Dynasty was pulled from the airwaves for saying offensive things about blacks and gays, maybe we ought to start referring to these periodic eruptions of right wing agitation as “duck call politics.”

The reactions to duck call politics are as predictable as they are dispiriting. One Facebook friend of mine professed disbelief that her “liberal friends” had not instantaneously rallied around Phil Robertson once the embattled patriarch of Duck Dynasty was temporarily suspended for his tirade against gays which appeared in GQ earlier this month.

“When did America become a Gestapo State?” my friend wanted to know. “Come on people, this has to stop. Regardless of whether you agree with Phil, the America we love has to support his right to his personal convictions and his FREEDOM to say them.”

Sarah Palin has never let the facts stand in the way of an opportunity to stir up the perpetually resentful populist mob. And so, undeterred by the fact she’d never actually read or saw what Robertson had to say about gays and blacks, Palin nevertheless felt competent to weigh in that: “Those offended by what Phil Robertson said are offended by the Gospel.”

Shortly after the Duck Dynasty controversy began on December 18, Palin wrote on her Facebook page that: “Free speech is an endangered species. Those ‘intolerants’ hatin and taking on the Duck Dynasty patriarch for voicing his personal opinion are taking on all of us.”

Palin’s comment drew over 428,000 “likes.”

Now, let’s be clear. When former Pope Benedict said that “tradition” based on Sacred Scripture “has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,” he was expressing a religious opinion. It may have been hurtful, or wrongheaded, or even un-Christian in my view. But when Benedict said that homosexual acts are “contrary to the natural law” because they “close the sexual act to the gift of life” and do not proceed “from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity” and so “under no circumstances can they be approved” he was still expressing his interpretation of what Catholic doctrine requires.

What Phil Robertson did was altogether different. Robertson was just being crude and hateful when he told a reporter for GQ: “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men. Don’t be deceived (he said paraphrasing Corinthians) neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers — they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.”

Robertson then went further: “It seems like, to me, a vagina — as a man — would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying?  But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”

Not content to confine his tastelessness to gays, Robertson also resurrected the embarrassing minstrel show fixture of the “Happy Negro,” a stock character whose origins go all the way back to Southern slave apologists like George Fitzhugh, who said “the negro slaves of the South are the happiest and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”

Fitzhugh was one of those Southern “fire-eaters” who believed the condition of the Southern slave compared favorably to that of the wage earner in the North since, as he said, slaves were “capital” whose “owners” paid dearly for them. And so “when slaves are worth $1,000 a head they will be cared for and well provided for” – unlike, he inferred, the expendable, exploitable and readily disposable wage slaves of the North.

Brought up-to-date by the likes of Phil Robertson, Fitzhugh’s repulsive idea sounds something like this: “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’-not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

For the relatively minor consequences he faced for these boorish remarks, Phil Robertson has become a celebrated martyr on the right and their latest cause célèbre. Conservatives have hoisted Robertson up on their shoulders as a cultural icon whose “brave” words are what other right wingers wish they could voice but for one reason or another can’t bring themselves to say out loud.

Nevertheless, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it probably is a duck. And what Phil Robertson said to GQ was anti-gay bigotry, plain and simple, whose open hostility towards these minorities is precisely why conservatives are now retroactively trying to dignify Robertson’s ugly hatefulness by wrapping it in the holy vestments of religious expression and free speech.

But the argument is hollow because Robertson’s fans are no more concerned with free speech than was the Tea Party with debts and deficits as they stood immobile and mute for eight long years while Republicans under George W. Bush doubled both until the Tea Party rose up in spontaneous and righteous anger the moment the American people had the effrontery to elect a black man as their President.

Right wing conservatives are not rallying around Robertson because they are the principled advocates of free speech or dedicated students of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and John Milton’s Areopagitica.

There were no angry outcries from conservatives a decade ago when the Dixie Chicks were being banned from one country music station after another, or having their records burned, once the superstar group said some contrarian things about President Bush and his baseless invasion of Iraq way back in 2003 when such anti-war opposition was unpopular but really mattered.

Country stations pulled the Dixie Chicks after lead singer Natalie Maines told a London audience she was “ashamed” that Bush hailed from Texas, where the Chicks are also from.

Soon, station managers were flooded with calls from angry listeners who thought the Chick’s criticism of Bush was “unpatriotic.” One station in Kansas City even held a Dixie “chicken toss” party where listeners were encouraged to dump the group’s tapes, CDs and concert tickets into trash cans.

“We’ve got them off the air for right now,” said Jeff Garrison, program director at KILT in Texas. “People are shocked. They cannot believe Texas’ own have attacked the state and the president.”

When the Dixie Chicks were preparing for their nationwide Top of the World Tour, death threats caused promoters to install metal detectors at the shows. In Dallas, fears for the safety of the group led police to provide an escort from the show to the airport.

A Colorado radio station suspended two of its disc jockeys for playing music by the Dixie Chicks. When the group was nominated for Entertainer of the Year at the Academy of Country Music awards in Las Vegas, host Vince Gill had to remind the booing audience that everyone is entitled to freedom of speech.

Even President Bush weighed in, telling Tom Brokow: “the Dixie Chicks are free to speak their mind. They can say what they want to say. They shouldn’t have their feelings hurt just because some people don’t want to buy their records when they speak out. Freedom is a two-way street.”

Yes, freedom is a two-way street. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion just not their own TV show. People are free to speak their mind and other people are free to retaliate by writing letters, organizing boycotts or taking offensive people off the air.

But what the Dixie Chicks did, it’s important to keep in mind, was criticize President Bush for the political acts he took while in office. Phil Robertson, on the other hand, was merely insulting gays and blacks for being who they are. Then he and his supporters used religion to hide their sin.

The idea that conservatives are civil libertarians who support free speech and diversity is a comic farce in any case, for what conservatives support is not “freedom” but “conformity” to a conservative culture where people have sex in the missionary position with members of the opposite sex or not at all, and where country music groups don’t criticize  God-fearing Republican presidents, especially if they are from Texas, for waging wars against the non-Christian infidel.

And if accomplishing this agenda means banning celebrities from the airwaves one minute and then attacking TV networks for doing the same thing to other celebrities the next, then so be it.

 

By: Ted Frier, Open Salon, December 26, 2013

December 30, 2013 Posted by | Bigotry, Conservatives, Racism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Duck Dynasty Bigots Will Fade Into Obscurity”: The Robertsons Are Country-Clubbers Posing As Rednecks

Now that I’ve actually seen a few episodes, Duck Dynasty is relatively harmless entertainment. Whatever “reality TV” means, it’s definitely not that. It’s a semi-scripted sitcom, basically cornball self-parody. Think Hee Haw without the music. I find it utterly inane, but then I don’t watch TV with children.

The “tell” is the show’s women; cute Southern sorority girls turned mommies. In real life, no way would those women tolerate their “menfolk” running around looking like a truckload of ZZ Top impersonators. They’re also not going on TV with hay in their hair like some Hollywood director’s idea of a country girl. Every comedy needs a straight man; on Duck Dynasty it’s the women.

But realism? Please. The beards, hair and overalls are costumes every bit as theatrical as the outfits the Rolling Stones wear onstage. In the rural Arkansas county where I live, you could hang around the feed store for a month without seeing anybody like Duck Dynasty “patriarch” (and head bigot) Phil Robertson. And if you did, his wife wouldn’t have any teeth.

The Robertsons are country-clubbers posing as rednecks. Duck hunting itself — requiring, as it does, quite a bit of expensive gear and pricey leases — is mainly a rich man’s pastime in the South. Deer hunting makes economic sense; duck hunting’s a luxury. It’s what doctors, lawyers and bankers do when the weather’s too lousy for golf. Bill Clinton used to go duck hunting once a year to prove he loved guns.

(My own most recent—and final—duck hunting trip began with me tasked with lugging an outboard motor across a muddy soybean field at 5:30 AM. Never again.)

But I digress. Although many Southerners wince at yokel stereotypes, the basic Duck Dynasty joke is that every redneck is a Peter Pan at heart. The Robertson men spend their time bickering like children and making mischief with pickup trucks, ATVs, shotguns, handguns, deer rifles, chainsaws, outboard motors, dynamite, etc. Basically anything that makes loud noises and/or throws mud around.

How long, I wonder, before the Duck Dynasty boys endorse the “Bad Boy” brand of riding mowers? Currently represented by a half-clothed model urging guys to “Get a Bad Boy, Baby!” these machines have the magical capacity to convert a tax accountant mowing a suburban half-acre under his wife’s supervision to a daredevil NASCAR racer. Yee Haw!

But the laughter ended abruptly when “Duck Commander” Phil Robertson inserted himself into the nation’s vituperative culture wars. The whole thing looked like a publicity stunt gone wrong—possibly successful in the short run, but almost certain to prove destructive in the end.

Concerning which, a few thoughts:

First, Sarah Palin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal notwithstanding, nobody has a First Amendment right to appear on TV. Make controversial public pronouncements deeply offensive to your employers, and you’d better have a backup plan.

The creator and producer of Duck Dynasty is one Scott Gurney, who once appeared in a gay-themed film called The Fluffer. (Don’t ask.)

The guy helps make you rich and famous, and you denounce gays as evil? That’s appalling.

Second, it has nothing to do with Christianity. Robertson didn’t just say he’s against gay marriage, nor even that God is. He spoke in the coarsest possible terms about homosexuality, equating it with bestiality.

He’s elsewhere characterized gay men and women as “full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God haters, they are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless, they invent ways of doing evil.”

Here’s my favorite moral philosopher, Fox News’ own Bill O’Reilly:

“It’s not about the Bible, or believing or not believing in the Bible. It’s singling out a group, could be any group, and saying to that group ‘Hey, you’re not worthy. You’re not worthy in the eyes of the Lord, or in the eyes of God, you’re not worthy because of who you are.’ So once you get that personal, once you get down into that kind of a realm, problems arise.”

Third, 10 years ago, many of the same people portraying Robertson as a martyr burned Dixie Chicks CDs and cheered their banishment from country radio stations for the terrible crime of saying they were embarrassed by George W. Bush before everybody was.

And those girls have genuine talent.

Fourth, as for the happy, singing darkies of Robertson’s Louisiana childhood, where are they on Duck Dynasty? Know what the African-American population of Monroe/West Monroe is? It’s roughly 60 percent. I’ve seen no black faces on the program.

Another prominent American from West Monroe is Boston Celtics great Bill Russell—a black man who’s been known to have strong opinions about race. Maybe Robertson ought to talk with him, although it wouldn’t be easy.

Duck Dynasty may be this month’s right wing cause célèbre. Longer term, however, unapologetic bigots always fade into obscurity, basically because they embarrass people.

By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, December 26, 2013

December 27, 2013 Posted by | Bigotry, Racism | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment