“No, Chris Lane Is Not Trayvon Martin”: Right Wing Media Prefers To Hide Behind A Veil Of Intentional Ignorance
The white conservative media believes it has its own Trayvon Martin in the case of Chris Lane, an Australian baseball player who was killed in Oklahoma, where he had been studying, by three black teenagers in an apparently random act of violence (note: there’s actually some question as to the race of one of the three teens, the driver, who faces lesser charges).
Rush Limbaugh called it “Trayvon Martin in reverse, only worse.” The Drudge Report, where black-on-white crime always gets top billing, has been prominently featuring news about the case for several days. Former Tea Party congressman Allen West weighed in, tweeting, “3 black teens shoot white jogger. Who will POTUS identify w/this time?”
Jesse Jackson tried to extend an olive branch, tweeting that he was “Praying for the family of Chris Lane.” But armed with that, Fox News is now demanding that President Obama weigh in, just as he did for Martin’s case. “I thought it was at least good of Jesse Jackson to step up,” Fox and Friends host Brian Kilmeade said today. “I haven’t heard anything from Al Sharpton [or the White House],” he added. His colleagues agreed.
(For what it’s worth, White House spokesperson Josh Earnest told reporters yesterday that he wasn’t familiar with the case.)
As the right sees it, the president’s silence confirms the narrative shared by everyone from Glenn Beck to Allen West to Maine Gov. Paul LePage to Sean Hannity — that Obama is racist against white people, and that the media is, too, or at least duped into doing the bidding of allegedly racist black leaders like Sharpton, or something.
It’s incredible that in 2013 we’re really arguing about this, but from Henry Louis Gates to Travyon Martin — when the conservative media made George Zimmerman the Real Victim of the supposed anti-white lynch mob — we should expect nothing else. And it’s equally striking, yet also not particularly surprising, that Fox and Limbaugh and the rest really don’t seem to comprehend why the Trayvon Martin case became a thing.
It’s not that difficult to understand so we’ll spell it out: It was not only that a light-skinned Zimmerman killed an unarmed black teenager — but also that police didn’t do anything about it. The killing was horribly tragic, as is Lane’s senseless murder, but if Zimmerman had actually been arrested for the shooting, the sad reality is that far fewer Americans would know his name. But that’s not what happened. Instead, police let Zimmerman go under Florida’s “stand your ground” law. It smacked of institutional, state-sponsored racial favoritism of the worst kind. It was only after public outcry that state prosecutors took over the case and pressed charges. Some could argue that Zimmerman didn’t need to be convicted for justice to be done, but he did need to stand trial.
Likewise with Henry Louis Gates, the famed black professor who was arrested while he was trying to get into his own home in Cambridge, Mass., after he misplaced his keys. That’s not how police are supposed to operate, and that’s why Obama weighed in.
Lane’s murder is an entirely different matter. It’s disgusting, but the police did their job. They arrested three suspects, and vowed to try to throw the book at them. That’s how it’s supposed to go. Murder is sadly quotidian in a gun-soaked America, and this is, sadly, another, if particularly senseless, one.
If you want to actually understand race relations in this country, you need to understand the difference between these cases. But the right prefers to live behind a veil of intentional ignorance where the only kind of racism that exists today is black people disliking white people.
Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, August 22, 2013
“The Story Bigots Hate”: A Clinic In Empathy, A Good Woman Without A Gun Stops A Bad Guy With A Gun
We rarely hear the tales of school-shooting heroism directly from the heroes, tragically, because the heroes rarely live to tell them. Dave Cullen’s haunting “Columbine” tells the poignant story of computer teacher Dave Saunders, who was shot while shepherding his students to safety and died after the students worked hard to save him. After the Sandy Hook shootings, the courage of principal Dawn Hochsprung and teachers like Victoria Soto broke our hearts – but we heard them from survivors and friends and family, because the women were among Adam Lanza’s victims.
That’s part of what makes the story of Antoinette Tuff so compelling – but only part of it. Tuff is, of course, the bookkeeper at Ronald McNair Discovery Learning Center in Decatur, Ga., whose work talking shooter Michael Brandon Hill into surrendering to police Tuesday was captured live on a stunning 911 tape that’s gone viral. The fascination at the heart of Tuff’s tale, the reason it’s riveting, is the way she used compassion and empathy to disarm a mentally ill man intent on killing. “Was the potential there to have another Sandy Hook? Absolutely,” the local police chief told reporters as he praised Tuff.
In this story, the only thing that stopped a bad guy with a gun was a good woman with a heart. Or to entirely rewrite Wayne LaPierre’s dumb Manichaean NRA propaganda: The only thing that stopped an emotionally damaged, despairing and unloved young man with 500 rounds of ammunition was a compassionate woman sharing her own story of damage and despair, and telling him she loved him.
Oh, and then there’s this: As we try to recover from the unnecessarily polarized aftermath of the Trayvon Martin killing and George Zimmerman’s acquittal, it’s worth noting that Tuff is a black woman who helped save a young white man from harm at the hands of police. Of course the race-baiters at Fox News, who were so agitated about the crimes of young black men a few weeks ago, have hardly rushed to emphasize that a young white man opened fire at a predominantly black school – let alone that he was helped to save his own life by an African-American woman (for example, check out how they approach these facts here).
Hill, a mentally ill 20-year-old, seemed convinced the police would kill him because he shot at them, and he might have been right. But Tuff tells him she’ll protect him by telling them he hasn’t hurt her, and he didn’t actually hit anyone he shot at.
“He thought it was over for him because he’d already been shooting at police officers,” she told a local Atlanta television reporter. “I told him, no, that I would allow them to know that he hadn’t hurt anyone.”
As the 911 tape begins, we hear Hill shooting outside, as the dispatcher tells a terrified Tuff to try to get somewhere safe. But when Hill comes back into the school, Tuff begins telling police outside, and the 911 dispatcher, that the cops should “back off” and not enter the building. At first she calls Hill “sir,” until she switches to calling him “baby,” which is when the momentum shifts and she seems to have a chance to save him from himself. Tuff tells the dispatcher that Hill told her “he should have just gone to the hospital instead of doing this, because he’s not on his medication.”
Gradually we hear her convince Hill to let her help him surrender safely to police.
“I can help you, you want me to talk to them? Let me talk to them and let’s see if we can work it out so you don’t have to go away with them for a long time … I can let them know you have not tried to harm me or do anything with me.” When he interrupts her to say he’s already shot at police, she reassures him, “That doesn’t make any difference, you didn’t hit anybody.”
Then she turns to the dispatcher and begins to negotiate with police. “He didn’t hit anybody, he just shot outside the door,” Tuff tells the woman. “If I walk outside with him, they won’t shoot him? … He just wants to go to the hospital … Can you talk to the police and let them know he wants to go outside with me?”
In the midst of all this she soothes Hill by telling him parts of her own story. “Don’t feel bad, baby, my husband just left me after 33 years … I tried to commit suicide last year after my husband left me. But look at me now, I’m still working and everything is OK.”
On the 911 tape we listen as Tuff calmly negotiates taking away Hill’s guns – “Put it all up there,” she tells him — and supervises him lying on the floor to surrender. “Tell me when you’re ready, then I’ll tell them to come on in,” she says. She directs the dispatcher, “Let him drink his bottle of water. Don’t come in shooting at anything, they can come on in, and I’ma buzz them in.” Then she’s back to soothing Hill.
“I’m gonna sit right here so they’ll see that you didn’t try to harm me … It’s gonna be alright sweetie, I want you to know that I love you, it’s a good thing that you did giving up. Don’t worry about it, we all go through something in life. You’re gonna be OK.”
Only after the police come in and arrest Hill without incident does she tell the dispatcher, “Let me tell you something, baby. I’ve never been so scared in all the days of my life. Oh, Jesus.”
“But you did great,” the dispatcher tells Tuff, speaking for all of us. “You did great.”
She did more than great. There won’t be an Antoinette Tuff to save us from every school shooting – we need tougher gun laws and better mental health care too, and even then, people will find guns and do bad things. But Tuff gave a clinic in empathy, and the way that trying to connect with the pain of another person, even someone scary and dangerous, can save lives. (She credits her pastor with teaching her to “pray on the inside” when she’s anxious.) Tuff protected her students, but she also protected Hill from himself, and from the police – and she did it with love.
I can only pray that a white woman faced with a heavily armed, mentally ill young black man would have done the same thing. There’s a reason it’s Antoinette Tuff Day all over social media. We need her right now.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, August 22, 2013
“The Conservative Dilemma In A Nutshell”: Carrying A Message Deliberately Designed To Line Their Pockets
Jim DeMint, the former firebrand senator from South Carolina who now heads The Heritage Foundation, has been on the speaking junket of late calling for the replacement of any Republican who has the good sense to oppose a purely symbolic and unwinnable vote on repealing ObamaCare. DeMint is an absolutist, and is revealing a sad truth about too many spokespeople for conservative causes these days: They play to an audience that does not understand (or does not care about) the demographic realities of electoral politics, and offer a message designed to line their own pockets rather than improve the party. This has to change if our party is to rise again.
Take DeMint. GOPers who are against the symbolic move to replace ObamaCare “should be replaced,” he says. DeMint also says he’s “not as interested in the political futures of folks who think they might lose a showdown with the president.” These remarks highlight two of the most fundamental obstacles to the GOP’s return to viability as a ruling party in this country.
Large swaths of the conservative base have come to believe that all conservatives in all states should be fire breathers like DeMint. But even if it would be good or desirable to run candidates like DeMint as the nominee in every race in America, the demographics of modern America make such a policy politically suicidal. Democratic elections mean that people tend to elect leaders that hold views that approximately resemble their own. The very qualities that make a DeMint clone wildly desirable in a dark red southern state like South Carolina make the identical person totally and completely unelectable in Connecticut, Delaware, or Nevada. And if you think my choice of those last three states was a coincidence, it was not, since the GOP has thrown away two slam-dunk Senate wins and one potential Senate win in recent cycles in those states by nominating a fire breather rather than a more “moderate” candidate in the general election.
This is basic politics. Almost any objective observer can look at the numbers and demographic realities and recognize the problem. That raises this question: Jim DeMint may hold some pretty extreme political views, but he’s no idiot, so why does he continue to spout this nonsense? The answer, as with so many things, becomes quickly apparent when we think about who he works for and what he is trying to do.
DeMint does not work for the Republican Party. He does not have the best interests of the GOP in mind when he goes on tour. Instead, DeMint is paid something close to $1 million a year to run the Heritage Foundation. The reason that Heritage is paying the former senator so much cash is because they expect him to raise a lot of it, as think tanks rarely generate revenue and therefore must raise money to survive. So make no mistake, in his present position, DeMint is concerned foremost not with the betterment of the GOP’s national position or the good of America, but the bottom line of the Heritage Foundation.
This leads us to a final question: What kind of person is apt to give money to a partisan think tank like Heritage? Your answer: Hyper-enthusiastic rich conservatives. And what these donors like to hear is their own beliefs echoed on television. They are less concerned with, you know, reality… or whether the GOP takes a Senate seat in Connecticut.
This last incentives problem is one that pervades the GOP. Right now, too many people are making too much money by being conservatives. Rush Limbaugh is a bright enough guy and he is an exceptional entertainer, but he knows that his core audience is hyper conservative and he plays to that audience exceptionally well. Same with Fox News: Their core viewers are über-conservative, Fox is in business to make money, and that means catering to the audience’s beliefs.
Sadly, the two problems play off of one another. Perhaps if DeMint and Limbaugh were not so busy looking our for #1 (and the organizations they represent), they might talk to their fans about what is and isn’t possible. In all likelihood, many of the true believers would embrace a compromise if it meant more conservatives rather than less. But to do so, Limbaugh and DeMint and Fox News would have to risk alienating some of their biggest fans, customers, or donors for the betterment of the party and, as we are so often reminded, they just don’t work for the party.
By: Jeb Golinkin, The week, August 21, 2013
“Illusions Of Grandeur”: Imaginary Republican Scandals Don’t Need Distractions
The “White House rocked by scandals” narrative clearly didn’t work out well for President Obama’s critics. The Benghazi conspiracy theories proved baseless; the IRS story quickly evaporated (even if most of the political world ignored the exculpatory details); and the AP subpoenas and NSA surveillance programs turned out to be policy disputes — on which many Republicans agreed with the administration’s position. As Jon Chait recently put it, “The entire scandal narrative was an illusion.”
But a funny thing happened after Scandal Mania 2013 ended: the right decided to pretend the narrative remained intact.
National Review ran a fairly long piece this week, arguing, “The truth about Benghazi, the Associated Press/James Rosen monitoring, the IRS corruption, the NSA octopus, and Fast and Furious is still not exactly known.” The headline read, “Obama’s Watergates.” (Yes, the president doesn’t have a Watergate; he has multiple Watergates.)
Yesterday, Marc Thiessen’s latest Washington Post column insisted that the IRS’s “political targeting of [Obama’s] conservative critics” — which, let’s remember, didn’t actually happen — is “undermining our nation’s security” and “has exposed Americans to greater danger.”
And on Fox News, Steve Doocy has cooked up a conspiracy theory that addresses his conspiracy theories.
“Remember last week all the talk was about ‘phony scandals’ and all that other stuff and the NSA and the IRS and suddenly we get this alert that something could be happening in the Arab world somewhere toward western interests, and it is pro-administration. We’ve heard this a million times. […]
“Just that they would reveal such detail. They burned a source and a method, and that’s the problem. They could still say be careful if you’re in these areas. But to be so specific to make it look like the administration is working overtime, look at these fantastic avenues of intel, that is troubling.”
So, for Doocy, the White House leaked sensitive national-security information to distract attention from scandals that don’t actually exist.
It’s awfully difficult to take this line of argument seriously.
Several news organizations learned of the administration intercepting al Qaeda communications — we do not yet know the source of the leaks — which led to the closings of many U.S. diplomatic outposts in the Middle East and North Africa. For some on the right, this was part of an elaborate White House scheme.
But that really doesn’t make any sense. For one thing, Scandal Mania is over, and there’s no incentive for the administration to turn attention away from stories that the political world has largely given up on. For another, the administration doesn’t gain anything by leaking news of the intercepted messages.
Wait, the right responds, the White House now gets to implicitly argue, “NSA surveillance is really important so these programs shouldn’t be shut down.” But the administration doesn’t need to say that — efforts to stop NSA surveillance aren’t going anywhere, at least not now, and the programs were going to continue anyway.
There are no Watergates for the right to play with here.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 7, 2013
“GOP National Tour Of Shame”: The Republicans’ Desperate Plan To Hide Its Clowns
Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, has told NBC and CNN that they will not be allowed to have any Republican presidential debates in 2016 if they go ahead and air planned films about Hillary Clinton, who will likely be the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. That is the reason he gave them, at least, but it is not the actual reason Priebus wants to not have any debates on those two channels. The real reason, everyone knows and sort of acknowledges, is that debates were a disaster for the party in 2012, an endless circus made up entirely of clowns on a national tour of shame.
These debates were on TV, people watched (and mocked) them, and the real candidates, the ones the money people were counting on to win the stupid race, were forced to say unacceptable things to appeal to raging loons. Furthermore, the serious candidates looked less serious simply by sharing a stage with Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain. So: Fewer debates, next time, is the plan, and these Hillary movies are a convenient reason to cancel on two of the big networks. (Do you know how I know that the Hillary Clinton movies aren’t the real reason? Media Matters’ David Brock would also like the networks to cancel these movies, because, let’s be honest, they probably won’t be entirely flattering.)
The entire Republican primary system is broken, and embarrassing debates really number among the least of their problems, but it is easier for Priebus to preemptively cancel embarrassing debates than it is for him to fundamentally alter the makeup of the Republican primary electorate, a small and largely angry group who demand ideological fealty to a political philosophy that most Americans abhor. Unfortunately for Priebus, threatening to cancel debates is going to be much easier than actually preventing them from happening.
Maybe one of the Republican Party’s primary malfunctions these days is that the interests of the party as a whole are frequently in opposition to the interests of individual Republican politicians. Preibus wants there to be fewer debates, because the debates are hugely embarrassing to the party and damaging to the eventual nominee. The candidates, though, need the debates, because there is nothing so precious as free airtime, and saying stupid things on television and then losing elections is a surprisingly lucrative career move these days. The debate problem is like the Ted Cruz problem: He acts against the long-term best interests of his party because in the shorter term, being an ultra-conservative is likely to make him rich and beloved. When 2015 rolls around a half-dozen would-be presidents and tryouts for the conservative speaking circuit are going to want free airtime, and the networks will happily provide it. The only question is whether the eventual “serious” nominee, if that’s Jeb Bush or Chris Christie, is going to join them or not.
Cruz may well be among those jokers, along with Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Scott Walker, Peter King, Rick Perry and various other figures adored by “the base” but sort of terrifying and confusing to everyone else. These guys are going to go on television if they are given the opportunity to go on television. You either finish your presidential campaign as the president or as a person who isn’t the president but who is much more famous than before, and conservative movement fame means well-compensated positions at nonprofits or think tanks, speeches, maybe even television or radio jobs. Mike Huckabee is doing so well for himself he couldn’t be bothered to run in 2012, and he would’ve probably beaten Mitt if he had.
So boycotting NBC and CNN isn’t going to prevent another string of embarrassing debates from happening. But it may still be useful. Priebus wants to avoid those two channels in part because they’re hostile to conservatives, and the moderators they select will likely actively seek to embarrass the candidates. Republicans are still mad that in 2007, NBC allowed Chris Matthews to co-moderate a Republican debate. They sort of have a point — he’s a shouty Democrat, and likely had no respect for the people onstage — but the problem isn’t liberal bias, it’s “nonpartisan” journalist idiocy. Nonpartisan television news personalities are generally ill-informed about policy and hostile to politics in general. Bob Schieffer was utterly useless as a debate moderator. Partisan journalists are, by and large, more engaged with the issues and much more likely to ask interesting questions. There’s really no reason why conservative journalists shouldn’t be moderating, or at least co-moderating, Republican debates. Byron York and Rich Lowry would do a fine job.
If there are going to be another hundred primary debates, and there probably will be, the party would most likely prefer most of them to be on Fox. And that’d be fine: The candidates will be trying to appeal to Fox’s audience for votes, after all. And liberals ought to be fine with it too, because the candidates will be just as likely, or maybe even more likely, to say dumb and embarrassing things on Fox as they would be on CNN or NBC. So boycott away, Reince Priebus.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, August 7, 2013
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