“A Tool Of Prophetic Vengeance”: George Zimmerman, Portrait Of A Contemptible Human Being
George Zimmerman is a contemptible human being.
In court, Zimmerman apologized to Trayvon Martin’s parents because their child ran into the bullet that he fired. Doubling down, Zimmerman, appearing on Fox News last night, had the unmitigated gall to offer up the following statement:
“My wife and I don’t have any children… I love my children even though they aren’t born yet, and I am sorry that they buried their child. I can’t imagine what it must feel like, and I pray for them daily.”
Zimmerman is possessed of a type of self-righteous narcissism and faux-empathy for those people whose lives he has ruined. In keeping with his belief that he was a tool of prophetic vengeance, Zimmerman also suggested that it was “god’s plan” that he killed Trayvon Martin.
I do not know who is worse: Is Zimmerman the true villain here, a killer, perhaps mentally unbalanced and a child molester, with a cop fetish priapism who played Dirty Harry because he couldn’t let one of “the blacks” get away again?
Or are those Right-wing reactionary conservatives like Sean Hannity who worship, coddle, and protect Zimmerman doing so because they wish that they were him, a trigger man, one who got to engage in the most dangerous game, hunting down and killing an innocent person of color for sport?
The role of George Zimmerman as an idol, victim, and martyr for the Right is both absurd and freakish.
Unfortunately, for many people who live in a society where political ideology and racial attitudes form a type of Gordian knot, they see justice for Trayvon Martin through a lens which views all people of color, and young blacks in particular, as perpetual suspects whose lives, citizenship, and safety are contingent and not absolute.
Criminality is a precondition of our existence for folks like George Zimmerman and his allies. This is especially true when black folks are confronted by White authority…and those who are overly identified with it.
In all, Zimmerman is likely surprised that he was arrested for the murder of Trayvon Martin. He intimately understands that black life is cheap in America. As such, what is the fuss over shooting dead a black teenager in the street? Zimmerman still does not have an answer to that question. Likewise, his supporters also do not have an answer to that question either.
This is the source of their love for Zimmerman, and sincere rage at his arrest and prosecution. If anything, the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman should have just been a minor inconvenience for all involved–except of course the victim, his family, and community. He is just a black anyway, so what’s the big deal? They die everyday in America and no one cares either way.
Consequently, how dare anyone suggest that legal and personal accountability should interfere with George Zimmerman’s fantasy play and rent-a-cop, amusement park, joyride of death.
By: Chauncey DeVega, Open Salon Blog, July 19, 2012
The Meaning Of “That”: Romney Finds Words To Twist Around To Make A Deceptive Point
If you’re Mitt Romney, it can mean whatever you want.
Mitt Romney is, without doubt, a representative of contemporary capitalism, a spectacularly rich financier who got his money not by making things but by buying and selling companies, exploiting leverage, and a whole bunch of other things folks like you and me will never have the privilege of understanding. So it isn’t surprising that this campaign has featured a debate about the nature of our economic system. That debate could be a salutary and educational discussion that leaves us all more informed and aware. Or it could be an occasion for some of the most vile demagoguery you could imagine. Do you need to ask which course it will take?
By now, we can all agree that a large portion of the Republican party has created in their minds an imaginary Barack Obama, one who is either a literal or philosophical foreigner (Romney has begun dropping the word “foreign” in as often as he can when discussing Obama), who hates America (here’s Rush Limbaugh on Monday: “I think it can now be said, without equivocation—without equivocation—that this man hates this country”), and one who hates success, hates rich people, and hates capitalism itself. And if you can’t find any actual evidence for these propositions—if “Barack Obama hates job creators so much he actually wants to increase the top income tax rate by 4.6 percentage points!” doesn’t have quite the ring you’d like—then it isn’t hard to find words you can twist around to make your point.
Which brings us to the word “that.” If you’ve been to a Mitt Romney speech in the last day or so, or if you’ve watched Fox News or listened to conservative talk radio, or even if you’ve watched some mainstream news*, you would have heard that Barack Obama said that people who own businesses didn’t actually build their businesses. Only a secret socialist could say such a thing, and Romney and his allies assure us that Obama did indeed say that and he is indeed that kind of person. But here’s what Obama actually said:
There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me — because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t — look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we don’t do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. That’s how we funded the GI Bill. That’s how we created the middle class. That’s how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. That’s how we invented the Internet. That’s how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and that’s the reason I’m running for President — because I still believe in that idea. You’re not on your own, we’re in this together.
When this quote worked its way up from the conservative media to the Romney campaign, they knew they had something. Sure, it’s obvious that when Obama said “you didn’t build that” he was talking about roads and bridges. But who cares? You can take that one sentence out of context, lie about what “that” in the quote refers to, and you’ve got evidence of Obama’s America-hating heart.
And yes, it is a lie, a word I use carefully. Romney and the people who work for him know full well what Obama was and wasn’t saying. But they decided to go ahead and engage in an act of intentional deception anyway, and I’m sure he’ll be repeating it many times.
There’s actually a discussion to be had about the radical individualism that has taken over the conservative movement, which Obama was responding to in his speech. I’d be interested to hear Mitt Romney’s thoughts on it, not in a “gotcha” kind of way, but because I genuinely want to know what his response to Obama’s arguments would be. Does he think that every rich person got rich completely on their own and owes nothing to the society that created the context that allowed their wealth to be created? I really have no idea. But the deeper into this campaign we go, the more it becomes clear that we’ll never know what Romney really believes about anything. And he may not be the most dishonest presidential candidate we’ve ever seen, but give him time—he’s working on it.
*Last night I saw Peter Alexander on NBC Nightly News do a story in which he showed Obama’s quote clipped exactly as Romney did, making it seem that Romney was being absolutely truthful. It was one of the most maddening acts of journalistic jackassery I’ve seen in some time.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 17, 2012
“Assuming Voters Are Fools”: GOP Tax Talk Takes A Trivial Turn
For more than three years, Republican critics of President Obama’s health care reform law have come up with all kinds of reasons to hate the law, most of which fall apart rather quickly under scrutiny. Thanks to last week’s Supreme Court ruling, however, the right has a new talking point they’ve largely ignored up until now: Obamacare raises taxes.
For Republicans, this should effectively end the conversation. The individual mandate counts as a “tax”; taxes are inherently evil; ergo the law is awful and anyone who supported it deserves to be publicly flogged. What’s more, conservatives are arguing that this wasn’t just any ol’ tax increase — it was the Largest Tax Increase Ever.
On Fox News, Jim Pinkerton characterized the mandate as “the biggest tax increase in the history of the universe.”
I hope most objective observers can agree this is, for lack of a better word, dumb. As Josh Marshall explained, “The Congressional Budget Office says the mandate penalty will raise $27 billion between 2012 and 2021. $27 billion over a decade. Anybody who cares to can do the math. But if you want to call it a ‘tax increase’ — which is debatable — it’s clearly one of the tiniest ones in history.”
This one tax penalty raises less than $3 billion a year, and it would affect about 1% of the population. What’s more, even if we’re generous, and assume the right is talking about all of the provisions within the law that raise new revenue, it’s still not even close to being the largest tax increase ever.
And just to top this off, Mitt Romney, the man Republicans want to be president, created and imposed the exact same tax penalty. He is, in fact, the only public official in American history to implement the policy the right is now pretending to find outrageous.
The entire argument is demonstrably ridiculous, apparently crafted under the assumption that voters are fools. We’ll see if the assumption is correct.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 2, 2012
“Sewing Together Disparate Data Points”: Conservative Media Try to Reverse Racial Reality
Conservatives must be feeling regretful. After nearly fifty years of using appeals to white racial resentment to take over the South, win presidential elections and control of Congress, conservatives are realizing this might come back to bite them in the ass. As the right wing has become xenophobic and anti-Latino, conservatives have watched young Latinos and young Asian Americans join young African-Americans in being overwhelmingly Democratic. The greater diversity of this younger generation has in turn meant that Democrats, especially Barack Obama, have won handily among young voters in recent elections. All of a sudden, conservatives see being the party of angry white males as a potential liability, and they want to change their image.
You can see this concern in Mitt Romney’s recent campaign events touting his substantively thin but rhetorically compassionate education reform agenda. As the Washington Post reported on Romney’s visit to a school in West Philadelphia on Thursday, his first campaign event in a majority black neighborhood: “Mitt Romney’s campaign team has been quietly laying plans for an outreach effort to President Obama’s most loyal supporters—black voters—not just to chip away at the huge Democratic margins but also as a way to reassure independent swing voters that Romney can be inclusive and tolerant in his thinking and approach.” Romney’s campaign insists they are sincere, but they never made any such outreach during the primaries, when they were competing against Newt Gingrich’s successful efforts to appeal to racism in his campaign in South Carolina.
The conservative media are happy to help burnish both white racial anxieties and the official story line that Republicans are the friends of minorities by trying to tell an oddly inverted story of race relations in America. According to National Review’s current cover story by Kevin Williamson, it is the Republican Party which has consistently supported civil rights and Democrats who have opposed it. Meanwhile, conservative blogs, talk radio and Fox News hype random stories of anti-white violence, creating the false impression that whites are more often the victims of hate crimes by blacks than the reverse.
The National Review argument has been thoroughly debunked in many outlets. Over at Democracy Journal, Clay Risen demonstrates “Williamson’s embarrassingly basic misunderstanding of American history.” There used to be liberal pro–civil rights wings and conservative anti–civil rights wings in both parties, hence the misleading factoid commonly cited by conservative pundits that a higher proportion of Republicans than Democrats in Congress voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But it was the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, especially Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, who pushed the issue and got the law passed. Republicans nominated anti–civil rights conservative extremist Barry Goldwater in 1964 and thus began their conversion of the South. Goldwater carried five Southern states despite losing in a landslide. “For a variety of reasons—including, but not only, racial politics—both parties went through ideological realignments in the postwar decades, so that today we speak of Republicans as almost uniformly conservative and Democrats as almost uniformly liberal,” notes Risen. “The GOP of today is simply not the GOP of 1963.” That’s why anti–civil rights Southern conservatives such as Trent Lott, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms became Republicans. Williamson is simply lying when he writes, “those southerners who defected from the Democratic Party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era.”
Most embarrassingly, Williamson starts his story by proudly proclaiming National Review’s history of debunking pernicious myths. (In this case, the myth is that Democrats supported civil rights more than Republicans.) But he makes no mention of National Review’s own history of opposing civil rights. As Jonathan Chait writes in New York, “conservative Republicans—those represented politically by Goldwater, and intellectually by William F. Buckley and National Review—did oppose the civil rights movement. Buckley wrote frankly about his endorsement of white supremacy: “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.”
Critics of Williamson’s piece were generous enough not to mention that National Review’s tendencies towards racism and opposition to civil rights continue today. National Review recently let go of longtime contributor John Derbyshire for penning a shockingly bigoted rant in another publication, although as NR editor Rich Lowry, admitted, “Derb has long danced around the line on these issues.” Derbyshire has since continued to write for the racist conservative Website VDARE, which is run by fellow National Review exile Peter Brimelo. Regarding the proper name for VDARE’s corner of the right, Derbyshire wrote on May 10, “The enemies of conservatism are eager to supply their own nomenclature. ‘White Supremacist’ seems to be their current favorite…. Leaving aside the intended malice, I actually think ‘White Supremacist’ is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with.”
NR also had to drop another contributor, Robert Weissberg, shortly thereafter for having, in Lowry’s words, “delivered a noxious talk about the future of white nationalism.” Meanwhile NR defends voting laws that would disenfranchise minorities through onerous requirements such as presenting government-issued photo identification. And it argues that the Voting Rights Act is no longer necessary.
That last part speaks to the other half of the conservative misinformation campaign about race. In order to simultaneously pretend to support civil rights in principle and oppose it now in practice, you must make the claim that the movement was so successful it has, if anything gone too far.
There is a corollary to this logic holding that it is blacks that oppress whites, rather than the reverse. This is, of course, a regular feature in arguments against affirmative action. Similarly, McKay Coppins recently reported in BuzzFeed on the odd conservative media fixation with occasional crimes that happen to be perpetrated against a white victim by a group of black aggressors. Coppins writes:
If you’ve spent much time consuming conservative media lately, you’ve probably learned about a slow-burning “race war” going on in America today. Sewing together disparate data points and compelling anecdotes like the attack in Norfolk, conservative bloggers and opinion-makers are driving the narrative with increasing frequency. Their message: Black-on-white violence is spiking—and the mainstream media is trying to cover it up.
This notion isn’t necessarily new to the right, which has long complained about stifling political correctness in the media and the rising tide of “reverse racism….
The irony of the race war narrative’s latest flare-up is that it comes at a time when national crime rates have reached historic lows—including reported hate crimes against whites. According to a report released by the FBI, there were 575 anti-white bias crimes reported in 2010—up slightly from the 545 reported in 2009, but distinctly lower than the 716 reported in 2008. Overall, the past decade has seen a downward trend in anti-white bias crime. What’s more, hate crimes against blacks have continued to outstrip those against whites by about four-to-one: In 2010 alone, there were 2,201 reported. Violent crimes across the spectrum reached a four-decade low in 2010.
Conservative media have been especially eager to smear Trayon Martin, the young black victim of a shooting for which the perpetrator was initially not arrested. They are also getting on the wrong side of modern civil rights struggles, by opposing gay rights and fanning the flames of Islamophobia. And as is especially the case with Fox News, their biggest sin of all may be simple inaccuracy.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, May 28, 2012
“Failing The Fundamental Test Of Journalism”: Watching Fox Makes You More Stupid
People who work at Fox News might like to think that they are only despised by real journalists because they are conservative and most journalists are liberal. Anyone who saw read the admiring obituaries of William F. Buckley, Jr in mainstream and liberal outlets would know that is nonsense. Journalists, both liberals and ones with no ideology in particular, are quite capable of respecting conservative pundits and reporters who deserve their respect.
But Fox does not. The reason is not because they hold a set of values that others may not share. And it is only partially because they claim to be “Fair and Balanced” when they are neither.
Rather, it is because they fail the fundamental test of journalism: are you informing your audience? According to a new study by Farleigh Dickinson University, Fox viewers are the least knowledgeable of any outlet, and they are know even less about politics and current events than people who watch no news at all.
Respondents to the survey were able to answer correctly an average of 1.8 of 4 questions about international news and 1.6 out of 5 questions about domestic affairs. “Based on these results, people who don’t watch any news at all are expected to answer correctly on average 1.22 of the questions about domestic politics, just by guessing or relying on existing basic knowledge,” said Dan Cassino the poll’s analyst.
“The study concludes that media sources have a significant impact on the number of questions that people were able to answer correctly,” wrote Cassino and his colleagues. “The largest effect is that of Fox News: all else being equal, someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer just 1.04 domestic questions correctly — a figure which is significantly worse than if they had reported watching no media at all. On the other hand, if they listened only to NPR, they would be expected to answer 1.51 questions correctly.”
This should come as no surprise if you follow Fox. Consider some recent history. “Fox and Friends” host Steve Doocy invented a quotation from President Obama completely out of thin air. He falsely claimed that Obama had said he and Michelle were not born with silver spoons in their mouths “unlike some people,” in reference to Mitt Romney’s privileged upbringing. In fact, Obama did not say “unlike some people” and he has been using the silver spoon line for years. Several other news outlets repeated Doocy’s assertion as fact and Doocy initially avoided correcting the record after it was revealed he was wrong. Eventually he admitted that he “seemed to misquote” Obama, instead of stating that he did, in fact, misquote him. And he did not apologize for the error.
When Fox isn’t inventing smears against Obama, it uncritically regurgitates corporate funded lies about him. Consider a segment of Sean Hannity’s show from last week. He showed a TV commercial by Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group founded and funded by the Koch brothers, that attacks President Obama’s record on investing in renewable energy. Hannity and Frank Luntz praised its effectiveness, with Luntz saying, “It was fact-based, not assertions. You see the facts come up on the screen. There’s specific numbers.”
The only problem is that the factual assertions are incorrect. The ad says, “80 percent of taxpayer dollars spent on green energy went to jobs in foreign countries.” But the article it cites as a source clearly states only that the money went to foreign firms. The bulk of American tax dollars spent on the subsidies, according to Politifact, went to American subsidiaries of the firms.
The ad goes on to offer specific examples: “$1.2 billion to a solar company that’s building a plant in Mexico. Half a billion to a car company that moved American jobs to Finland. And $39 million to build traffic lights in China. President Obama wasted $16 billion on risky investments.” I won’t bore you with all the details of how each of these claims is untrue; each has been labeled false or mostly false by Politifact or Factcheck.org and you can go to Media Matters for the full rundown.
Hannity routinely takes Republican misinformation as the Gospel truth. To choose just one particularly embarrassing example, he let Herman Cain’s spokesman Mark Block declare absurdly, that a woman named Karen Kraushaar who accused Cain of sexual harassment was the mother of a Politico reporter named Josh Kraushaar. Hannity did not challenge either the veracity of this claim nor question why this “fact” would cast doubt on Politico’s thoroughly reported revelation that Cain has been repeatedly accused of sexual harassment. In fact, Josh Kraushaar had left Politico for National Journal over a year before the story even ran, and he is not related to Karen Kraushaar. It would have been easy for Hannity to check on these facts and correct Block’s assertion, but he did not. Here is what Josh wrote about it the next day:
Anybody with Internet access would, at the very least, been able to figure out that I haven’t worked for Politico since June 2010 — and have been working at National Journal since then. I even Tweeted the fact that I wasn’t related to Karen Kraushaar earlier that evening before Hannity’s show to clear up any potential confusion.
That didn’t stop Block. When I heard what Block had said on Hannity’s show, I immediately e-mailed him informing him of his mistake. I still haven’t heard back.
This laziness, partisan hackery and lack of regard for basic accuracy is what separates Fox News from outlets that merely have opinions. And it is doing their audience a disservice. This Fairleigh Dickinson study is not the first to find that Fox News viewers are the most ill informed of any news consumers. As November 22, 2011 Think Progress had found seven studies showing Fox News’ viewers to be the worst informed of all news consumers. In a post about a report that had just come out in the International Journal of Press/Politics, by communication scholar Lauren Feldman of American University and colleagues which found that “Fox News viewing manifests a significant, negative association with global warming acceptance,” Chris Mooney cited six previous studies with similar findings.
I identified 6 separate studies showing Fox News viewers to be the most misinformed, and in a right wing direction—studies on global warming, health care, health care a second time, the Ground Zero mosque, the Iraq war, and the 2010 election.
I also asked if anyone was aware of any counterevidence, and none was forthcoming. There might very well be a survey out there showing that Fox viewers aren’t [emphasis in original] the most misinformed cable news consumers on some topic (presumably it would be a topic where Democrats have some sort of ideological blind spot), but I haven’t seen it. And I have looked.
In the last year, since Fox News fired Glenn Beck and has sought to line up behind more establishment Republican candidates such as Mitt Romney, the new conventional wisdom has been that Fox is tacking back to the center. As a purely strategic move within the Republican Party, that may be true. But, unfortunately, this has not been correlated with any improvement in the quality or independence of their journalism.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, May 21, 2012
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