“The Duck And Jackass Dynasty”: Has It Become Acceptable Again For An American Politician To Embrace Unashamed Bigotry?
I got the gist of the “Duck Dynasty” thing after my first and only viewing: bunch of rural jackasses who somehow struck it rich get brought into our living rooms to be laughed at by the rest of us aristocrats.
Well, all right. When the archetype first appeared on television via the “Beverly Hillbillies” it was also enormously popular, but also taken as an illustration of how TV was living down to its condemnation by FCC Chairman Newton Minow as a “vast wasteland.”
In any event, A&E knew what it was doing when it put these people on the air, so its show of indignation in “suspending” one of them for speaking out against gays and the aspirations of African Americans falls a little flat.
What’s truly ghastly, however, is the reaction of a couple of political figures. Sarah Palin‘s opinion isn’t worth the eleven words I’ve just written to dismiss it. But Bobby Jindal still holds down office as the governor of Louisiana. That raises the question: Has it become acceptable again for an American politician to embrace unashamed bigotry?
In the old days, news that public funds (via the Louisiana state film and television incentive program) had helped finance racism and gay-bashing of the variety espoused by Phil Robertson, the outspoken duck dynast, would have presented a moral dilemma and created a political embarrassment for a governor. Most self-respecting political leaders would have run away from association with such views; that’s the essence, after all, of the “leadership” part of the equation.
Not for Jindal. His only public statement on the matter thus far has praised Robertson as a member of a family of “great citizens of the State of Louisiana.” He defends Robertson’s views on the “it’s a free country” principle, which as a debating point generally gets dropped by most people before the fourth grade. “Everyone is entitled to express their views,” he says.
In Jindal’s seven-sentence statement, not a word of defense for gay people so crudely mocked by Robertson. Not a word to remind us that the life of black sharecroppers in Louisiana’s Jim Crow era was not “godly” or “happy.”
In January of this year, Jindal lectured his fellow Republicans on the need to “stop being the stupid party.” Remember? He talked about how the Republican brand had been damaged by its candidates’ “offensive and bizarre comments.” That was supposed to represent the launch of a new GOP outreach to communities that had been excluded by Republican doctrine, including the gay and minority communities.
But that was eleven months ago. Now, according to Jindal, Republicans are supposed to embrace offensive and bizarre comments. The party’s transformation into a marginal and regional movement thus continues. Jindal has made himself the biggest jackass in the story, and his career as a national political figure the thing to be laughed at.
By: Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, December 21, 2013
“Cracker To Cracker”: The Bonding Of Southern “Populists” And Good ol’ Boys Without, Of Course, The Racism
As longtime readers of my stuff know, I’ve got a real ax to grind whenever someone tries to justify display of Confederate regalia, particularly the Confederate Battle Flag (a.k.a., the Cross of St. Andrew), as an innocent symbol of “southern pride.” As a proud southerner who regards the Confederacy (not to mention the neo-Confederacy of the late Jim Crow era) as a shameful period in my home region’s history, I felt this way even before I helped Zell Miller (you know, the old Zell Miller, before he turned to the dark side) write the 1993 State of the State Address calling for eliminating the Battle Flag from Georgia’s state flag. And as the years went by, amnesia about both the Confederacy and the Battle Flag has always made me a bit crazy, driving me at one point to write a long rant about Appomattox. When Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell declared a “Confederate History Month” in 2010, I counter-proposed a “Neo-Confederate History Month” to take notice of the long, dark shadow the Lost Cause had cast over white and black southern folk in the many years since the planters’ revolution failed. And I got agitated just last month when country music star Brad Paisley tried to claim the Battle Flag was just an innocent token of “southern pride” (presumably “white southern pride,” since I’m not aware of too many African-Americans sporting the symbol).
This is all preamble to what I feel I need to address to former U.S. Rep. Ben “Cooter” Jones, cracker to cracker, about the hissy fit he pitched in the Boston Globe yesterday in response to the decision by Rep. Ed Markey’s campaign to disinvite Jones from performing at a fundraiser for his “old pal Eddie” because it discovered he’s a loud-and-proud defender of the display of the Battle Flag (most notably emblazoned on the car he drove as a character on Dukes of Hazzard).
I’m not going to quote Cooter’s op-ed extensively; you can read it for yourself. His private views on the subject (the standard-brand post-neo-Confederate “populist” view that the Battle Flag was just misappropriated by racists and should offend no one if displayed by non-racists) wouldn’t have been an issue if Jones hadn’t waged a very public battle last year with NASCAR (word to Cooter: when you are to the right of NASCAR, it’s time to reconsider) over its “politically correct” decision to bar the car from The Dukes, named “General Lee,” from a raceway). I guess a really good staff vetting might have also turned up Doug Wilder’s complaint when Jones used the General Lee in his unsuccessful 2002 congressional campaign in Virginia (Cooter lost to some guy named Eric Cantor).
In the op-ed, Jones complains that he’s got a sterling civil rights record, and I’m sure that’s true. I’m also sure he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. I actually know the guy a little from back in the day, when I did some light campaign work for him in Georgia. And I was one of his constituents when he was in Congress, and thought he was a fine public servant. And yes, I am very familiar with the constant temptation southern white liberals (or as they usually style themselves, “populists”) have succumbed to over the years to try to make some common cultural bond with good ol’ boys by adopting Confederate symbols–without, of course, the racism. Hell, I remember a southern-based New Left group back in the 60s that made as its logo a Battle Flag with the clenched fist of The Movement at the center!
But I’d say to Ben Jones (as another “old pal Eddie”) that it’s time, and actually far past time, to give it up and consign the Battle Flag to its well-deserved grave in the Museum of Bad Symbols. Seriously, Ben, aside from its original association with a violent revolution against the United States in the cause of human bondage, and aside from its long association with Jim Crow, and aside from its twentieth-century revival as the emblem of hard-core resistance to measures of basic decency, and aside from the fact that it defines “southern pride” in a way that inherently excludes a huge number of actual and hereditary southerners–aside from all that, if you can possibly put all that aside: displaying that Flag makes four violent years of failure that plunged our region into grinding poverty and cultural isolation for nearly a century the centerpiece of southern identity. That’s an insult to all the southerners who lived before and after the disaster of the Confederacy, and a continuing distortion of what it means to be southern.
To use an appropriate analogy, if the Serbs can give up Kosovo, white southerners can give up the Confederacy and its symbols. Most of them, in fact, already have. But the process of recovery won’t be helped by southern celebrities, however well-meaning, running around the country taking offense at the “political correctness” of people who don’t have much stomach for the St. Andrew’s Cross and its bloody history.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 16, 2013
“Foul Subterfuge”: A GOP Witch Hunt For The Zombie Voter
Republicans are waging the most concerted campaign to prevent or discourage citizens from exercising their legitimate voting rights since the Jim Crow days of poll taxes and literacy tests.
Four years ago, Democrats expanded American democracy by registering millions of new voters — mostly young people and minorities — and persuading them to show up at the polls. Apparently, the GOP is determined not to let any such thing happen again.
According to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which keeps track of changes in voting laws, 22 statutes and two executive actions aimed at restricting the franchise have been approved in 17 states since the beginning of 2011. By the center’s count, an additional 74 such bills are pending.
The most popular means of discouraging those young and minority voters — who, coincidentally, tend to vote for Democrats — is legislation requiring citizens to show government-issued photo identification before they are allowed to cast a ballot. Photo ID bills have been approved by Republican-controlled legislatures in Alabama, Kansas, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin, and by referendum in Mississippi. Only one state with a Democratic-controlled legislature — Rhode Island — passed a law requiring voters to produce identification, and it does not mandate a government ID with a photo. In Virginia, Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell has not decided whether to sign a voter ID bill the legislature sent to his desk.
In theory, what could be wrong with demanding proof of identity? In the real world, plenty.
As Republican strategists are fully aware, minorities are overrepresented among the estimated 11 percent of citizens who do not have a government-issued photo ID. They are also painfully aware that, in 2008, President Obama won 95 percent of the African American vote and 67 percent of the Hispanic vote. It doesn’t take a genius to do the math: If you can reduce the number of black and Latino voters, you improve the Republican candidate’s chances.
If photo ID laws were going to be the solution, though, Republicans had to invent a problem. The best they could come up with was The Menace of Widespread Voter Fraud.
It’s a stretch. Actually, it’s a lie. There is no Widespread Voter Fraud. All available evidence indicates that fraudulent voting of the kind that photo ID laws would presumably prevent — someone shows up at the polls and votes in someone else’s name — just doesn’t happen.
For a while, the GOP pointed to South Carolina, where Republican Gov. Nikki Haley said that “dead people” had somehow cast ballots in recent elections. But then the state’s election commission investigated claims of 953 zombie voters and, um, well, never mind.
The number of voters came from a crude comparison of records done by the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles. The elections commission actually found 207 contested votes. Of that total, 106 reflected clerical errors by poll workers, 56 reflected errors by the motor vehicles department, 32 involved people who were mistakenly listed as having voted, and three involved people who had cast absentee ballots and then died before Election Day.
That left 10 contested votes — count ’em, 10 — that could not be immediately resolved. However, the commission found no evidence of fraud. Or of zombies.
Of course, there are other potential kinds of electoral fraud; crooked poll workers, for example, could record votes in the names of citizens who actually stayed home. Election officials could design ballots in a way that worked to a specific candidate’s advantage or disadvantage (see Florida, 2000). But none of this would be prevented by photo ID, which still hasn’t found a problem to solve — except, perhaps, an excess of Democratic voters.
Even more sinister are new laws, such as in Florida, that make it much more difficult for campaigns — or anyone else — to conduct voter-registration drives. If you thought Republicans and Democrats agreed that more Americans should register to vote, you were sadly mistaken.
Florida requires that groups conducting registration drives be vetted and that registration forms be submitted within 48 hours of when they are signed — an onerous and unnecessary burden that only serves to hamper anyone seeking to expand the electorate. Let’s see, who might try to do such a thing? The Democratic Party, maybe? The Obama campaign?
In the name of safeguarding the sanctity of the ballot, Republicans are trying to exclude citizens they consider likely to vote for Democrats — the young, the poor, the black and brown. Those who love democracy cannot allow this foul subterfuge to succeed.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 30, 2012
The GOP Assault On Voting Rights: A Poll Tax By Another Name
AS we celebrate the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, we reflect on the life and legacy of this great man. But recent legislation on voting reminds us that there is still work to do. Since January, a majority of state legislatures have passed or considered election-law changes that, taken together, constitute the most concerted effort to restrict the right to vote since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Growing up as the son of an Alabama sharecropper, I experienced Jim Crow firsthand. It was enforced by the slander of “separate but equal,” willful blindness to acts of racially motivated violence and the threat of economic retaliation. The pernicious effect of those strategies was to institutionalize second-class citizenship and restrict political participation to the majority alone.
We have come a long way since the 1960s. When the Voting Rights Act was passed, there were only 300 elected African-American officials in the United States; today there are more than 9,000, including 43 members of Congress. The 1993 National Voter Registration Act — also known as the Motor Voter Act — made it easier to register to vote, while the 2002 Help America Vote Act responded to the irregularities of the 2000 presidential race with improved election standards.
Despite decades of progress, this year’s Republican-backed wave of voting restrictions has demonstrated that the fundamental right to vote is still subject to partisan manipulation. The most common new requirement, that citizens obtain and display unexpired government-issued photo identification before entering the voting booth, was advanced in 35 states and passed by Republican legislatures in Alabama, Minnesota, Missouri and nine other states — despite the fact that as many as 25 percent of African-Americans lack acceptable identification.
Having fought for voting rights as a student, I am especially troubled that these laws disproportionately affect young voters. Students at state universities in Wisconsin cannot vote using their current IDs (because the new law requires the cards to have signatures, which those do not). South Carolina prohibits the use of student IDs altogether. Texas also rejects student IDs, but allows voting by those who have a license to carry a concealed handgun. These schemes are clearly crafted to affect not just how we vote, but who votes.
Conservative proponents have argued for photo ID mandates by claiming that widespread voter impersonation exists in America, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. While defending its photo ID law before the Supreme Court, Indiana was unable to cite a single instance of actual voter impersonation at any point in its history. Likewise, in Kansas, there were far more reports of U.F.O. sightings than allegations of voter fraud in the past decade. These theories of systematic fraud are really unfounded fears being exploited to threaten the franchise.
In Georgia, Florida, Ohio and other states, legislatures have significantly reduced opportunities to cast ballots before Election Day — an option that was disproportionately used by African-American voters in 2008. In this case the justification is often fiscal: Republicans in North Carolina attempted to eliminate early voting, claiming it would save money. Fortunately, the effort failed after the State Election Board demonstrated that cuts to early voting would actually be more expensive because new election precincts and additional voting machines would be required to handle the surge of voters on Election Day.
Voters in other states weren’t so lucky. Florida has cut its early voting period by half, from 96 mandated hours over 14 days to a minimum of 48 hours over just eight days, and has severely restricted voter registration drives, prompting the venerable League of Women Voters to cease registering voters in the state altogether. Again, this affects very specific types of voters: according to the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, African-Americans and Latinos were more than twice as likely as white voters to register through a voter registration drive.
These restrictions purportedly apply to all citizens equally. In reality, we know that they will disproportionately burden African Americans and other racial minorities, yet again. They are poll taxes by another name.
The King Memorial reminds us that out of a mountain of despair we may hew a stone of hope. Forty-eight years after the March on Washington, we must continue our work with hope that all citizens will have an unfettered right to vote. Second-class citizenship is not citizenship at all.
We’ve come some distance and have made great progress, but Dr. King’s dream has not been realized in full. New restraints on the right to vote do not merely slow us down. They turn us backward, setting us in the wrong direction on a course where we have already traveled too far and sacrificed too much.
By: Rep John Lewis, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, August 27, 2011
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