“Rudy Lied. Let’s Start With That”: Giuliani’s Hate-Mongering Shows The Right Wing Will Never Stop Trying To Scare Whites About Obama
Rudy Giuliani lied. Let’s start with that. After the heinous murder of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos a week ago, Giuliani spewed the following bit of hate about President Obama: “We’ve had four months of propaganda starting with the president that everybody should hate the police.”
For the record, the president did absolutely no such thing. If you want the details of what he has actually said about law enforcement officers over the past four months — i.e., since Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri — Politifact and the Washington Post‘s Fact Checker have compiled them as part of their respective evaluations of Giuliani’s claim (the WaPo‘s article also includes more, similar statements by Giuliani about Obama and the police, made after the initial one cited above). Politifact found the claim to be a “pants on fire” lie, while the WaPo gave it four (out of a possible four) Pinocchios. As I said, Rudy Giuliani lied.
But of course it’s about much more than just the lie, it’s about the kind of race-baiting lie he told, and how it fits into an eight-year-long campaign by the right to draw on the worst fears of white Americans about a black president, in particular a liberal black president. You see, Giuliani’s comments about the police killings weren’t even the worst ones uttered. Among others, Ex. Rep. Joe Walsh accused Obama of having “blood on his hands.” Erick Erickson said the president has “created a situation where Americans cheer police officers being gunned down.”
As egregiously wrong as these are, I want to focus now on some remarks made by Rush Limbaugh that didn’t get, as far as I can tell, any broader media coverage, but which were heard by his 12.5 million listeners (he’s still got the biggest talk radio audience out there). What Giuliani only implied, Rush came right out and said — after first echoing the point that the president has “blood on his hands” and placing his picture next to that of Al Sharpton just below that statement on his website’s show transcript:
We are all headed in an accelerated pace for anarchy. That is where all of this is headed. The primary agents of this anarchy are militant Islamists, militant civil rights coalition types, the New Black Panther Party and ancillaries. And who are their enablers? The Democrat Party and the American left, from college professors to pop culture false idols to elected Democrats, and of course the media, the left has and is, I believe — and I really believe this, and I’m not using a single word for exaggeration purposes — I really believe that college professors, these pop culture false idols, elected Democrats, the media, are literally making their followers, i.e., base voters, insane with rage and anger. I don’t think there is any other conclusion.
No, Rush is not exaggerating. This is exactly what is behind the statements — as hateful as they were on their face — made by Giuliani. And notice what Limbaugh has done here, building on Giuliani’s demonstrably false accusation that the president has been telling people to hate the police. He hits on racial boogeymen like the New Black Panther Party, a teeny-tiny organization (which the Southern Poverty Law Center has defined as a hate group) about which the right has long stoked anxiety among whites. But Rush also connects the New Black Panthers to civil rights activists (not to mention militant Islamists, triggering a whole other set of fears), and says that elected Democrats — led by the chief elected Democrat — have been “enabling” them and pushing our country into “anarchy.” Oh, and as a college professor myself I’m proud to note that he mentioned us twice. Finally, since this is a race-based, “civil rights”-based anarchy, Rush’s listeners know that he’s talking about the thing he’s talked about so many times before: a race war.
This is by no means the first time Limbaugh has invoked the specter of race war. Just after the president was inaugurated a second time, in January 2013, he declared: “We’re in the midst here of designed class and race wars,” and this was only a week after he claimed that Louis Farrakhan was “in preparation for a race war.” Rush also talked on July 30, 2009, about how the media were promoting a “race war.”
But Limbaugh doesn’t have to use the words race war to make his listeners afraid of big, bad, black Barack Obama and his radical, militant allies. In my book about President Obama and American national identity, I examine numerous examples where Rush (and other right wingers) practiced race-baiting. I’ve shared what I then called his most egregious example here on Daily Kos before (although what he said last week certainly gives this one a run for it’s money), but I want to cite it again here because it ties together all the hateful things — starting with the remarks by Rudy Giuliani — said about the president (not to mention Eric Holder and Bill de Blasio) since the murder of NYPD Officers Liu and Ramos. This is from my book:
Limbaugh summarized this perspective on June 4, 2009, in one of the most pernicious formulations heard from a major media voice since Obama became a national figure–one that could have no purpose but to sow the toxic combination of hatred and fear among white members of his audience and pit Americans against one another along ethnic lines: “The days of them not having any power are over, and they are angry. And they want to use their power as a means of retribution. That’s what Obama’s about, gang. He’s angry, he’s gonna cut this country down to size, he’s gonna make it pay for all the multicultural mistakes that it has made, its mistreatment of minorities.”
In this brief, vitriol-laden rant, Limbaugh defined Obama and his nonwhite supporters (“they”) as anti-American and angry, and set their interests in opposition to those of whites, whose interests he defined as in line with those of America. It’s Obama and his people vs. America. Moreover, Limbaugh insinuated or perhaps tried to subconsciously evoke the idea that this was a street fight by using the term “gang.” In his view, the battle between Obama’s and Limbaugh’s gangs would determine whether whites or nonwhites will ultimately wield “power.”
Limbaugh did not choose these words lightly. His statement resembles rhetoric that goes back to the eighteenth century, according to which poor whites should rally together with slave owners around their shared whiteness, because if black slaves ever got free they would enact vengeance on all whites. It draws on the image of blacks as bloodthirsty savages bent on destroying the white civilization that has oppressed them for so long, without of course mentioning what that oppression says about how “civilized” are those who have carried it out. The greatest fear of the slave-owning elite was always an alliance of the common folk of all races. Limbaugh’s use of the trope of white racial unity as the only defense against retribution for past mistreatments is not original, but that makes it no less disgraceful.
And this is exactly what the right has sought to do to Barack Obama since before they had even heard of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Rudy Giuliani does it his way, and Rush Limbaugh does it his. But make no mistake, both of them — along with every other right winger who engages in this kind of race-baiting — have but one goal in mind, and that is to draw on and even heighten already existing fears held by too many white Americans that the day is coming for, in Limbaugh’s own words, “retribution.”
And they have the nerve to say Obama’s the one spreading hate.
By: Ian Reifowitz, The Blog, The Huffington, December 29, 2014
“Obama Is Right On Race; The Media Is Wrong”: The Rotten Apples Do Not Represent All Americans
It seemed as though President Obama couldn’t possibly say anything to make conservatives, particularly conservative members of the media, even more incredulous than they already are. But then he said what some apparently consider his biggest half-truth or untruth to date: that he believes the country is less racially divided now than it was when he took office. The disbelief was evident in article after article, with one conservative site using “President Pinocchio” in its headline.
The thinking seems to go like this: With protests across the nation over racially charged deaths, from Michael Brown to Tamir Rice, how could the president say with a straight face that our nation is not less divided than it once was? Especially when polls show that some Americans think we are. And yet the answer to that question can be found in Obama’s own words. “I actually think that it’s probably in its day-to-day interactions less racially divided,” he told NPR.
He’s right. Despite the images perpetuated by the media highlighting divisions—because that makes better television than images highlighting unity—we are not a nation at war over race. We are a nation suffering growing pains. We are a nation in which a few rotten apples are spoiling different barrels. There are a few among the police, whom some Americans no longer trust; among some of the communities currently at odds with the police; and among those more interested in securing 15 minutes of social media fame by stoking unrest than seeing our nation at peace. But those rotten apples do not represent all Americans. Those rotten apples do not represent America, and they certainly don’t represent a nation at war.
How do I know? Well, the numbers tell us so, as do all of our day-to-day interactions, just as the president said.
For starters, the number of interracial married couples reached an all-time high in 2012, three years after President Obama took office, jumping from 7 percent in 2000 to 18 percent. Those numbers don’t include those who are dating or cohabitating, an indication that the number of interracial couples is actually higher, as American marriage rates are at an all-time low.
And while a majority of Americans may not be in interracial relationships, a large number of Americans are now either related to someone or know someone who is in one or has been in one. Furthermore, mixed race children are the fastest growing population in the country. Someone who once may have been less evolved on race relations could very well now have a grandchild, niece, nephew, or godchild who is of mixed race, which will likely spark an evolution of some sort. That evolution can be seen in Gallup’s tracking of national attitudes on interracial relationships. In 1958 4 percent of Americans approved of such couples. By 1997 half of Americans approved, and by 2012 the number was 87 percent, a steady year-to-year increase in the years since the Obama presidency began.
I have been reminded of this throughout the holiday season, in both big cities and small Southern towns, where I’ve crossed paths with a number of mixed race families. No one stared at them as though they were anomalies, because they aren’t anymore. They represent the face of the new America, an America the country’s first biracial president has helped usher in, despite what critics might say.
But then again, highlighting the new America doesn’t generate the clicks or the TV ratings that highlighting people spewing angry, racially charged rhetoric does. So the story has become “America is divided by race,” and though that doesn’t represent most Americans’ day-to-day experiences, some of us are buying into the media’s toxic narrative.
I almost did. While traveling this holiday season, a relative and I were pulled over by a police officer. It was late at night, in the South, and a relatively deserted area. The officer was white, male, and had a Southern drawl. Since my relative and I are both African American and have been following the same news coverage many of you have been, I was nervous. I even began texting a friend so someone would be aware of where we were and what was occurring on the off chance the experience took a turn for the worse. It didn’t. He was courteous, explained the legitimate reason we were briefly pulled over, and then let us continue on our way. I breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
The fact that many African Americans fear the police more than our white counterparts says our nation is still a work in progress. But the next time you are tempted to say our nation is worse off on race than it was before the president took office, ask yourself this: Are your day-to-day relationships with people of other races worse? The people you work with, or see at your grocery store, or your church? Are your personal relationships worse? Or is it simply that what you are hearing and seeing about race in the media seems worse?
If that is the case, then here’s a piece of advice: Turn your TV off.
By: Keli Goff, The Daily Beast, December 29, 2014
“Documenting Police Killings”: Wide Discrepancies In Rate Of Police Killings Among Major Metropolitan Police Departments
One of the sources of confusion arising during recent controversies over police killings in Missouri and in New York has been the lack of good and consistent data on similar incidents. Congress just passed legislation to revive a lapsed 2000-2006 data collection law, but as veteran journalist Blake Fleetwood notes in a web-exclusive piece for Ten Miles Square today, the earlier law wasn’t enforced. As a result we know less than we should about police killings and such closely related issues as the risk to police of being themselves killed by lethal force in the line of duty. But by piecing together available data, Fleetwood does reach some tentative conclusions well worth testing with fresh data.
A Washington Monthly analysis of police homicides found wide discrepancies in the rate of police killings among major metropolitan police departments, when measured against population figures.
Contrary to popular belief, New York City—-with a police homicide rate of 1 in 123,529 citizens—-ranks near the top (best, least people killed) of large cities in the U.S. The NYPD killed 68 people from 2007 – 2012 out of a population of 8.4 million.
In Miami-Dade County, in a population of 2.5 million, (less than a third of the people living in NYC) police killed 68 citizens during that same five-year period. This means that citizens of Miami are 3.5 times more likely to killed by their local policeman than their counterparts in New York City.
An amalgamated review of police shooting data from the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and figures from 105 major police departments (obtained by the Wall Street Journal) —- when overlaid with population figures —- revealed that the Los Angeles Police Department killed 111 citizens during this period in a population of 3.8 million, which works out to one police homicide per 21,229 persons. This indicates that the average citizen’s chance of being killed by a policeman is nearly six times greater in Los Angeles than in New York City.
Fleetwood esttimates that the total number of police killings from 2007-2012 probably exceeded three thousand. Probably half or more of those killed did not have firearms. Moreover, while no one wants to expose police officers to undue risk, some facts remain that contradict the impression that it’s open season on the police:
In five years, 2008 to 2012, only one policeman was killed by a firearm in the line of duty in New York City. Police officers are many times more likely to commit suicide than to be killed by a criminal. Eight NYC policemen took their own lives in 2012, alone.
Comparatively, a fisherman is 10 times more likely to be killed on the job than a police officer, according to national figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A logging worker is eight times more likely than a police officer to die on the job, and a garbage man is three times more likely to die while working.
Most policemen killed on the job die in auto accidents, according to FBI statistics.
What can be done to reduce the number of police killings without making the lives of officers more dangerous? Fleetwood points to better training of a sort that used to be available not that long ago:
Twenty years ago Bill Clinton funded the Police Corps, whose mission was to train elite policemen with physical and mental conditioning very much like the training of the Seals and Green Berets. The recruits spent a year role-playing through every possible situation. The Police Corps produced 1,000 of the best trained and most professional policeman in the country.
But it was expensive, and, according to Joe Klein, it was killed by George W. Bush.
If the United States had better trained, more professional police, we certainly would not have so many police homicides, which are tearing apart the social fabric of our country.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, The Washington Monthly, December 17, 2014
“The Only Way To End Police Violence”: Convince Americans That Their Lives Truly Matter
Here’s something one is not supposed to say at a time like this, but it’s true and we all know it’s true, so let’s say it: There will be more Eric Garners; more Michael Browns. There will be, it’s sad to say, piles more of these dead, black, male bodies, and dozens or hundreds more white police officers walking away from the inconvenience of having added to the pile, for the simple and obvious reason that our political system and our culture have neither the will nor the capacity to ensure that there won’t be.
This is also usually when we pause to take note of the great racial progress we’ve made in this country over the last two generations, while adding dutifully and ruefully that there is still much more to do. We’ve made progress for sure. But on the criminal justice front, we’ve gone backwards. The harsh sentencing laws passed from the 1970s through the 1990s have seen to it that one out of three black men in America will do some jail time at some point in his life. If Putin did that with one of his ethnic minorities, we’d be calling him a greater monster than Stalin.
The dollar value of a statistical life in the United States is purported to be around $5 million. That’s what safety analysts say. Of course that dollar value, callous as it may seem, is based on certain inputs—a person’s education, her earnings, her contributions to community and society. But if that’s the average, what’s a young black male life worth in the United States? Is it worth $1 million? Maybe $500,000? Michael Brown’s was apparently worth something closer to zero.
This is not going to change in America, at least for many, many years. Ask yourself: What would it take, really, for your average white cop not to see your average black male young adult as a potential threat? Because we can pass all the ex-post facto laws we want, and we can even convict the occasional police officer, which does happen from time to time. But that’s not where the problem starts. The problem starts in that instant of electric mistrust when the cop reaches for his gun, or employs a homicidal chokehold. That moment is beyond the reach of legislation, or of any punishment that arrives after the fact.
So to answer the question of what it would take—well, cops will make different and less deadly decisions in those fateful moments when they no longer reflexively see black males as a priori threatening figures. But there’s so much history and cultural DNA threaded into that reflex that it’s hard to see how it can change.
Which is not to say that we shouldn’t try things. But to me, we should be putting a lot more emphasis on the front end than the back end; that is, on prevention more than punishment. By which I mean, for example, the training, education, and screening of white cops who will be dealing regularly with black citizens.
Back when I was writing about New York City, I once participated in a public forum where I was one of the journalists questioning then-Police Commissioner Howard Safir. One of those big incidents—Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, I can’t remember which, and they happened every few months—had recently taken place. Others asked Safir about after-the-fact approaches—a stronger civilian complaint review board, for example, which had been kicking around at the time, or steeper departmental penalties.
I went in a different direction. I asked Safir whether the NYPD did any kind of racial screening of police academy hopefuls; any battery of psychological tests, say, designed to identify and weed out the potential bad seeds? He didn’t say yes. But he didn’t say no, either. He had no idea! The commissioner—no idea how or whether applicants were screened for racial biases. Now, I don’t know whether any such testing goes on today, but if it doesn’t, it should.
We could also try more integrated police forces. Things are better on that score in many cities than they were 30 years ago, but still woefully out of balance, especially in a city like Ferguson. So there are a few things we can do to try to prevent these tragedies.
But I doubt the political will exists for anything beyond the most transparently cosmetic changes, and at bottom the will is not there because not enough value is attached in American society to young black male lives. If more were, society would never stand for this. If someone out there with a passion for this issue and a couple billion dollars wants to work on a project, maybe it’s just this: Show Americans that young black men don’t have to be either hoodlums or rappers or occasionally actors, that they are just like young white men in their infinite variety, goodness, badness, talent, mediocrity, and decency. When they become simply human to the rest of America, that’s when America will do something to lessen the pile.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 5, 2014
“Two Grand Juries, The Same Disappointing Result”: The Criminal Justice System Is One Of The Last Bastions Of Blatant Racism
No expressions of sympathy or regret can resurrect Eric Garner, the New York City man killed by police in July. Garner died after an officer placed him in what appears to be a chokehold during an arrest for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes, an offense not usually regarded as a capital crime.
But, at the very least, officer Daniel Pantaleo (or his representatives) showed a spark of decency after a Staten Island grand jury decided not to indict him for any crime. “I feel very bad about the death of Mr. Garner,” he said in a statement. “My family and I include him and his family in our prayers and I hope that they will accept my personal condolences for their loss.”
That’s just one contrast to events in Ferguson, Missouri, where Officer Darren Wilson showed no hint of sympathy for teenager Michael Brown or his family. “I don’t think it’s haunting. It’s always going to be something that happened,” Wilson said in a televised interview.
There were other equally stark contrasts. While Brown’s response to Wilson will always be the subject of dispute, bystanders recorded video of Garner’s arrest and posted it on the Internet, where it went viral. There is no disputing Garner’s tragic last words as Pantaleo’s arm lingers around his neck: “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” Even Fox News’ bellicose Bill O’Reilly was moved to observe that Garner “didn’t deserve what happened to him.”
But the greatest contrast between the deaths of Garner and Brown may have been in the reactions of elected and civic leaders. Backed by its politicians, Ferguson’s police force responded to criticism of Brown’s death with excuses, equivocation and armored personnel carriers.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio took to the podium to express sympathy for Garner’s loved ones, and equally important, a simple shared humanity. Compassion. Understanding. Empathy. “This is now a national moment of grief, a national moment of pain,” he said. Members of Congress — liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats — joined to criticize the grand jury’s decision.
That matters. All citizens, regardless of color or creed or religion, want to believe that the people who govern them share their fears, their hopes, their aspirations. Or, at the very least, that their leaders can understand their frustrations.
Even now, that’s not always the case in the United States, especially when it comes to law and order. The criminal justice system is one of the last bastions of blatant racism, a tangled net of explicit prejudices and implicit biases, of rank stereotypes and unfair perceptions, a web that ensnares black men disproportionately. Countless studies conducted by experts have borne out the view held by so many black Americans: We do not stand equally before the bar of justice.
Black motorists are subjected to more traffic stops than white drivers. Black men and women are arrested more often for drug offenses, even though we are no more likely to be drug users than whites. And the use of the death penalty tilts against black defendants and devalues black lives: It is more likely to be meted out if the victim is not white.
Has there been progress? Of course there has. The nation’s top law enforcement official, the attorney general, is a black man. But the nation’s criminal justice system started out in a hellishly low place — where officials were complicit in lynchings, where the wealthy extracted unpaid labor from black men by having them arrested, where black crime victims were ignored. De Blasio referred to that unfortunate history: “We’re not dealing with years of racism leading up to it, or decades of racism — we are dealing with centuries of racism that have brought us to this day.”
For all the striking contrasts between the reactions to the deaths of Brown and Garner, there was one stunning consistency: Grand juries saw no evidence of wrongdoing by a white police officer who killed an unarmed black man. Bear in mind that a New York City medical examiner, citing “compression of his chest and prone position,” ruled Garner’s death a homicide. Still, a Staten Island grand jury found nothing to suggest that Pantaleo committed any criminal offense.
Some things haven’t changed at all.
By: Cynthia Tucker, Visiting Professor, The University of Georgia, School of Journalism; The National Memo, December 6, 2014
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