“Race Hustlers, Inc”: Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly And Sean Hannity Stoking Racial Tensions For Cash
I was in Ireland when President Obama made his surprise 18-minute comment about the George Zimmerman verdict, so I didn’t see it. I read a wide range of reactions, but they didn’t prepare me for what he actually said. It was a sober, balanced, thoughtful and painful portrait of how race is lived by African Americans, particularly black men. I can even understand, though I don’t support, the criticism from the left: while making the powerful statement “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” the president also went out of his way to praise the judge and jury in the Zimmerman trial and to say the system worked; to acknowledge the problem of so-called “black on black” crime; and to observe that this country is getting better every generation when it comes to race, which it surely is.
On their entirely separate planet, though, the right wing race hustlers went crazy, and they aren’t shutting up. Monday night Fox’s Bill O’Reilly accused Obama himself of making life worse for African Americans, because his speech showed he had “no clue” how to combat “gangsta culture.”
An unusually crazed, agitated O’Reilly declared that the plight of black America “has nothing to do with slavery. It has everything to do with you Hollywood people and you derelict parents… Race hustlers and the grievance industry,” he went on, “have intimidated the so-called ‘conversation,’ turning any valid criticism of African-American culture into charges of racial bias,” leaving African-Americans to “fend for themselves in violent neighborhoods.” I can’t wait to hear the ignorant O’Reilly generalize more about “African American culture.”
But I agree with O’Reilly about “race hustlers and the grievance industry” being the problem here – only we define them differently. Bill-O himself is a consummate race hustler and grievance peddler, pushing the drug of racial grievance to white people, making himself rich by worsening racial tension. He’s second only to Rush Limbaugh in terms of spewing ignorance to a vast, frightened audience.
Limbaugh confessed to almost losing it on his show Monday over Obama’s speech – of course he loses it every day, he just doesn’t admit it; he really lost it a long, long time ago. On his Monday show he spewed:
Obama and [Rev. Jesse] Jackson and [Rev. Al] Sharpton have the same objective, same mind-set, same cultural references, same views of America….Obama is grievance politics, and the primary reason for that grievance is race. It’s in everything that he’s done. It’s in every policy. It’s in almost every speech.
And Limbaugh, like O’Reilly, is fed up with people whining about slavery. “It’s preposterous that whites are blamed for slavery when they’ve done more to end slavery than any other race,” he declared. The radio bully may be hustling for a spot on Sen. Rand Paul’s staff because that’s essentially the point “Southern Avenger” Jack Hunter made about whites and slavery, in a CD obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Hunter resigned, so maybe Rush is getting restless, or is feeling the pinch of his advertiser boycott, and wants Paul’s social media director job.
Sean Hannity may be the worst of all, using the president’s saying he could have been Trayvon Martin 35 years ago to smear both Martin and Obama with drug charges. “Is that the president admitting that I guess because what, he was part of the Choom Gang and he smoked pot and he did a little blow — I’m not sure how to interpret because we know that Trayvon had been smoking pot that night.”
I mostly try to ignore grievance peddlers like O’Reilly, Limbaugh and Hannity, because I could write about an outrage every hour and still never finish. They’re part of the “conservative entertainment complex” David Frum has attacked for destroying his party; Joe Scarborough, another conservative, went in on Hannity Monday morning, accusing him of using the Zimmerman case “to gin up his ratings.”
Every once in a while, though, it’s important to pay attention to what the braying bullies say, because they have large audiences and when they turn on a dime to one topic, you know you’re getting a view of the right-wing id. And since they offer a guide to the right-wing id as well as to getting rich, when they convene on a new narrative, others always follow.
Now even former Bush press secretary Dana Perino is getting in on the race hustle, complaining on ABC’s “This Week” that Obama was ignoring the issue of crime by African American males, when in fact he talked about it in his remarks. “When you think of a young mother whose two year old son was shot in the face by the two black teens who approached her in Atlanta, and that baby has died—Why do presidents choose to speak about one case and not the other? That’s why it’s better maybe not to talk about any of them. They chose to talk about this one.” Perino is obviously studying at the Sarah Palin School of Elocution, Reasoning and Race Baiting.
It’s worth remembering that before Obama made the comment, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” reaction to the Martin case wasn’t strictly ideological. Many Republicans expressed regret at the killing of the unarmed teen, including Mitch McConnell and Florida Gov. Rick Scott. Obama’s remarks made the issue partisan, and I don’t blame Obama, I blame the race-baiting Republican opportunists who saw the president’s entry into the debate as a new way to polarize and rile up vulnerable and/or racist white people into seeing themselves as George Zimmerman.
This is the new right wing racket. Well, it’s not entirely new – race baiting is an old racket on the right – but the extent to which conservatives are now comfortable telling white people they’re the new victims, in danger of being unfairly prosecuted like George Zimmerman when they should actually be thanked for ending slavery, is unique and brazen and dangerous. We need more Republicans, as well as more media figures, to call it what it is: a race hustle.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor-at-Large, Salon, July 23, 2013
“The Turtle Vs The Con Man”: Mitch McConnell Gets A Tea Party Challenger
After years of speculation, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is finally getting a Republican challenger in his 2014 re-election bid. Louisville businessman Matt Bevin is expected to officially announce his primary challenge to McConnell this week, with the hope of consolidating Tea Party support to depose the four-term incumbent from the right.
Bevin, who is currently a partner at the Louisville-based investment firm Waycross Partners, will formally declare his electoral plans on Wednesday, according to a Monday press release. Given that Bevin’s campaign has already announced a planned three-day tour of the state, all signs point to him joining the race.
Bevin has long hinted at challenging McConnell from the right. Tea Party groups reportedly began recruiting Bevin into the race in February, and in March he told the right-wing news organization The Daily Caller that he was considering a run.
“If I can be a part of the dialogue that leads to a reversal of the downward economic spiral that faces us as a state and as a nation, then I am willing to do so,” Bevin said at the time. “The people of this state are self-reliant, hard-working and strongly principled citizens and many of us are disheartened by the idea that the values we hold dear are being left behind at the state border by some of those who are representing us in Washington…We deserve better.”
Politico reports that Bevin has recently been meeting with influential right-wing groups such as the Club for Growth, the Senate Conservatives Fund, and the Madison Project, hoping to marshal support for a serious challenge to the deep-pocketed, well-connected McConnell.
McConnell, who is an obvious target for a Tea Party challenge due to his image as the consummate Washington insider, has long prepared for a primary battle — and is highly unlikely to lose such a contest, despite his low poll numbers. McConnell has an intimidating war chest of nearly $10 million in cash on hand that he can spend to fight off opponents, and he has gone out of his way to forge a close relationship with the Tea Party’s favorite politician in the state, Senator Rand Paul. McConnell — who initially opposed Paul’s Senate run, instead backing then-Secretary of State Trey Grayson — even hired longtime Paul ally Jesse Benton to manage his re-election campaign.
On Friday, Benton served notice that McConnell is not overlooking Bevin, and that his famously vicious political operation would not shy away from attacking a fellow Republican. In a statement, Benton dismissed the Connecticut-born businessman, saying “Matthew Griswold Bevin is not a Kentucky conservative, he is merely an East Coast con man.”
The winner of the Republican primary is expected to face Democratic Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes in the general election.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, July 22, 2013
“Peter King For President?”: Republicans Had Better Hope Not
If U.S. Representative Peter King (R-NY) is serious about pursuing the Republican nomination for president in 2016, then the GOP will have a real problem on its hands.
Congressman King’s interest in a White House bid was first reported on Wednesday night by Newsmax. The next day, the Long Island Republican elaborated on his plans in an interview with ABC News.
“I’m going to certainly give it thought. I’m going to see where it goes,” King explained. “My concern right now is I don’t see anyone at the national level speaking enough on, to me, what’s important – national security, homeland security, counterterrorism.”
“The big debate that Republicans seem to have in the Senate on foreign policy is whether or not, you know, the CIA was going to use a drone to kill an American in Starbucks,” he added, in a shot at Kentucky senator Rand Paul. “To me, we should be going beyond that and we should go back to being a party – whether it’s Eisenhower, Reagan, Bush – of having a strong national defense, and that should be, to me, an essential part of the presidential debate. And so far, that’s missing.”
Of course, if national defense has been missing from the presidential debate, it’s probably just because said debate won’t begin for another two years. But if King does insist on bringing the issue to the forefront of the Republican presidential primaries, then that’s very bad news for the GOP.
King’s positions on homeland security and foreign policy line up rather neatly with those of the George W. Bush administration (notably, former attorney general and noted torture advocate Michael Mukasey was the first Republican to go on record in support of King’s hypothetical candidacy). In other words, they are ridiculously unpopular. If voters were clamoring for a return to the Bush era, then Mitt Romney — whose diplomatic and national security teams were stacked with Bush administration veterans — presumably would not have been the first Republican presidential candidate in three decades to lose to his opponent on questions of foreign policy and national security (President Obama trounced Romney 56 to 44 percent among voters focused on the subject, according to exit polls.)
Making matters worse is King’s apparent inability to advocate for these positions without invoking startling racism. If the Republican plan to appear less hostile to minorities isn’t already completely dead by 2016, then a presidential campaign by a man who has declared that “we have too many mosques in this country,” and that “85 percent of American Muslim community leaders are an enemy living amongst us” — among many other racist broadsides against the Muslim community — would certainly deliver the coup de grâce.
Furthermore, a King candidacy would be sure to bring out the worst in his fellow candidates. With a lifetime 75 percent rating from the American Conservative Union, King would draw attacks from the right throughout the primaries; it’s not hard to imagine a fierce argument over King’s support for closing the gun show loophole, for example, becoming the 2016 version of “let him die!”
And none of these issues with a potential King candidacy even touch his decades-long support for a violent terrorist organization.
Happily for Republicans, King is likely just floating a presidential bid as a way to raise both his own profile and money for his congressional campaigns. But if he actually does enter the 2016 race, it would result in another huge blow to the Republican Party’s already tattered brand.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, July 19, 2013
“Delusions Of Libertarian Populism”: Here’s A Public Service Announcement For You, It’s Bunk
Have you heard about “libertarian populism” yet? If not, you will. It will surely be touted all over the airwaves and the opinion pages by the same kind of people who assured you, a few years ago, that Representative Paul Ryan was the very model of a Serious, Honest Conservative. So let me make a helpful public service announcement: It’s bunk.
Some background: These are tough times for members of the conservative intelligentsia — those denizens of think tanks and opinion pages who dream of Republicans once again becoming “the party of ideas.” (Whether they ever were that party is another question.)
For a while, they thought they had found their wonk hero in the person of Mr. Ryan. But the famous Ryan plan turned out to be crude smoke and mirrors, and I suspect that even conservatives privately realize that its author is more huckster than visionary. So what’s the next big idea?
Enter libertarian populism. The idea here is that there exists a pool of disaffected working-class white voters who failed to turn out last year but can be mobilized again with the right kind of conservative economic program — and that this remobilization can restore the Republican Party’s electoral fortunes.
You can see why many on the right find this idea appealing. It suggests that Republicans can regain their former glory without changing much of anything — no need to reach out to nonwhite voters, no need to reconsider their economic ideology. You might also think that this sounds too good to be true — and you’d be right. The notion of libertarian populism is delusional on at least two levels.
First, the notion that white mobilization is all it takes rests heavily on claims by the political analyst Sean Trende that Mitt Romney fell short last year largely because of “missing white voters” — millions of “downscale, rural, Northern whites” who failed to show up at the polls. Conservatives opposed to any major shifts in the G.O.P. position — and, in particular, opponents of immigration reform — quickly seized on Mr. Trende’s analysis as proof that no fundamental change is needed, just better messaging.
But serious political scientists like Alan Abramowitz and Ruy Teixeira have now weighed in and concluded that the missing-white-voter story is a myth. Yes, turnout among white voters was lower in 2012 than in 2008; so was turnout among nonwhite voters. Mr. Trende’s analysis basically imagines a world in which white turnout rebounds to 2008 levels but nonwhite turnout doesn’t, and it’s hard to see why that makes sense.
Suppose, however, that we put this debunking on one side and grant that Republicans could do better if they could inspire more enthusiasm among “downscale” whites. What can the party offer that might inspire such enthusiasm?
Well, as far as anyone can tell, at this point libertarian populism — as illustrated, for example, by the policy pronouncements of Senator Rand Paul — consists of advocating the same old policies, while insisting that they’re really good for the working class. Actually, they aren’t. But, in any case, it’s hard to imagine that proclaiming, yet again, the virtues of sound money and low marginal tax rates will change anyone’s mind.
Moreover, if you look at what the modern Republican Party actually stands for in practice, it’s clearly inimical to the interests of those downscale whites the party can supposedly win back. Neither a flat tax nor a return to the gold standard are actually on the table; but cuts in unemployment benefits, food stamps and Medicaid are. (To the extent that there was any substance to the Ryan plan, it mainly involved savage cuts in aid to the poor.) And while many nonwhite Americans depend on these safety-net programs, so do many less-well-off whites — the very voters libertarian populism is supposed to reach.
Specifically, more than 60 percent of those benefiting from unemployment insurance are white. Slightly less than half of food stamp beneficiaries are white, but in swing states the proportion is much higher. For example, in Ohio, 65 percent of households receiving food stamps are white. Nationally, 42 percent of Medicaid recipients are non-Hispanic whites, but, in Ohio, the number is 61 percent.
So when Republicans engineer sharp cuts in unemployment benefits, block the expansion of Medicaid and seek deep cuts in food stamp funding — all of which they have, in fact, done — they may be disproportionately hurting Those People; but they are also inflicting a lot of harm on the struggling Northern white families they are supposedly going to mobilize.
Which brings us back to why libertarian populism is, as I said, bunk. You could, I suppose, argue that destroying the safety net is a libertarian act — maybe freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. But populist it isn’t.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 11, 2013
“Utterly Shocking!”: Just Like Dear Old Dad, Rand Paul Has Ties To Neo-Confederates
During his 2008 presidential campaign, then Texas Representative Ron Paul faced wide criticism for his newsletters—published as far back as the 1970s—which, at various points, were racist, homophobic, and anti-semitic. One newsletter from 1992 claimed that nearly all black men in Washington D.C. are “Semi-Criminal or Entirely Criminal”—while another from 1994 claimed that gays were “maliciously” infecting people with AIDS. Paul defended himself by saying that the newsletters were produced by a ghostwriter—with his name attached, and presumably, his consent—and the controversy didn’t do much to diminish his following among a certain set of young libertarians. But for those of us less enamored with Ron Paul, it did underscore one thing: His long-time association with the reactionary far-right of American politics.
Ron Paul has retired from politics, but his son—Kentucky Senator Rand Paul—is in the mix, and is clearly planning a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. Ideologically, the younger Paul is indistinguishable from his father. And while he isn’t as close to the far-right as Ron Paul, it’s hard to say that he doesn’t have his own problems with race. In 2009, his campaign spokesperson resigned after racist images were discovered on his MySpace wall, and in 2010, Paul landed in a little hot water during an interview with Rachel Maddow, when he told her that he would have opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act for its impositions on businesses, i.e., they were no longer allowed to discriminate against blacks and other minorities.
Now, as the Washington Free Beacon reports, it also turns out that Rand Paul has his own relationship with the racist backwaters of American politics. I’m not a fan of the publication, but this looks terrible for the Kentucky senator:
A close aide to Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) who co-wrote the senator’s 2011 book spent years working as a pro-secessionist radio pundit and neo-Confederate activist, raising questions about whether Paul will be able to transcend the same fringe-figure associations that dogged his father’s political career.
Paul hired Jack Hunter, 39, to help write his book The Tea Party Goes to Washington during his 2010 Senate run. Hunter joined Paul’s office as his social media director in August 2012.
From 1999 to 2012, Hunter was a South Carolina radio shock jock known as the “Southern Avenger.” He has weighed in on issues such as racial pride and Hispanic immigration, and stated his support for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.
During public appearances, Hunter often wore a mask on which was printed a Confederate flag.
When considered in light of everything I mentioned earlier, none of this comes as a surprise. We know that Ron Paul has ties to neo-Confederates, and we know that Rand Paul has faced criticism for beliefs that echo their opposition to civil rights laws. Hiring a John Wilkes Booth sympathizer fits the picture of the Pauls as a political family that—regardless of what’s in their hearts—is comfortable working with right-wing racists.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, July 9, 2013
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