“And They Didn’t See It Coming?”: The Kochs’ AFP Starts Scrubbing Its Bundy Support
It was just two weeks ago that affiliates of Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political operation financed by Charles and David Koch, decided to extend support to Cliven Bundy. Despite the Nevada rancher’s defiance of the law and court orders, and despite the fact that he denied the legitimacy of the United States government, AFP helped promote Bundy’s cause and mock the Bureau of Land Management for trying to enforce federal law.
Then Bundy started speculating about whether African Americans were “better off as slaves,” at which point the AFP apparently decided to join the stampede away from the radical Nevadan.
Americans for Prosperity Nevada, the state affiliate of the Koch Brothers-backed group, appears to have hastily deleted social media posts expressing support for Cliven Bundy, the renegade rancher who exposed himself as a racist in recent press conferences.
A tweet sent by AFP Nevada on April 10 urging followers to read more about the #BundyBattle, which involves Bundy’s refusal to pay fines for allowing his cattle to graze on public land, has been deleted. A Facebook graphic that the group posted criticizing the Bureau of Land Management for enforcing grazing laws against Bundy has similarly disappeared.
The instinct to run away is understandable, and it’s hard to blame AFP officials for waking up yesterday and wondering what in the world they’d gotten themselves into.
But the scrubbing is of limited utility given that screen-grabs and caches exist. Media Matters, for example, still has the content online that AFP is trying to take offline.
And all of this only serves to reinforce the question: what was the right thinking?
If you missed last night’s A block, it’s worth your time.
“[L]et us all pray that it is out of ignorance that the National Review comparing him to Gandhi and the right-wing activists comparing him to Rosa Parks, and the Fox News channel booking him and his family over and over and over and over and over again as heroes, and the Republican senator calling his armed supporters pointing guns at federal law enforcement officers ‘patriots’ – let us pray that that was happening under a veil of ignorance. Let us pray that they had no idea that there is a long-standing fairly violent right-wing movement in this country that is born in the defense of slavery and that causes people to say weird stuff about sheriffs being the supreme authority and the federal government not existing.
“Let us pray that the right and these Republican senators made a hero out of this guy in bloody ignorance of where he was really coming from.
“But it is a choice as to whether or not you do your homework before you try to mainstream a guy like this. The turn today to ‘let me tell you another thing I know about the Negro,’ that was telegraphed way, way, way in advance here. Anybody who chose not to see it coming now has this mess all over themselves.”
And as of today, the AFP’s solution is to clean up this mess by pretending it never said what it very clearly said.
As for Bundy, he apparently keeps talking, and is now attempting to invoke the legacies of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks in his defense.
The far-right movement really knows how to pick ‘em.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 25, 2014
“With Cliven Bundy, The Right Is Reaping What It Sows”: He’s Theirs, Down To His Last Ugly Thought
Some great causes achieve their goals and transform the world, while others fizzle out when it’s discovered that their leaders are unadorned racists who think black people were in much better shape when they were slaves. Isn’t that how it goes? At least that’s what some conservatives must have thought today as they learned of the New York Times report on Cliven Bundy, the Nevada rancher who has been grazing his cows on federal land and refusing to pay grazing fees, what you or I might consider “stealing,” but what the folks at Fox News, who have given Bundy hour after hour of glowing coverage, consider a principled stand against federal overreach in the finest American traditions.
Prior to this morning, Bundy’s fans were a limited but influential group, including senators Rand Paul and Dean Heller, the entire Fox network (but especially Sean Hannity), and the National Review, where one writer compared him to Gandhi. Now that Bundy’s fascinating ideas about “the Negro” have come to light, they’ll no doubt pretend they never really liked the guy in the first place, then they’ll stop talking about him. I predict, for instance, that after practically being Sean Hannity’s co-host for the last couple of weeks, Bundy will never be seen on Fox again, and he’ll be wiped out of their future discussions like a disfavored Soviet leader airbrushed out of a photo of the Politburo. But is there anything to learn from this episode? I think so. First though, here are the comments in question:
“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.
“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
Who would have thought that a gun-toting rancher who thinks he can graze on public land for free because “I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing” would also be a racist? So weird.
Now hold on, you might say, that’s just a stereotype based on some things about who he is and what he believes about an entirely separate matter. And yes, it is. Which is why it would have been unfair to assume, before we knew it to be true, that Bundy was a racist. But I didn’t see anybody doing that. The only commentary I saw having to do with race before today came from people like Jamelle Bouie and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who pointed out that if Bundy were black, right-wing figures would not exactly be flocking to his defense, and the government might be dealing with him differently as well.
And the conservatives who embraced Bundy were doing so because of their own stereotypes about him. It wasn’t as though he had some kind of compelling case to make. It was clear from the outset that the guy was a nut (see the above comment about not recognizing the existence of the United States government). His only cause was that he shouldn’t have to pay fees to graze his cattle on land he doesn’t own. To most people he looked like a crazy old man with a sense of entitlement that would put any “welfare queen” to shame.
But to his advocates, he was an avatar of freedom. Why? Well, he does ride a horse and wear a cowboy hat, and he loves guns and hates the government. What else did they need to know?
As I noted today over at the Washington Post, there are more than a few parallels with the case of “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson. Robertson too was someone conservatives knew they loved, since he was their kind of guy, even before they heard his views on gay and black people. Robertson’s statement was remarkably similar to Bundy’s, just substituting Jim Crow for slavery (“I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues”). Since no black people ever brought their complaints about the terroristic system of Jim Crow directly to Phil Robertson, he’s pretty sure they were all “singing and happy” back then, unlike today with their entitlement and their welfare. Cliven Bundy once drove past a housing project, so he has a deep understanding of how pathological those black folk are.
The conservatives who elevate figures like Robertson and Bundy may not share the full extent of their views on race, but they can’t escape them either. Because those people know which party and which ideology is their natural home. Sure, you may not hear Rush Limbaugh say that black people were better off as slaves, but you’ll hear a lot of other things that make Cliven Bundy nod his head in agreement. You’ll hear him say that Barack Obama’s agenda is “payback” for slavery, a way to stick it to white people. You’ll hear him say that Barack and Michelle Obama’s lavish lifestyle, where they live in a big white house and travel on their own airplanes, isn’t just what presidents do; instead, “they view it as, as an opportunity to live high on the hog without having it cost them a dime. And they justify it by thinking, ‘Well, we deserve this, or we’re owed this because of what’s been done to us and our ancestors all these’ — who knows?” When you watch Fox you’ll see story after story about welfare queens and food stamp cheats and all the other schemers and scammers who are taking your hard-earned money away from you. And you’ll be told, again and again and again, that racism against black people is but a fading memory, while the false accusation of racism is something liberals and blacks use to keep the white man down.
Conservatives didn’t invent Cliven Bundy, but when he rushed to their embrace they encouraged him and applauded him and made him into a national figure. He’s theirs, down to his last ugly thought.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 24, 2014
“Jim DeMint, Constitutional Revisionist”: Deliberate Conflation Of The Declaration Of Independence With The Constitution
RightWingWatch’s Brian Tashman runs across an interview with Jim DeMint in which the Heritage Foundation president and avatar of “constitutional conservatism” utters gibberish about slavery, and charitably suggests he is “confused:”
Heritage Foundation head Jim DeMint appeared on Vocal Point with Jerry Newcombe of Truth In Action Ministries last week, where he insisted that “no liberal is going to win a debate that big government freed the slaves.”
DeMint, a former US senator from South Carolina, told Newcombe that “the conscience of the American people” and not the federal government was responsible for the end of slavery.
In the interview, DeMint seemed to confuse the US Constitution with the Declaration of Independence and implied that William Wilberforce, a British politician who died almost thirty years before the Civil War, did more to end American slavery than the federal government.
Here’s the relevant portion of the transcript:
Newcombe: What if somebody, let’s say you’re talking with a liberal person and they were to turn around and say, “that Founding Fathers thing worked out really well, look at that Civil War we had eighty years later.”
DeMint: Well the reason that the slaves were eventually freed was the Constitution, it was like the conscience of the American people. Unfortunately there were some court decisions like Dred Scott and others that defined some people as property, but the Constitution kept calling us back to ‘all men are created equal and we have inalienable rights’ in the minds of God. But a lot of the move to free the slaves came from the people, it did not come from the federal government. It came from a growing movement among the people, particularly people of faith, that this was wrong. People like Wilberforce who persisted for years because of his faith and because of his love for people. So no liberal is going to win a debate that big government freed the slaves. In fact, it was Abraham Lincoln, the very first Republican, who took this on as a cause and a lot of it was based on a love in his heart that comes from God.
Jim’s not being “confused” here. His rap is based on a series of palpable falsehoods that are extraordinarily common in the exotic world of “constitutional conservatism:” the deliberate conflation of the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution (this is how they sneak God and “natural rights”–meaning property and fetal rights–into the latter); the idea that the Civil War was about everything other than slavery; and the claim of Lincoln’s legacy, even though the Great Emancipator was in almost every respect a “big government liberal” as compared to the states rights Democrats–DeMint’s ideological and geographical forebears who touted the Constitution even more regularly (and certainly more consistently) than today’s states rights Republicans.
For dessert, DeMint mentions Dred Scott, a hoary dog whistle to the antichoicers who like to compare that decision to Roe v. Wade.
What’s most interesting about hearing DeMint say all this stuff in one big mouthful is that it makes it so abundantly clear the man is engaging in all sorts of revisionism about well-known aspects of American–and constitutional–history. What makes it amusing is that he claims to be an “originalist.” Only if he gets to rewrite history.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 9, 2014
“Lose That Cause”: Don’t Name Streets Or Army Bases For Confederate Leaders
Alexandria, Va., is finally getting around to deinstitutionalizing the celebration of Confederate military leaders – maybe the U.S. Army can get around to following suit?
I probably shouldn’t be surprised, but I have to admit to being taken aback when I learned – thanks to the Old Town Alexandria Patch – that the city where I reside still has a law on its books requiring that when streets are named, those “running in a generally north-south direction shall, insofar as possible, bear the names of confederate military leaders.”
I understand that the Confederacy generates a certain amount of romanticism down here below the Mason-Dixon line, but let’s keep some perspective: This was a cause dedicated (a) to preserving the right to own other human beings as chattel and (b) to violently overthrowing the United States government and sundering this country. The idea that we should honor the leaders of this attempt to destroy the United States is offensive and absurd. It boggles my mind that I live a stone’s throw from Jefferson Davis Highway and just a few minutes’ drive from (Robert E.) Lee Highway.
As the Patch’s Drew Hansen notes, the bit of municipal code in question was enacted during the 1950s when legal segregation was entering its final, dismal throes. And good for Alexandria Councilman Justin Wilson for introducing an ordinance which would repeal the Confederate naming mandate. (His bill would also take off the books Alexandria’s law against unwed couples living together.)
Hopefully when the council considers this bill later this week, the South won’t rise again. And maybe the U.S. Army will take note.
As an anonymous active-duty U.S. Army officer argued in a guest post at Tom Ricks’ ForeignPolicy.com blog, it’s “ridiculous” and “absurd” that U.S. Army bases bear the names of Confederate generals. These men, after all, led troops in battle against U.S. forces. Ricks’ anonymous correspondent in turn refers back to a New York Times op-ed by Jamie Malanowski from last spring detailing the list of Confederate-named bases. Malanowski wrote:
Yes – the United States Army maintains bases named after generals who led soldiers who fought and killed United States Army soldiers; indeed, who may have killed such soldiers themselves. Only a couple of the officers are famous. Fort Lee, in Virginia, is of course named for Robert E. Lee, a man widely respected for his integrity and his military skills. Yet, as the documentarian Ken Burns has noted, he was responsible for the deaths of more Army soldiers than Hitler and Tojo. … Now African-Americans make up about a fifth of the military. The idea that today we ask any of these soldiers to serve at a place named for a defender of a racist slavocracy is deplorable; the thought that today we ask any American soldier to serve at a base named for someone who killed United States Army troops is beyond absurd. Would we have a Fort Rommel? A Camp Cornwallis?
Seriously. Let’s honor American heroes with our streets and military installations, not people who tried to destroy this country.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, January 21, 2014
“The RNC Reflects On Ending Racism”: The Republican Party No Longer Qualifies For The Benefit Of The Doubt
For all of its many benefits, Twitter’s brevity can cause trouble for plenty of political voices. Yesterday, for example, the Republican National Committee decided to honor the anniversary of Rosa Parks’ “bold stand,” which seemed like a perfectly nice gesture. The RNC added, however, that Parks played a role “in ending racism.”
Not surprisingly, the message was not well received. Despite what you may have heard from Supreme Court conservatives in the Voting Rights Act case, racism hasn’t ended, it certainly wasn’t vanquished on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955.
A few hours later, realizing that they’d made a mess of things, RNC officials returned to Twitter to say, “Previous tweet should have read ‘Today we remember Rosa Parks’ bold stand and her role in fighting to end racism,’” which was a welcome clarification, though the damage was done.
In fairness to the Republican National Committee, it’s hard to believe the party was trying to be deliberately offensive. For that matter, I rather doubt the RNC believes Rosa Parks helped end racism 58 years ago. This was likely the result of clumsy tweeting, not ignorant malice.
But in the larger context, stories like these resonate because the party no longer qualifies for the benefit of the doubt. Too many incidents come quickly to mind: the Nevada Republican who’d embrace slavery, the North Carolina Republican whose appearance on “The Daily Show” became the stuff of legend, the birthers, the fondness for Jesse Helms, the widespread voter-suppression laws that disproportionately affect African Americans, the Maine Republican who wants the NAACP to kiss his butt, the former half-term Alaska governor who’s comfortable with “shuck and jive” rhetoric, etc.
The RNC, in other words, can’t lean on its credibility on racial issues to easily dismiss poorly worded tweets. The fact that the party can’t even say a nice thing about Rosa Parks without screwing up and getting itself in trouble only helps reinforce the extent to which race is a systemic problem for the party.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 2, 2013
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