“It’s Not About Content Of Character”: Hey, Fox Pundits! How Blatant Must The Anti-Obama Racism Be?
I have a question for George Will.
If he can’t answer it, maybe Brit Hume can. Both men were recently part of a panel on Fox News Sunday to which moderator Chris Wallace posed this question: Has race played a role in the often-harsh treatment of President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder? Wallace was reacting to a clip of Holder strongly hinting that a testy encounter with House Republicans was part of a pattern of race-based abuse of himself and the president.
Some of the panelists framed their answers in political dimensions, i.e., what does this mean for the midterms? But Hume and Will responded directly.
Has race played a part? Heck no.
Said Hume: “This strikes me as kind of crybaby stuff from Holder. My sense about this is that both Eric Holder and Barack Obama have benefited politically enormously from the fact that they are African-American and the first to hold the jobs that they hold.”
“Look,” added Will, “liberalism has a kind of Tourette’s Syndrome these days. It’s just constantly saying the word ‘racism’ and ‘racist.’ It’s an old saying in the law: If you have the law on your side, argue the law, if you have the facts on your side, argue the facts. If you have neither, pound the table. This is pounding the table.”
And here, let us remove Holder from the equation because, frankly, the question I’m here to ask is more pertinent to his boss than him. I just wish Messrs. Will and Hume would explain one thing:
You say race has played no role in the treatment of President Obama? Fine. What would it look like if it did?
I mean, we’re talking about a president who was called “uppity” by one GOP lawmaker, “boy” by another and “subhuman” by a GOP activist; who was depicted as a bone-through-the-nose witch doctor by opponents of his health care reform bill; as a pair of cartoon spook eyes against a black backdrop by an aide to a GOP lawmaker, and as an ape by various opponents; who has been dogged by a “Tea Party” movement whose earliest and most enthusiastic supporters included the Council of Conservative Citizens, infamous for declaring the children of interracial unions “a slimy brown glop”; who was called a liar by an obscure GOP lawmaker during a speech before a joint session of Congress; who has had to contend with a years-long campaign of people pretending there is some mystery about where he was born.
There’s much more, but you get the drift. So I wish those men would explain how, exactly, the treatment of the president would differ if race were indeed part of the mix. What misbehavior would make them say: “OK, this is definitely about color of skin, not content of character”? Because from where I sit, much of the behavior toward Obama would need white hoods to be more blatantly racial than it already is.
Hume, by the way, says some critics have called his comments themselves “racist.” They’ve also scored the fact that this discussion was undertaken by an all-white panel. While the optics were odd, there was nothing in what he or Will said that would seem to merit that label. Those who slap him with it are likely motivated by the same knee-jerk reflex by which my critics — depend on it — will claim that I consider any disagreement with the president to be — sigh — “racist.”
That’s silly. But then, discussion of this seminal American fault line often reveals in some of us an unfortunate fondness for clownish superficiality. And yet that silliness does not detract from the criticality of the fault line itself. Nor can I share Will’s conviction that manly taciturnity is the best way to seal that fissure.
So what I ask is not rhetorical, not abstract, not a joke. It is a serious question.
And I’d appreciate the same sort of answer.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, April 21, 2014
“Deadbeat On The Range”: The Phony Cliven Bundy Event Has Brought Out The Worst Of The Gun-Waving Far Right
Imagine a vendor on the National Mall, selling burgers and dogs, who hasn’t paid his rent in 20 years. He refuses to recognize his landlord, the National Park Service, as a legitimate authority. Every court has ruled against him, and fines have piled up. What’s more, the effluents from his food cart are having a detrimental effect on the spring grass in the capital.
Would an armed posse come to his defense, aiming their guns at the park police? Would the lawbreaker get prime airtime on Fox News, breathless updates in the Drudge Report, a sympathetic ear from Tea Party Republicans? No, of course not.
So what’s the difference between the fictional loser and Cliven Bundy, the rancher in Nevada who owes the government about $1 million and has been grazing his cattle on public land for more than 20 years? Near as I can tell, one wears a cowboy hat. Easterners, especially clueless ones in politics and the press, have always had a soft spot for a defiant white dude in a Stetson.
This phony event has brought out the worst of the gun-waving far right, and the national politicians who are barely one degree of separation from them. Hundreds of heavily armed, camouflaged supporters of the scofflaw turned out Saturday in Nevada, training their rifles on public employees who were trying to do their job. The outsiders looked like snipers ready to shoot the police. If you changed that picture to Black Panthers surrounding a lawful eviction in the inner city, do you think right-wing media would be there cheering the outlaws?
With their assault rifles and threats, the thugs in the desert forced federal officials with the Bureau of Land Management to back down from a court-ordered confiscation of Bundy’s cattle. One of the rancher’s supporters, Richard Mack, a Tea Party leader who is in the National Rifle Association’s Hall of Fame, said he planned to use women as human shields in a violent showdown with law enforcement.
“We were actually strategizing to put all the women up front,” Mack said in a radio interview. “If they were going to start shooting, it’s going to be women that are going to be televised all across the world getting shot.”
That’s who Fox and friends are playing with these days — militia extremists who would sacrifice their wives to make some larger point about a runaway federal government. And what’s more, the Fox host Sean Hannity has all but encouraged a violent confrontation.
At the center of the dispute is the 68-year-old rancher Bundy, who said in a radio interview, “I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing.” A real patriot, this guy. You would think that kind of anarchist would draw a raised eyebrow from the Tea Party establishment that provides Bundy his media oxygen. After all, wasn’t the Tea Party born in a rant by Rick Santelli of CNBC about deadbeat homeowners? He complained about taxpayers’ subsidizing “losers’ mortgages” and he said we should “reward people that can carry the water instead of drinking the water.” Believe me, Bundy’s cattle are drinking an awful lot of our water, and not paying for it.
But instead, people like Ron Paul have only fanned the flames, warning of a Waco-style assault. Paul and his son, Senator Rand Paul, further showed themselves to be stunningly ignorant of the public lands legacy created by forward-thinking Republicans a century ago. “They had virtual ownership of that land because they had been using it,” Ron Paul said on Fox, referring to the Bundy clan. “You need the government out of it, and I think that’s the important point.”
No, the renegade rancher has no more right to 96,000 acres of Nevada public range than a hot dog vendor has to perpetual space on the Mall. Both places belong to the American people. Bundy runs his cattle on our land — that is, turf owned by every citizen. The agency that oversees the range, the Bureau of Land Management, allows 18,000 grazing permits on 157 million acres. Many of those permit holders get a sweet deal, subsidized in a way they could never find on private land.
What’s more, the land is supposed to be managed for stewardship and other users. Wild-horse advocates would like a piece of the same range. The poor desert tortoise, which has been in Nevada a lot longer than Bundy’s Mormon pioneer stock, is disappearing because of abusive grazing on that same 96,000 acres.
Ranching is hard work. Drought and market swings make it a tough go in many years. That’s all the more reason to praise the 18,000 or so ranchers who pay their grazing fees on time and don’t go whining to Fox or summoning a herd of armed thugs when they renege on their contract. You can understand why the Nevada Cattlemen’s Association wants no part of Bundy.
These kinds of showdowns are rare because most ranchers play by the rules, and quietly go about their business. They are heroes, in one sense, preserving a way of life that has an honorable place in American history. The good ones would never wave a gun in the face of a public servant, and likely never draw a camera from Fox.
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, April 17, 2014
“The Constitutional Excuse For Subverting Democracy”: Just Another Conservative Heads-We-Win-Tails-You-Lose Proposition
To anyone puzzled or confused about the preferred Tea Party self-identification buzzword “constitutional conservative,” George Will has done a fine job in his latest column spelling it all out, by way of touting a new book by Timothy Sandefur of the Pacific Legal Foundation. Progressives believe the Constitution provides a process that facilitates democracy. Conservatives understand that it’s a safeguard against the limitation of “natural” rights by democratic majorities.
This sounds reasonable if you accept the rather cartoonish idea that progressives do not acknowledge any limitations on popular majorities, or that the two sides mean roughly the same thing when they talk about individual rights. Here Will is not as forthcoming as he might have been, but his extensive discussion of the alleged incorporation of the Declaration of Independence into the Constitution–an invariable touchstone for Constitutional Conservatives–alludes to the common conservative belief that via the Declaration certain divinely granted or naturally endowed “rights”–particularly the untrammeled enjoyment of private property and the “right to life” of zygotes–trump the founding document itself.
You can think of it as a vastly more sweeping conservative version of the “penumbra” theory whereby Justice Douglas identified an implicit “right to privacy” in the Bill of Rights. And indeed, critics of Douglas’ opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut (itself a precedent for Roe v. Wade) have sometimes compared it to the “substantive due process” concept of the Lochner v. New York decision under which progressive social and economic legislation was routinely struck down as violating immutable private property rights until Lochner was overturned in 1937. It’s no accident that Will’s hero Sandefur is a latter-day defender of Lochner.
I’m no constitutional lawyer, and so won’t go into the argument over Lochner (or for that matter, Griswold) in detail, but it’s worth noting the practical effect this idea of supra-constitutional limitations on democratic majorities has on conservative political argumentation. When they aren’t describing America as a “center-right nation” or predicting perpetual Republican electoral landslides, or indulging in a “populist” appeals whereby “real Americans” are told they are being illegitimately outgunned by voter fraud or voter bribery, conservatives are prone to retreat into this impregnable fortress of constitutionalist theory which prohibits as a matter of fundamental law most progressive legislation. This redoubt makes it psychologically very easy to rationalize restrictions on voting, or mendacious campaign ads, or unlimited campaign spending by wealthy individuals, or abuse of the filibuster or other anti-democratic mechanisms. After all, conservatives are simply defending themselves against laws and policies that really ought to be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional–you know, like the Lochner-era courts routinely did with progressive legislation up through the early New Deal.
It’s at bottom just another heads-we-win-tails-you-lose proposition whereby American conservatives tend to support the constitutional arguments that in any given circumstance happen to support their policy goals.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 17, 2014
“Last Gasps Of A Dying Movement”: Obamacare Obstructionists’ Self-Created Trap
Kevin McCarthy doesn’t have the best timing. The House majority whip released what he hoped would be the foundational document of Obamacare truthers, “Debunking Obamacare’s 7 million enrollees ‘success’ story,” the same day the White House announced that, in fact, 8.03 million Americans had enrolled in the insurance exchanges. Republicans will no doubt try to debunk the higher figure the same way, but the more we learn about who’s been covered under the Affordable Care Act, the harder it will be. It is, overwhelmingly, a success story.
I said the same thing back when the number was 7 million: Imagine how many more people might have been covered if shrill Republicans hadn’t made repealing and obstructing the ACA their top priority. The news that 35 percent of enrollees are under 35 is particularly heartening: it means many young people ignored the campaign to tell them not to sign up – remember that creepy Uncle Sam “doctor” and reports of cool campus keg parties? Yes, the president had Zach Galifianakis and Bradley Cooper – damn you, Bradley Cooper! Greg Gutfeld is still so angry at you – but imagine where we’d be without an organized national campaign to scare people out of signing up.
The campaign to discredit the act will continue. McCarthy’s dumb document lists five new metrics for measuring success, including how many enrollees have actually paid, and how many didn’t have insurance before. Those are old talking points, but they’ve added a new one – how many received subsidies — which is ugly in several ways. Republicans will use a high rate of subsidies, if that’s the case, to negate the act’s success, when in fact the subsidies were always key to it: You can’t have an individual mandate to purchase private insurance without making some provision to help those who can’t afford it. Affordability is why most didn’t have it in the first place.
But McCarthy also tacks on an ugly parenthetical, asking “how many received a subsidy (raising concerns about fraud).” Brian Beutler at the New Republic calls this an effort to “welfarize Obamacare,” to stigmatize it and also make it subject to the same hysteria about “fraud” that conservatives use to smear other social programs. Remember that Sen. Ted Cruz called the subsidies “sugar,” telling Sean Hannity that when Americans got a taste of it, they’d be “addicted to the sugar, addicted to the subsidies. And once that happens, in all likelihood, it never gets …”
“It’s over,” Hannity declared. “It never gets repealed.”
Exactly.
Still, a high rate of subsidies will let the GOP continue to demonize the “takers” vs. the “makers.” But some of them are going to have a big problem: A lot of the takers will turn out to be their voters. Poor Mitch McConnell: His own state of Kentucky, under the leadership of Democratic Gov. Steve Brashear, set up its own insurance exchange, expanded Medicaid and conducted a bold public health campaign to get folks into “Kynect.” Now Kentucky has reduced the number of uninsured by 40 percent – and many of those newly insured are McConnell’s aging white constituents.
McConnell seems appropriately alarmed. The man who has repeatedly pledged to “repeal” the law just this week told healthcare workers in Kentucky that repealing the law can’t happen while Obama is president, so “we’re going to figure out a way to get this fixed.” That softer tone isn’t sitting well with his Tea Party challenger Matt Bevin, who’s already accusing McConnell of being an Obamacare appeaser, but the Senate minority leader seems to be looking past Bevin to his November battle with Alison Lundergan Grimes.
The only thing that might get Republicans out of a mess of their own making is Democratic cowardice, and you can never underestimate the capacity of centrist and red state Democrats to sabotage themselves and their own party. We’ll see how hard Grimes hits McConnell over his role in obstructing the ACA; so far, it hasn’t been very hard at all. She needs to make him the man who’s trying to charge women more than men for insurance again; the man who’s trying to take healthcare away from 370,000 Kentuckians who have it thanks to Democrats.
Democrats have similar opportunities in Virginia and Arkansas. Republicans have been itching to make the midterms a referendum on Obamacare. Thursday’s news means that might not work the way they had planned.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, April 18, 2014
“Is It Constitutional, The Civil Rights Act?”: Learning To Live With The Civil Rights Act, 50 Years Later
Freshman U.S. Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) has mainly drawn attention as a Tea Party ultra who somehow managed to draw a Tea Party ultra ultra 2014 primary opponent with rather exotic extracurricular activities.
But he may be fairly typical of his ideological cohort in having some, well, problems coming to grips with major legislation enacted a half-century ago, per this report from Scott Keyes of Think Progress:
Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL), a freshman congressman aligned with the Tea Party, held a town hall Monday evening in Gainesville where he fielded a wide range of questions from constituents. One such voter was Melvin Flournoy, a 57-year-old African American from Gainesville, who asked Yoho whether he believes the Civil Rights Act is constitutional.
The easy answer in this case — “yes” — has the benefit of also being correct. But Yoho found the question surprisingly difficult.
“Is it constitutional, the Civil Rights Act?” Yoho repeated before giving his reply: “I wish I could answer that 100 percent.” The Florida Republican then went on to strongly imply it may be unconstitutional: “I know a lot of things that were passed are not constitutional, but I know it’s the law of the land.”
Well, that’s mighty nice of him to acknowledge the Supremacy Clause, not a universal tendency among self-styled Constitutional Conservatives.
But the difficulty a lot of CCers have with the Civil Rights Act–which almost certainly exceeds public expression, given the rather controversial nature of fighting the particular lost cause that helped sink their predecessor Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign–comes from three distinct but interrelated sources. The wonkiest issue is hostility to the Commerce Clause jurisprudence on which the Public Accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act relied for regulating private discriminatory business practices. It’s very common in conservative legal circles to deplore the extension of federal power via the Commerce Clause during a chain of Supreme Court decisions beginning in the 1930s; Chief Justice Roberts famously refused to accept a Common Cause rationale for the Affordable Care Act of 2010.
A second argument that would have been more familiar to Goldwater and to the southern segregationists who flocked to his 1964 campaign is a states’ rights objection to federal regulation of race relations. While today’s neo-secessionists would try to stay a million miles from racial issues in arguing that “state sovereignty” retains meaning even after the Civil War, it still has a ghostly power in conservative circles.
And then there is the idea, embraced off-and-on by the Paul family, that the Civil Rights Act simply violates fundamental principles of private property rights that cannot be trammeled for any cause, however justifiable.
It’s unclear which of these conservative concerns about the Civil Rights Act Ted Yoho shares, notwithstanding his willingness to bend the knee to the “law of the land.” But it’s interesting that he and other constitutional conservatives can’t quite suppress their discomfort with a legal regime that ensures people aren’t denied access to restaurants and hotels and other business because of the color of their skins.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, April 15, 2014
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