By Manifesto Joe
Right-wingers are forever accusing their foes of playing the race card, and thereby crying wolf. But I've been watching the bile being spewed at President Barack Obama for a few years now -- going back to the early days of his 2008 campaign -- and there seems to be no other explanation for all this hatred in the absence of any reasoned discourse.
To phrase it in the most direct way, a lot of people who hate Obama do indeed hate his policies, but what they hate much more is the fact that there's a n****r in the White House.
You'll notice that I'm expurgating that word. Even Richard Pryor and Muhammad Ali weren't doing that in the 1970s. I'm doing it because I respect the fact that, over time, it has become much worse than crude slang. It's an expression of pure, unadulterated hatred for a large group of people.
Bill Clinton was the target of a lot of venom while he was in office, and much of it seemed ridiculous. Remember those bumper stickers with the "C" in Clinton incorporated in a communist hammer and sickle? Hell, I actually knew a couple of misguided people who were avowed communists, and they both thought Clinton was a neoliberal, corporate-friendly jerk.
Obama has governed little different from how Clinton did, and how Hillary would have. The far left doesn't claim him and is more than a little upset with him. But, considering that this is pretty obviously a family man without most of the personal baggage that Bill Clinton had, the attacks on him from the right have been even more ruthless. Race hatred seems to be the only way to explain it.
I don't seem to be alone in this conclusion. Here's a link to a story that appeared after Obama called a news conference to release his long-form birth record.
Now, of course, Donald Trump and others are also questioning Obama's academic record. They are pointing out that he didn't graduate from Columbia University with honors, which means that his cumulative GPA would have been less than 3.3. They are alleging that he could only have gotten into Ivy League schools as an affirmative-action student.
Do these people remember Il Doofus?
I do, and not at all fondly. This is a guy who got into Yale only because of the first, most corrupt affirmative-action program -- the "legacy" one for rich little shits. Bush II was said to have gotten through Yale largely with the help of "gentleman's C's." Then he gets into Harvard Business, where one professor remembered him as a guy who would say something in class quite explicitly and clearly, and then have the nerve to say, just a couple of minutes later, "I didn't say that."
I went to a private college as an undergraduate, someplace about on a par with Occidental College, where Obama went his first two years. I was a straight "B" student most of my first two years -- I didn't go to a good high school, and there seems to be a sort of social grace associated with making "A's" at a tough college that doesn't permit grade inflation. By the time I was a junior I started making the dean's list, but I had made so many "B's" by then that I finished with something over a 3.2 GPA, short of the 3.4 needed to graduate with honors. I can identify very much with a student like Obama probably was.
I would say that, in hindsight, it seems like a terrific investment in human capital that Obama was accepted by Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review and graduated magna cum laude. He went on to become a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago. All that amounts to one hell of a lot more than Il Doofus ever thought of doing.
And as for Donald Trump -- his daddy was the "self-made" man, not him. "The Donald" got a business degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, then followed daddy into the real estate/developer business. Like all the recent Bushes, Trump is a son of a bitch who, as Texas legend Jim Hightower phrased it, was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.
Trump has always been an opportunist. I doubt that he harbors personal malice toward Obama; he's just "capitalizing" on the vast amount of race prejudice that's out there. Living in Red State America, I've seen and heard ample evidence of it. I can remember standing in line to be seated at a restaurant, and hearing some festering redneck who was leaving talking about "Barack Osama" and the like, on the eve of the 2008 election.
I understand exactly what this is all about. It's about President N****r.
Manifesto Joe Is An Underground Writer Living In Texas.
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11 comments:
Amen Joe.
Amen.
When the opposition can't form a cogent argument on policy, they'll use every racist ploy in the book, and then accuse President Obama of playing the race card simultaneously.
This guy got this far in America despite being "Black."
-SJ
You nailed it, Joe. It's about race hatred and nothing else. These people are SO narrow minded, SO ignorant, SO partisan, SO judgmental, and SO hateful they would NEVER accept anyone but "their own kind." It doesn't matter that he applied himself, played by all the rules, studied and worked very hard, became a very good husband and father, and actually lived the American Dream. The fact that he is partially black, a Democrat, and had a Muslim father is why they will ALWAYS hate him. They'd rather have a low life like Il Doofus, a drunken and lazy slob holding onto his daddy's coat tails for dear life as President. No wonder they hate the government so much---look at the kind of idiots they want running it!
If Clinton had one and passed Affordable Healthcare and other things, she would have been hated by the right with a passion. I am sure it would have been because she is white.
Why doesn't the right universally hate Clarence Thomas?
I think assuming someone despises a political opponent because of his color is a bit racist. It is true that some people, both democrat and republican are prejudice against blacks to the point of hatred. They are the vast minority and any other assumption is a based on partisan emotion.
Hi, John:
Did the left have pictures of African dancers leaping about, joking that it was a rehearsal for Clarence Thomas being sworn in as a justice?
One of the right's leading candidates in New York state posted just such a thing on the Web, only calling it a rehearsal for Obama's inauguration.
I'd say you are being a bit too kind to the right wing. I don't know what part of the country you live in. Where I live, racism, the more traditional kind, is alive and well. There are more than a few people who would have supported Hillary at least somewhat, who are not being so supportive of Obama, to say the least. Around here, such people are a very substantial minority, not a small one. They clearly hated Obama long before he was even elected, in ways that they never quite vilified the Clintons or John Kerry. I don't assume here -- I observe.
With all due respect, I'd say you're being just a tad naive.
BTW -- the guy who sent that video to assorted people was Carl Paladino, who with Tea Party support won the Republican nomination for governor of New York state. Fortunately, he lost the general election to Cuomo.
Here's a link to check out:
http://newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mccalla/tea-partys-carl-paladino-who-sent-racist-emails-wins-n-y-gop-gov-nomination/
Gotta go with Joe on this one- I'm in East Texas, where the owner of a construction company proudly displays his "Don't re-nig in 2012" bumper sticker on his work truck.
Pointing out instants of racist comments does not prove racism as the rule. For every right winger you find acting racing, count the number of right wingers you found that were not acting racist. Only then will you have a valid statistic.
The left wingers did not pay as much attention to Clarence Thomas, partially because he was not the president of the United States, and partially because they are sometimes less aggressive than conservatives in general.
99.9% of the right-wingers who "hate Obama because he is black," would support and defend a black republican president, were he in office. If you believe that, it may be kind of hard to reconcile with your current opinion.
I am a Caucasian male. I live in Dallas, Texas with my African American wife.
I am sure I am naive for not thinking that the right is racist. However, the vast majority of the right is also naive, as they commit no racist actions and do not embrace racism.
I am not arguing that racists do not exist. I am arguing that racism is not an attribute of the right, and also that it is not the norm. Actually, I am not even arguing that, per se. I am arguing that I see no evidence to support such an assumption and that any unsupported assumption in that direction is divisive and dangerous. There are so, so many large targets the left can home in on its war with the right. It is bad to focus on the straw man instead of the real ones. Doing so makes the left a legitimate target.
By the way, I am a far left liberal, but a very intellectually honest one.
Racism does seem to me a common attribute of the right. How many liberals does one find putting Confederate flag decals on their vehicles? And, did you notice how Michael Steele was treated during his tenure as GOP chairman? The list can go on and on, enough to constitute a pretty convincing inductive argument. I also recommend that you closely read the link I provided on the post. These quotes are from it:
"There is a real deep-seated and vicious racism at work here in terms of trying to de-legitimate the president," Peniel Joseph, a professor of history at Tufts University, told The Ticket.
"This is more than just a conspiracy," Joseph added. "I think this is fundamentally connected to a conception of white supremacist democracy in this country."
Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. in early April called for the connection to be publicly drawn between birthers and racism: "So it is time to call this birther nonsense what it is--not just claptrap, but profoundly racist claptrap."
And columnist Michael Tomasky wrote for The Guardian Wednesday that the birther conspiracy "had to be the only explanation for how this black man got to the White House." He added: "And if you think race isn't what this is about at its core, ask yourself if there would even be a birther conspiracy if Barack Obama were white and named Bart Oberstar. If you think there would be, you are delusional."
Notice, as well, how quickly the question of John McCain's qualifications (he was born in the Panama Canal Zone) went away in 2008.
A list of inconsistencies could grow long. I appreciate the fact that you are invoking intellectual honesty here, but I think you are giving the narrow-minded element of the right wing (a very large element) more credit than they deserve.
We will simply have to agree to disagree.
Firstly, Mr. Manifesto, I agree that there is such a thing as racism. Most conservatives are not racist. That is what I am saying. Birthers are idiots. I did something I never do (just now). I wrote a post making fun of birthers. I generally try to make my posts more creative non-fiction with a moral to the story or a political argument embedded. However, because of your post (and a thousand others, especially Sue's at "Helloooo Mr. President," I made an exception.
I just don't want to be falsely identified (guilt by association) as considering "racism" to be an attribute of conservatism. It is a straw man attribute.
By the way, it was not your article, per se, that inspired me to leave a comment here. It was your article combined with Mr. Jodell's statement: "You nailed it." He then used other attributes, narrow-minded, ignorant, partisan, judgmental, hateful, and would never accept anyone of their own kinds. I feel like he is using all of these adjectives in reference to racists, aka, republicans. Either I have misjudged him, or he has misjudged conservatives. There are plenty of legitimate accusations to make about the conservative philosophy. I don’t want to combine false attributes as part of my attack. To do so makes my attack partially erroneous and therefore less effective. It does not strengthen my argument, but it weakens it. It uses confirmation bias and the need to avert cognitive dissonance to strengthen the faith those who already agree with me may have. However, it makes those who have different philosophies, such as conservatives, repel in legitimate disgust. They now see “the lies the left uses to convince each other,” and at that point I cannot stand with my left bretheren because the conservative accusation is accurate. The statement I want to reject, which I am not claiming you are making, is that conservatives are racists. To find racist conservatives and then to declare that racism is an attribute of conservatism is a composition fallacy.
A big problem is racism is something that isn't easy to prove in modern America.
For example, what, exactly is a "racist"? From what I can tell, unless you've actually been caught on tape using the "N" word, you're not really considered a racist in America (at least by white Americans).
By contrast, there are tens of millions of white, racist Americans out there, who quietly go about living their day-to-day lives. The vast majority of these people would vehemently deny they're even racist at all.
These range from the cop who beats the shit out of a black man on the street because he hates "n*ggers," to the white CEO who runs a business for decades and never hires a black person.
But unless these people are stupid enough to use the "N" word near a tape recorder, white America, by and large, doesn't consider them "racist."
John, we've clearly had different experiences with conservatives. I wouldn't say that a majority of them are what could be described as practicing racists, but a pretty large minority would fit the description. I'm what could be described as a "recovering" libertarian conservative, from my youth. I know the code words very well.
I have to move on to new posts, but let me leave you with a couple of parting thoughts. Do you recall Nixon's "Southern strategy" of 1968? Four years earlier, when LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he privately lamented that, because the majority of the Democratic Party had supported the bill, the Democrats had basically given the South away to the Republicans for the foreseeable future. I will try to appeal to your sense of political realism here -- it was absolutely no accident that the Republicans knew exactly what the significance of this was.
This is from Wikipedia:
Although the phrase "Southern strategy" is often attributed to Nixon political strategist Kevin Phillips, he did not originate it,[2] but merely popularized it.[3] In an interview included in a 1970 New York Times article, he touched on its essence:
From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.[4]
While Phillips sought to polarize ethnic voting in general, and not just to win the white South, the South was by far the biggest prize yielded by his approach. Its success began at the presidential level, gradually trickling down to statewide offices, the Senate and House, as some legacy segregationist Democrats retired or switched to the GOP. In addition, the Republican Party worked for years to develop grassroots political organizations across the South, supporting candidates for local school boards and offices, for instance. Following the Watergate scandal, there was broad support for the Southern Democrat Jimmy Carter in the 1976 election.
From 1948 to 1984 the Southern states, traditionally a stronghold for the Democrats, became key swing states, providing the popular vote margins in the 1960, 1968 and 1976 elections. During this era, several Republican candidates expressed support for states' rights, which some critics claim was a "codeword" of opposition to federal enforcement of civil rights for blacks and intervention on their behalf, including passage of legislation to protect the franchise.[5]
Back to me. It was absolutely no accident that conservative Republicans were easily able to convert white Southerners into GOP voters. And it's absolutely no accident now that the "birther" phenomenon finds its greatest numbers among rural white Southerners.
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