Gawker 
Enter your username and password.
New York, 2:57 PM
Sun Nov 29
12 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip Your Editors:
tips@gawker.com
Tipline: 646-214-8138
Editor-in-Chief:
Gabriel Snyder | Email
West Coast Editor:
Richard Rushfield | Email
Contributing Editors:
Valleywag:
Ryan Tate | Email
Media:
Hamilton Nolan | Email
Politics:
Alex Pareene | Email
Investigations:
John Cook | Email
Entertainment:
Brian Moylan | Email
Nights:
Adrian Chen | Email
Azaria Jagger | Email
Ravi Somaiya | Email
Weekends:
Foster Kamer | Email
Video Editor:
Richard Blakeley | Email
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
09/18/09
and is he conveniently the only one that found birthers and black family reunion peeps sharing the mall that day. [btw, racists are usually find buying stuff from people they don't like or disparage or they feel are different and deserve less).
finally, he just happened to go jogging there. he did not go himself.
yeh.
09/18/09
09/19/09
David - Isn't the heart of your column, the rurals resent being judged and bossed by the urbans, who think they're smarter. And isn't that what you've done?
09/18/09
[www.ocpathink.org]
09/18/09
09/18/09
Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer wrote an article calling people un-American for "drowning out opposing views" when those very people were trying to express opposing views on health care reform. I'd call that the same ballpark. Sharpton urged "decent" Americans to not allow health care reform to be turned into a "racial issue". Jimmy Carter basically said that the majority of people who disagree with the President are racists. And how can accusing him of being a Muslim, which essentially no one does, be "racist"? Muslims aren't a race of people. There are Arab Muslims, Persian Muslims, African Muslims, Chinese Muslims, etc. Do you honestly think that The Right would be any less vitriolic toward Hillary Clinton? Or John Kerry? Do you not remember the Swift Vets? Did The Right hate Ted Kennedy because he was Catholic?
09/18/09
09/18/09
09/18/09
Someone wake me up, when David gets back to earth.
09/18/09
That mode of thinking is even more bullshit today than it was 200 years ago, when Jackson, in his paranoid, populist, ignorance, thought the country shouldn't have any sort of central bank.
09/18/09
09/18/09
09/18/09
09/18/09
09/18/09
Belonsky hits the nail on the head with the line: "They're simply continuing — um —the age old Jefferson v. Hamilton debate."
That Brooks really thinks people are consciously playing out a Jefferson/Hamilton feud is utterly preposterous. I think we live with the ramifications of this national divide, but Brooks would have us believe that nothing that's happened since Jefferson/Hamilton has made a mark on the discourse. And was he ever going to mention that Jefferson owned slaves? I mean, I know it's common knowledge, but it seems odd for him to seemingly overlook that detail when he's trying to make the argument that this all has nothing to do with race.
09/18/09
09/18/09
09/18/09
09/18/09
That said, I reiterate, that many in the anti-federalist camp these days are there for less noble reasons than their forebears.
09/18/09
09/18/09
Racism didn't end in 1865, and there is reason to continue discussing it today. Here are a few statistics from the Kaiser Family Foundation of where young black males stand in this society:
Young black males ages 15-29 represent 14 percent of the population, but make up 40 percent of the prison population.
20 percent of young black males are unemployed, vs. 10 percent of white males. (This stat dates back a few years)
In 2002, at every education level black males made less then white males.
09/18/09
09/18/09
09/18/09
Damn, that's quite a leap.
09/18/09
09/18/09
09/18/09
09/18/09
However, I think many conservatives are concerned that it is turning into a scenario where if you do not agree with POTUS you are automatically deemed a racist.
09/18/09
Nobody on the left is making any comments like that. Not even in the same ballpark. And yet, to listen to the right-wing leadership, you'd think Obama was lining up the stormtroopers and giving them their marching orders.
I don't think I've heard a single person say that the response to Obama's positions on healthcare reform, or any other political issue, is based on racism. That's not the argument. What people are saying is that the tenor of the current right-wing outrage has racist overtones. And I think the evidence is pretty clear. The Birthers, Deathers, and Teabaggers who represent the vocal movements among the right these days are made up of people who insist that Obama is a socialist, a Nazi, a foreigner, a Muslim, a eugenicist, etc.
The insistence that he is a Muslim, which implies at the same time that a Muslim is a bad thing to be, is just patently racist on its face. I'm not sure why that statement even passes as anything like civilized speech. It's not just a baseless conspiracy theory, but it's vile and disgusting racism. And even left-wingers who hear it kind of shake their heads at the silly wingnuts who say it, without really thinking about how offensive the underlying implication of the statement is.
And of course, we all know what it means when somebody implies that a black leader is "not one of us," that he is "a foreigner." It has nothing to do with rules about who can be president, and it has everything to do with that black guy not being trustworthy because he's not white. It's clearly racist.
I'm not sure how you can really be "on the fence" as far as race being a major component of the outrage against Obama on the right. Left-wing commentators (bloggers mostly) are the only people actually writing useful critiques of Obama's policies. And they are living proof that such critiques are possible without resorting to over-the-top, baldly racist bloviation. As long as people like Glenn Greenwald exist, you'll never be able to convince me that the alternative to this outrage is that Obama be given a big love-in by the GOP. You can easily criticize Obama without resorting to this nonsense. That is, if you have a head on your shoulders.
09/18/09
When folks are that uninformed, I hesitate even to apply political labels like "conservative" to them. Wouldn't it be more accurate to label them as "consumers" or something more neutral?
09/18/09
Oh, but I forgot: you're black, so you know more about this than we do.
09/18/09
I think some liberals are grouping all conservatives in the birther, Death Squad, etc.. crazies. While I rarely agree with Pelosi, I think she might be right about calming down our rhetoric and choosing our words more carefully. I just think that both sides ought to do it.
@skahammer: You make an interesting point about the uninformed. While I just shake my head at those who believe a death squad is going to give granny the thumbs up or down on whether she lives, I think the basic tenet of smaller gov't is an issue that is resonating with conservatives around health care reform.
Personally, I am for reform, I just am not a fan of the current proposals. I probably could live with gov't option, as long as insurance was mandatory if you live in this country -- whether you are an American, visitor or here illegally.
09/18/09
The problem that I see with practicing "rainbow populism" (see Bobby Kennedy ca. 1968 for the origins) is that such a movement has nothing to motivate voters except class-based antagonism, and that scares off the money that is so desperately needed in a campaign. Bill Clinton was pretty good at multicultural populism, at least until his health care debacle, but Obama's campaign (as opposed to his administration) did it even better.
A federal system such as ours is always going to have tension between the centralists and the sectionalists. The balancing act between centrifugal and centripetal tendencies is indeed grist for political mills, and I wouldn't have it any other way. What bugs me are the people (like my mother) who act like they've just discovered the Tenth Amendment.
09/18/09
"Bill Clinton was pretty good at multicultural populism, at least until his health care debacle, but Obama's campaign (as opposed to his administration) did it even better."
Obama's campaign isn't an example of governance. I think people keep expecting the campaign to be representative of Obama's success or ability to motivate audiences in office when they should be looking to him while he has previously been in office. Obama in-office has never been good at populism. It doesn't benefit him.
09/18/09
IMHO, William Jennings Bryan was the last great populist, but that's an entirely different discussion. One has to be willing to go against one's self-interest, and even Bill C. wasn't going to do that.
09/18/09
09/17/09
09/17/09
09/17/09
09/17/09
Clearly, Carter's dialogue is a Dog Whistle. It is one intended for Southern ears from a Southern voice. They are the ones hearing it loud and clear. They are the people who know how damn right he is.
Don't believe me? Read the posts here from Southerners. They're all on the same page as Carter.
You know who this will alienate? The full-of-shit, just-as-transparent-but-far-more-in-denial NORTHERN racists. That "Libertarian" you know who says that everyone knows that the entire South is a government dependency, but HE'S a "conservative" because he "understands economics". That "Independent" you know who says that he "just wants government off his back" while he lives in a multi-billion dollar infrastcuture northern city that supports his entire local economy.
THAT'S who Carter will alienate. Because while these "Good Ol Boiz" of the northern citues will say the very SAME things behind closed doors, they will hate Carter for calling them something worse than "racists".
He's calling them welfare-using, government-supported, private-industry shunning, broke-ass, defeated SOUTHERNERS!
And THAT, the beer-swillin' northern urban white boiz simply will not abide.
09/17/09
09/17/09
I don't know whether to laugh, cry or throw up. At this point, is it a good thing that the real "cause" behind these people come back out from the shadows? That sort of ugliness is what finally brought on one of the most progressive eras this country had ever seen.
It's not as if nobody ever knew exactly what this ilk was saying when they wouldn't come out and say shit like this. They just changed their lyric, but never their tune.
But damn, it's so fucking ugly. I just don't know.
09/17/09
09/18/09
As far as misogyny goes, they never hid that, so it's not like women of any race or orientation ever got a break on that end.
09/18/09