Category: Racism

Today’s Must Read

No Comments

Charlie Pierce notices something about the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, specifically the treatment of the body:

I keep coming back to what seems to me to be the most inhumane thing of all, the inhumane thing that happened before the rage began to rise, and before the backlash began to build, and before the cameras and television lights, and before the tear gas and the stun grenades and the chants and the prayers. I keep coming back to the one image that was there before the international event began, before it became a television show and a symbol in flames and something beyond what it was in the first place. I keep coming back to one simple moment, one ghastly fact. One image, from which all the other images have flowed.

They left the body in the street.

Dictators leave bodies in the street.

Petty local satraps leave bodies in the street.

Warlords leave bodies in the street.

A police officer shot Michael Brown to death. And they left his body in the street. For four hours. Bodies do not lie in the street for four hours. Not in an advanced society. Bodies lie in the street for four hours in small countries where they have perpetual civil war. Bodies lie in the street for four hours on back roads where people fight over the bare necessities of simple living, where they fight over food and water and small, useless parcels of land. Bodies lie in the street for four hours in places in which poor people fight as proxies for rich people in distant places, where they fight as proxies for the men who dig out the diamonds, or who drill out the oil, or who set ancient tribal grudges aflame for modern imperial purposes that are as far from the original grudges as bullets are from bows. Those are the places where they leave bodies in the street, as object lessons, or to make a point, or because there isn’t the money to take the bodies away and bury them, or because nobody gives a damn whether they are there or not. Those are the places where they leave bodies in the street.

4 hours with his body lying in the street, with no effort to cover him.

This cannot be seen as anything but a demonstration of raw power to, and contempt of, the community, by which I mean the people of color in Ferguson, Missouri.

It may not say anything conclusive about what happened that day, but it does fairly clearly tell us that the police force of Ferguson do not see themselves as protectors of the poorer side of town. They see themselves as an occupying force.  (Of course, whole Mosul in Missouri thing that has been going has made this pretty clear anyway. )

That being said, read the rest of Charlie Pierce’s post. It is quite good.

It’s a Gang Sign, He’s Black. QED

No Comments

It appears that both CNN and the right wing twitterverse think that any hand gesture by a black man is a gang symbol:

Today in Ferguson, Mo., news, The Washington Post takes on the assertion that Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson has been photographed flashing gang signs with members of the community.

He has not.

To reiterate: Capt. Johnson is a member of Kappa Alpha Psi, a black fraternity that was formed in 1911 at Indiana University in Bloomington, and the hand sign you see in the pictures below is a Kappa greeting. The Kappas are part of the Divine Nine or the National Pan-Hellenic Council, the nine historically black fraternities and sororities that include Delta Sigma Theta, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Alpha Phi Alpha, Omega Psi Phi, Phi Beta Sigma, Zeta Phi Beta, Sigma Gamma Rho and Iota Phi Theta, none of which are gangs.

(emphasis mine)

Yes, a back man is President, so there is no more racism in society.

Make the stupid stop. Please.

The Most Transparent Coverup Ever

No Comments

So, the Ferguson police department, aka the gang that cannot shoot straight, but will do so with fully automatic weapons mounted on top of an MRAP, decided to both release the shooting officer’s name and begin a policy of character assassination against Michael Brown:

Police on Friday said that Darren Wilson, the officer who shot and killed Michael Brown last weekend, confronted Brown after the teenager was identified as the main suspect in a convenience store robbery that occurred Saturday morning.

 However, hours later, authorities said that the robbery was not the reason for the encounter that ended with Brown shot to death on a suburban St. Louis street, suggesting that it was unrelated to the confrontation.

As Ezra Klein notes, “The police are the issue in Ferguson, not Michael Brown’s character.”

I am tempted to go all Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp fiction, and asking if Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson thinks that we look like a bitch, because he is certainly trying to f%$# us like one.

If there are not multiple of indictments of the police involved in this, both for the town of Ferguson and for St. Louis county, I will be suggest that it will be because of collusion between the police and the prosecutors.

Thoughts on Ferguson: Part 2: the Protests and the Police Response

No Comments

These are not peace officers, These are an implacably hostile occupying force.

This guy is eager to start shooting “animals”

First, and perhaps most telling, was the police officer caught on tape screamig, “Bring it, all you f%$#ing animals! Bring it!”

This is not just a cop who is ill trained to either handl a protest and defuse potential violence, this is someone who actively wants to shoot some people. (One does wonder which Cracker Jack box this guy got his badge out of)

Then, we have the comments by the Ferguson police chief, blaming the violence on “outside agitators,” which has historical echos to the comments of people like Birmingham’s infamous police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor.

I think that it is fairly clear that both the Ferguson, and the St. Louis County PD have not covered themselves with glory, but a bigger issue is the increasing militarization of the police, and their increasing view of the general public as the enemy:

Michael Brown was shot dead by an officer from a police force of 53, serving a population of just 21,000. But the police response to a series of protests over his death has been something more akin to the deployment of an army in a miniature warzone.

 Ferguson police have deployed stun grenades, rubber bullets and what appear to be 40mm wooden baton rounds to quell the protests in a show of force that is a stark illustration of the militarization of police forces in the US.

 “I’m a soldier, I’m a military officer and I know when there’s a need for such thing, but I don’t think in a small town of 22,000 people you need up-armor vehicles,” Cristian Balan, a communications officer in the US army, who was not speaking on behalf of the US military, told the Guardian. “Even if there’s an active shooter – are you really going to use an up-armor vehicle? Do you really need it?”

Of course the don’t but the Pentagon is giving away their slightly older stuff for free, and they are fun toys.

The problem is that it makes things worse, not better:

“As we’ve seen in Ferguson, the militarization of policing tends to escalate the risk of violence to the communities,”said Kara Dansky, senior counsel with the ACLU’s Center for Justice and the prime author of its June 2014 report on the militarization of US police. “We think that historically, the police and the military have had different roles and that American neighborhoods aren’t war zones and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies.”

 She said the trend of militarizing local police forces has continued over the past several decades and that communities of color bare the brunt of most military policing.

 Representative Hank Johnson, a house Democrat from Georgia, said on Thursday that he plans to introduce the “Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act”, which would end the department of defense’s military surplus program.

Your mouth to God’s ear, Representative Johnson.

I would also suggest that requiring on duty police to wear cameras at all time would help.  We know what happens when both the police, and the citizenry, become aware that there is monitoring of law enforcement interactions with the general populace:

.
In 2012, Rialto, a small city in California’s San Bernardino County, outfitted its police officers with small Body Cams to be worn at all times and record all working hours. The $900 cameras weighed 108 grams and were small enough to fit on each officer’s collar or sunglasses. They recorded full-color video for up to 12 hours, which was automatically uploaded at the end of each shift, where it could be held and analyzed in a central database.

 When researchers studied the effect of cameras on police behavior, the conclusions were striking. Within a year, the number of complaints filed against police officers in Rialto fell by 88 percent and “use of force” fell by 59 percent. “When you put a camera on a police officer, they tend to behave a little better, follow the rules a little better,” Chief William A. Farrar, the Rialto police chief, told the New York Times. “And if a citizen knows the officer is wearing a camera, chances are the citizen will behave a little better.”

The situation in Ferguson has gotten so bad that both liberal icon Elizabeth Warren, and Teabagger militant Justin Amash have condemned the overreaction of the police, and civil rights icon John Lewis has called for Barack Obama to federalize the National Guard and declaring martial law.

On the bright side, the local constabulary, both the Ferguson and the St. Louis county PD have been removed from command, and replaced by the state Highway Patrol, which has resulted in a lighter touch and less violence:

A wall of militarised police had blocked the centre of Ferguson, Missouri, this week, shooting teargas and rubber bullets at seething protesters who dared to show any defiance.

 On Thursday evening it melted away.

 A carnival-like demonstration filled the centre of the city after a new police chief given control of protests over the killing of an unarmed 18-year-old implemented a dramatic shift in tactics.

 Hundreds of people gathered at the same intersection in this northern suburb of St Louis that has been the epicentre of violent clashes with police in the previous days.

 But where the officers with assault rifles once stood, backed by armoured trucks topped with snipers’ nests, on Thursday there was almost no police presence.

 Car horns filled the air as people blew whistles and chanted “no justice, no peace” and “hands up, don’t shoot”, the slogan adopted in solidarity with Michael Brown, who according to witnesses was shot by a police officer as he fled a confrontation with his arms aloft on Saturday afternoon.

 The shift followed the installation of Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri state highway patrol as the effective commander on the ground, under orders earlier in the day from the state governor, Jay Nixon. His force replaced the St Louis county police in leading the operation

Gee, a simple rule, “Don’t be a savage and blindly unreasoning racist asshole,” appears to have defused much of the situation.

I think that the police forces in that part of Missouri rate a full deep dive investigation of their policies and actions by the Feds.

Zero tolerance, baby.

Thoughts on Ferguson: Part 1: the Shooting

No Comments

This first bit is arguably the least important detail in the whole affair.

What we know at this point is that two black men of roughly college age, Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson, were walking down the street, that a police officer confronted them over this and it ended with Michael Brown dead from multiple gunshot wounds.

The video you see is Dorian Johnson describing the confrontation.

The police claim that Mr. Johnson went for the gun, and Mr. Johnson claims that the (as still unnamed) police officer went after Mr. Brown, and that Brown was trying to get away, and his death was the result of the police officer being shot while holding his hands up.

So, what really happened?

I don’t know, but what I do know is that what happened in the immediate aftermath is very strange.

What surprises me is that Dorian Johnson has not yet been questioned by police.  Heck, it surprises me that he wasn’t taken into custody, as he wasn’t just a witness, but he was a part of the incident, as he was walking down the street with the victim.

The only reason that I can imagine that the police are studiously avoiding questioning witnesses in this matter is because the police already knew what happened, that the officer was at fault, and they are trying to cover it up.

Note that I am not talking about the law enforcement reaction to the protests, that will be part 2, I am simply describing the profound irregularities in the investigation that I cannot explain except by deliberate wrongdoing.

Quote of the Day

No Comments

If a thousand armed Blacks had gathered in one place, pointing rifles at federal officers, and two of them later cold-bloodedly assassinated policemen, the federal response would touch every Black neighborhood in America. But the armed white Right gets a pass. Racists are resources to those in power. “The national security state’s legitimacy is based on (white) mass fear and loathing of the Other.”

—Glen Ford at the Black Agenda Report

Chaos is Job Won!*

No Comments

What a surprise. After a decades long assault from the right wing, and an increasingly hostile judiciary, the bigots have managed to re-segregate our public schools:

For decades, federal desegregation orders were the potent tool that broke the back of Jim Crow education in the South, helping transform the region’s educational systems into the most integrated in the country.

 Federal judges, often facing down death threats and violence, blanketed Southern states with hundreds of court orders that set out specific plans and timetables to ensure the elimination of racial segregation. Federal agencies then aggressively used the authority of the courts to monitor hostile school systems, wielding the power of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to strip federal dollars from districts that refused to desegregate.

 The pace of the change wrought by the federal courts was breathtaking. In 1963, about 1 percent of black children in the South attended school with white children. By the early 1970s, the South had been remade — fully 90 percent of black children attended desegregated schools. Court orders proved most successful in the South, but were also used in an attempt to combat de facto segregation in schools across the country, from New York to Michigan to Arizona.

 Today, this once-powerful force is in considerable disarray.

 A ProPublica examination shows that officials in scores of school districts do not know the status of their desegregation orders, have never read them, or erroneously believe that orders have been ended. In many cases, orders have gone unmonitored, sometimes for decades, by the federal agencies charged with enforcing them.

 At the height of the country’s integration efforts, there were some 750 school districts across the country known to be under desegregation orders.

 Today, court orders remain active in more than 300 districts. In some cases, that’s because judges have determined that schools have not met their mandate to eliminate all vestiges of segregation.

 But some federal courts don’t even know how many desegregation orders still exist on their dockets. With increasing frequency, federal judges are releasing districts from court oversight even where segregation prevails, at times taking the lack of action in cases as evidence that the problems have been resolved.

 ………

 Since the 1990s, the Supreme Court has sharply curtailed the power of parents to challenge racial inequities in schools. Districts not under court orders are largely prohibited from considering race to balance schools. And parents in these districts must show that school officials are intentionally discriminating when they make decisions that adversely affect black and Latino students.

 And so, as desegregation orders are ignored, forgotten or lifted, black parents are losing the ability to effectively challenge school inequality.

 Over the course of months, ProPublica has compiled the nation’s most comprehensive and accurate data on active desegregation orders. We used legal databases, academic studies and contacted more than 160 school districts across the country.

This is not an accident.

Between the Republican Party’s embrace of segregation for political success, and the Democratic Party’s cowardly unwillingness to enforce the law to placate people who will never for then, we are back to separate and unequal.

*H/T Trit on the Stellar Parthenon BBS for that quote.

This Should Have Happened Years Ago

No Comments

Donald Sterling has been banned from the NBA for life and must sell the LA Clippers.

I do not know whether this will survive the inevitable court challenge (If the NBA were smart, they would make an above market value offer to get this sh%$ off the table).

Still, I think that the big point was made by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, that we have known that Sterling was a racist dirtbag for years:

Yes, I’m angry, too, but not just about the sins of Donald Sterling. I’ve got a list. But let’s start with Sterling. I used to work for him, back in 2000 when I coached for the Clippers for three months. He was congenial, even inviting me to his daughter’s wedding. Nothing happened or was said to indicate he suffered from IPMS (Irritable Plantation Master Syndrome). Since then, a lot has been revealed about Sterling’s business practices:

  • 2006: U.S. Dept. of Justice sued Sterling for housing discrimination. Allegedly, he said, “Black tenants smell and attract vermin.”
  • 2009: He reportedly paid $2.73 million in a Justice Dept. suit alleging he discriminated against blacks, Hispanics, and families with children in his rentals. (He also had to pay an additional nearly $5 million in attorneys fees and costs due to his counsel’s “sometimes outrageous conduct.”)
  • 2009: Clippers executive (and one of the greatest NBA players in history) sued for employment discrimination based on age and race.

………

What bothers me about this whole Donald Sterling affair isn’t just his racism. I’m bothered that everyone acts as if it’s a huge surprise. Now there’s all this dramatic and very public rending of clothing about whether they should keep their expensive Clippers season tickets. Really? All this other stuff I listed above has been going on for years and this ridiculous conversation with his girlfriend is what puts you over the edge? That’s the smoking gun?

 He was discriminating against black and Hispanic families for years, preventing them from getting housing. It was public record. We did nothing. Suddenly he says he doesn’t want his girlfriend posing with Magic Johnson on Instagram and we bring out the torches and rope. Shouldn’t we have all called for his resignation back then?

 ………

 Make no mistake: Donald Sterling is the villain of this story. But he’s just a handmaiden to the bigger evil. In our quest for social justice, we shouldn’t lose sight that racism is the true enemy. He’s just another jerk with more money than brains.

I got nothing to add, really.

The Nexus of Sports and Racism, and Clueless Conservative Bloggers

No Comments

Normally, I would not comment on the the recent racial diatribe of LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling, but the right wing blogs, who have spent the past few years claiming that there is no more racism, decided that the sports mogul is proof that racism does continue to exist ……… in the Democratic Party.

The problem is that none of them bothered to look at his party registration:

Over the weekend, while nation-wide attention was focused on the racist comments reportedly made by Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, some conservative commentators were focused on something else: Sterling’s party affiliation.

Specifically, certain conservatives were taking the media to task for supposedly ignoring Sterling’s ties to the Democratic Party. But a bit of context was missing. Sterling is a registered Republican.

A search of The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s website using Sterling’s name, date of birth, and address turns up a Republican registration, and the registrar-recorder’s office confirmed the information to TPM on Monday. (The initial tip came to TPM from public records compiler eMerges.)



………

By Monday afternoon, The National Review had updated its piece on Sterling’s political ties. The correction read as follows:

“An earlier version of this post identified Sterling as a Democrat. Although his political donations appear to have been exclusively to Democrats, his official party affiliation is not known. A Clippers representative did not respond to requests for his present political affiliation.”

You f%$#ed up.  He is a registered ‘Phant, and if you had practiced journalism 101, you would have found this out.

Admit it, and move on, wankers.

No Blogging for You!

No Comments

I just got back from picking up my mother in law to the airport.

She visited my sister in law in Memphis over Passover.

Unfortunately, this means that I will have to delay my brilliantly satirical essay about how conservatives are stunned and chagrined to discover that their favorite welfare cheat rancher is a bigot who liked slavery because it kept them in their place.

Posted via mobile.

That’s Gonna Leave a Mark (Paul Ryan Edition)

No Comments

Paul Krugman serves a can of whup ass on Paul Ryan for his racist dog whistles:

There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about.

 So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. [As an aside, when he was a senior in high school, Charles Murray burned a cross next to a police station, which sort of describes his whole career since then] Oh, wait.

 Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.

 Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.

Krugman makes a point that needs to be made.  Ever since the days of Barry Goldwater’s Southern Strategy, the Republican party has aggressively embraced racists and racism, so the the dialogue within the GOP is permeated with racism.

So he said something that makes perfect sense within a political party that is lacking in, “mindful human beings,” to quote what Ronald Reagan, Jr. said about Dick Cheney, but it was viewed with horror by much of the rest of humanity.

And then there is Timothy Egan, who observes that Ryan, who frequently makes hay of the fact that his great-great-grandfather fled the Irish potato famine, which was a product of near-genocidal British policies, which were driven from the Victorian concerns about fostering dependency, which is exactly the same point that he makes when assaulting the social safety net:

In advance of St. Patrick’s Day, I went time traveling, back to the 1840s and Ireland’s great famine. On one side of the Irish Sea was Victorian England, flush with the pomp and prosperity of the world’s mightiest empire. On the other side were skeletal people, dying en masse, the hollow-bellied children scrounging for nettles and blackberries.

 A great debate raged in London: Would it be wrong to feed the starving Irish with free food, thereby setting up a “culture of dependency”? Certainly England’s man in charge of easing the famine, Sir Charles Trevelyan, thought so. “Dependence on charity,” he declared, “is not to be made an agreeable mode of life.”

 And there I ran into Paul Ryan. His great-great-grandfather had fled to America. But the Republican congressman was very much in evidence, wagging his finger at the famished. His oft-stated “culture of dependency” is a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock. But it was also England’s excuse for lethal negligence.

 There is no comparison, of course, between the de facto genocide that resulted from British policy, and conservative criticism of modern American poverty programs.

 But you can’t help noticing the deep historic irony that finds a Tea Party favorite and descendant of famine Irish using the same language that English Tories used to justify indifference to an epic tragedy.

………

 On Wednesday, he went further, using the language of racial coding. This, after he told a story of a boy who didn’t want his free school lunch because it left him with “a full stomach and an empty soul.” The story was garbage — almost completely untrue.

 “We have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In other words, these people are bred poor and lazy.

 Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes — 19th-century England. The Irish national character, Trevelyan confided to a fellow aristocrat, was “defective.” The hungry millions were “a selfish, perverse, and turbulent” people, said the man in charge of relieving their plight.

Ouch.

Rule Number 1: Do Not Piss off Jon Stewart

No Comments

Rule number 2:  Going on The Daily Show to show what you are really nice guy.

Jim Kramer of Mad Money’s evisceration was, until last night, the reigning champion of this, but his take down last night of former judge Andrew Napolitano’s ignorant and bigoted spew of Neo-Confederate talking points about Abraham Lincoln mad that look like a tea party.

I’ll not show you an interview, I’ll just show you the (I sh%$ you not) game show segment.

It is unbelievably brutal:

Funny, but unbelievably brutal.

I Wish that This Was True

No Comments

In response to Georgia’s issuing a vanity plate featuring the Klu Klux Klan Confederate Battle Flag, John Perr comes up with a parody that is pure genius.

The only thing that could make this better would be if this were true:

The state of Georgia this week began offering a new version of its vehicle license plate featuring the Confederate battle flag. Sponsored by the Georgia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (to whom a portion of the purchase price and annual registration fees will go), the revised design has many people inside the state and out howling mad.

In response to the outcry, Georgia SCV commander Jack Bridwell asked, “What’s the big deal?” Echoing Bridwell’s explanation that “the design is just people trying to show who they are and trying to be proud of their heritage,” Sons of Confederate Veterans spokesman Ray McBerry invited other groups to do the same:

“We believe that all people ought to be able to celebrate their history and their heritage, and that includes Southerners. We did anticipate that there could be some folks who would not like that, but we encourage them to go and make application for their own specialty plates.”

Now, a little known organization is taking him up on the offer. The group, calling itself The American People, is sponsoring a license plate to mark the 150th anniversary of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea.

After capturing the South’s vital manufacturing center and rail hub at Atlanta, Sherman’s troops marched southeast to Savannah leaving a swath of ruin in their wake. Between November 15th and December 21st, 1864, Sherman more than accomplished his objective to “create havoc and destruction of all resources that would be beneficial to the enemy.” Sherman’s brilliant campaign (or what the Sons of Confederate Veterans brand “atrocities and war crimes“) hastened the end of the Confederacy and with it the enslavement of four million Americans.

Read the rest, it’s brilliant, and if you know anyone in Georgia, have them petition for a vanity plate.

This is f%$3ing brilliant!

I Don’t Think that I’ve Ever Seen Jon Stewart Angrier

No Comments

John Stewart and Larry Wilmore tear into professional bigot Fox News Legal analyst Andrew Napolitano for rolling out standard grossly KKK/Sons of the Confederacy lies.

Notice that they are both smiling.

They are f5$#ing outraged, and the smiles never leave their faces, and Wilmore draws blood when he compares Napolitano’s differing attitudes on the Civil War and the Revolutionary war, “You know, there’s something not right when you feel the only black thing worth fighting for is tea,” but he drives a much deserved stake through the anti-tax libertarianism espoused by Napolitano, and Fox, when he says, “You think it’s immoral for the government to reach into your pocket, rip your money away from its warm home and claim it as its own property, money that used to enjoy unfettered freedom is now conscripted to do whatever its new owner tells it to. Now, I know this is going to be a leap, but you know that sadness and rage you feel about your money? Well, that’s the way some of us feel about people.”

It’s frightening that such a contemptible human being as Napolitano was once a judge.

Just watch.

I am Feeling so Much Schadenfraude Right Now

No Comments

Its beginning to look like George Zimmerman is starting to learn that there are people out there who aren’t NRA gun nuts with small penises with racial murder fantasies:

Zimmerman taped an interview last Tuesday with Univision and Fusion, and then took his girlfriend, her kid and his brother to the beach. While they were catching some rays, people noticed him, started harassing him, and then someone shouted out George had a $10,000 bounty on his head.

We’re told it freaked him out and they all retreated to the hotel, but the crowd followed them.

Security swept their room to make sure no one tampered with their stuff and then stood guard throughout the day and night. We’re told Zimmerman did his CNN interview early the next morning and then beat it … literally fleeing Miami.

I am not feeling any sympathy, or empathy, for that racist murderer right now.

Tinfoil Hat Time

No Comments

Loretta Fuddy, the director of the Hawaii Department of Health, was killed in a plane crash.

Ms. Fuddy was the official who released Obama’s “Long Form” birth certificate.

Within minutes, “whacko, my parents are first cousins, X-Files wannabe, black helicopter, tinfoil hat wearing, stupid, dim-witted, thinks pro wrestling is real,”* lunatic teabaggers were already saying that she was murdered for knowing too much:

When President Obama marched into the White House briefing room with his Hawaiian birth certificate in April 2011, he said: “I know that there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest.”

How right he was. The release of his long-form birth certificate did not eliminate the “birther” movement, which wrongly contends that Obama was born in Kenya and is therefore ineligible to be president. Although conspiracists had demanded its release, once he made public the document it merely shifted the debate. Some birthers accused Obama of forgery, while others turned their focus to his college transcripts in hopes of proving that he had applied for admission as a foreign student. (He had not.)

And this week, birthers seized on a plane crash off Hawaii that killed one person: state public health Director Loretta Fuddy, the woman who verified the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate.

Skeptics turned to social media Thursday to suggest that Obama had played some role in Fuddy’s death. Twitter posts included: “The WH tying up loose ends?” “What did she really know?” and “R.I.P. Loretta Fuddy — we’ll know the truth about Barack Hussein Obama, regardless.”

Donald Trump, a longtime doubter of Obama’s birthplace, also weighed in on Twitter: “How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.”

That reaction didn’t surprise those who study conspiracy theorists.

Wankers.

*Sorry, I think that I just channeled the comedian Denis Leary.

Putting the The Right’s Hypocritical Eulogies of Nelson Mandela in Perspective

No Comments

I am not referring here to the bigots who responded to Senator Ted Cruz’s (R-Crazytown) tribute to Mandela, while they are repulsive medieval racists, they are honest in their hate.

Rather, I am accusing the folks like Ted Cruz who are now claiming that they’ve always thought that he was a hero opposing a great injustice, when this is clearly not the case.

In fact, while Nelson Mandela was in Robben Island prison, mainstream movement conservatives were literally paid representatives of the Apartheid regime:

Nelson Mandela died yesterday, and all around the world, much-deserved hosannas are coming in, praising the life of one of the most important figures in modern Western history. That last bit reflects my own bias. What’s become clear in all my studies of our history of World War II, of the Civil War, of Tocqueville, of Rousseau, of Zionism, of black nationalism, is that understanding Enlightenment ideals requires understanding those places where ideals and humanity meet. If you call yourself a lover of democracy, but have not studied the black diaspora, your deeds mock your claims. Understanding requires more than sloganeering, and parroting—it requires confronting our failures.

For many years, a large swath of this country failed Nelson Mandela, failed its own alleged morality, and failed the majority of people living in South Africa. We have some experience with this. Still, it’s easy to forget William F. Buckley—intellectual founder of the modern right—effectively worked as a press agent for apartheid:

Buckley was actively courted by Chiang Kai-Shek’s Taiwan, Franco’s Spain, South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal’s African colonies, and went on expenses-paid trips trips to some of these countries.

When he returned from Mozambique in 1962, Buckley wrote a column describing the backwardness of the African population over which Portugal ruled, “The more serene element in Africa tends to believe that rampant African nationalism is self-discrediting, and that therefore the time is bound to come when America, and the West … will depart from our dogmatic anti-Colonialism and realize what is the nature of the beast.”
In the fall of 1962, during a visit to South Africa, arranged by the Information Ministry, Buckley wrote that South African apartheid “has evolved into a serious program designed to cope with a melodramatic dilemma on whose solution hangs, quite literally, the question of life or death for the white man in South Africa.”

Buckley’s racket as an American paid propagandist for white supremacy would be repeated over the years in conservative circles. As Sam Kleiner demonstrates in Foreign Policy, apartheid would ultimately draw some of America’s most celebrated conservatives into its orbit. The roster includes Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Jesse Helms, and Senator Jeff Flake. Jerry Falwell denounced Desmond Tutu as a “phony” and led a “reinvestment” campaign during the 1980s. At the late hour of 1993, Pat Robertson opined, “I know we don’t like apartheid, but the blacks in South Africa, in Soweto, don’t have it all that bad.”

It’s also important to remember that one of William F. Buckley’s contributions to modern movement conservative was to incorporate, and legitimize a new language of racism into both the conservative movement and the Republican Party:

I know it is often hard to understand the difference between racists and conservatives, but here is some help to redefine the lexicon and come up with a simple translation guide.
………

 Theodore Bilbo

To preserve her blood, the white South must absolutely deny social equality to the Negro regardless of what his individual accomplishments might be. This is the premise – openly and frankly stated – upon which Southern policy is based. This position is so thoroughly justified in the minds of white Southerners that it is sometimes difficult for them to comprehend the reasoning of those who seriously dispute it.

William F. Buckley

The central question that emerges . . . is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not prevail numerically? The sobering answer is Yes – the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is a fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists.

 National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct. . . . It is more important for the community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.

See, we’re used to the naked racism of the hood wearing Klansman. Yet, since the 1950’s, most racism has been cloaked in the sort of academic langugae which hides the meaning of the statement.

 We can reduce example one to saying: them niggers will fuck our white women and make us stupid. Yet, Goldberg is no more likely to say that than to run naked down the street. So he has to couch his language in terms which will be polite and acceptable.

 Now, in example two, Buckley, says nearly the same thing as Sen. Bilbo, but in much less passionate language.

(As an aside, I really miss Steve Gilliard’s ferocious writing)

The right wing spent decades demonizing and attempting to marginalize Nelson Mandela.  To pretend anything else is to take the rest of to be historically illiterate idiots.