Dirty Hippies » Racism

Socialist You

Tom Sullivan — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 02:57:16 +0000

The late George Carlin had this comedy bit involving a four-letter word starting with S. He marveled at how it was this all-purpose expletive. He provided lots of examples. What fascinated Carlin was how everyone used the S-word figuratively. Almost never literally.

Socialist is like that. Conservatives started throwing the word around with gusto when Barack Obama began running for president. Socialist is the conservative all-purpose epithet beginning with S.

Of course, they never use it literally, either. Most could not define socialism if you put their own guns to their heads. But as an all-purpose slur, precision is not the point. As in, “If I ever get my hands on that socializing, socialistic socialist, I’m gonna shove my socializing boot right up his socialist butt!”

Conservatives complain that, after they worked so hard for so long to turn the word liberal into a four-letter word, a lot of liberals just started calling themselves progressives. But you don’t have to be Lee Atwater to figure that one out. Progressive is just the L-word with a P.

Conservatives used to prefer communist as an epithet. But using it now makes them sound silly, since not even the Chinese are communists any more (and they own stock in corporations that partner with the Chinese), so a lot of conservatives just started using socialist. Makes it sound like they know a secret, like they got their inside information by waterboarding Boris Badenov.

The great thing about socialist is -– they have workshops on this stuff at CPAC, don’t they? –- it’s a four-letter word you can get away with saying out loud on radio and television. (See, that’s because socialist has eight letters — heh-heh, as President George W. Bush might say.)

Lately, they have traded their dog whistles for bullhorns. Clowns in powdered wigs may think saying “knickers” with a sly wink is high comedy at CPAC: “What, ‘knickers’? I can say knickers because I wear knickers.” Newt Gingrich will call Barack Obama the “food stamp president” and feign offense at the suggestion his phrasing is racist. Not even Fox News would let you on TV again if you used the actual N-word on the air. But you can call the president of the United States a socialist all day and never have to explain what you really mean. Which is good. Because sometimes socialist is just the N-word with an S.

People who deny that are only lying to themselves. Everyone is wise to them except them.

The Southern Strategy: A Tumor of the Soul

Tom Sullivan — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:14:07 +0000

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a waiter. For seven years. Before PCs. Back in the age of LPs and carbon paper. I remember one customer who, after he’d signed his credit card receipt and I handed him his copy, asked me to give him the carbons (back then we used carbon paper).

I must have had a puzzled look on my face because he asked if I knew why he wanted them. I didn’t. He explained that it was because criminals sometimes go dumpster diving for carbons to steal credit card numbers. Huh? It would never have occurred to me, I said. That’s because you don’t have a criminal mind, he replied. Maybe for the first time it dawned on me that it takes a certain bent of mind to turn one’s creativity to criminal mischief.

All that is preface to Ari Berman’s new Nation essay, “How the GOP Is Resegregating the South.” In their vanity, some liberals like to think of themselves as more intelligent and creative than their conservative counterparts, but Berman shows just how creatively Republicans of a certain bent have twisted the Voting Rights Act to renovate their Southern Strategy and dilute minority influence — by packing as many minority voters into as few congressional districts as possible.

In virtually every state in the South, at the Congressional and state level, Republicans—to protect and expand their gains in 2010—have increased the number of minority voters in majority-minority districts represented overwhelmingly by black Democrats while diluting the minority vote in swing or crossover districts held by white Democrats.

[...]

According to data compiled by Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy North Carolina, precincts that are 90 percent white have a 3 percent chance of being split, and precincts that are 80 percent black have a 12 percent chance of being split, but precincts with a BVAP between 15 and 45 percent have a 40 percent chance of being split. Republicans “systematically moved [street] blocks in or out of their precincts on the basis of their race,” found Ted Arrington, a redistricting expert at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. “No other explanation is possible given the statistical data.” Such trends reflect not just a standard partisan gerrymander but an attack on the very idea of integration. In one example, Senate redistricting chair Bob Rucho admitted that Democratic State Senator Linda Garrou was drawn out of her plurality African-American district in Winston-Salem and into an overwhelmingly white Republican district simply because she is white. “The districts here take us back to a day of segregation that most of us thought we’d moved away from,” says State Senator Dan Blue Jr., who in the 1990s was the first African-American Speaker of the North Carolina House.

Then-Republican Party Chair Ken Mehlman apologized to the 2005 NAACP national convention for the thirty years of this Republican strategy. You see how much that was worth. Republican master strategist Lee Atwater repented of this kind of politics as he faced his death in 1991:

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The ’80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don’t know who will lead us through the ’90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

Obviously, the Koch brothers, Art Pope and the GOP leadership in Raleigh and ALEC didn’t listen. Berman writes that the new Southern Strategy makes it “difficult for voting rights advocates to prove in federal court that packing minority voters into majority-minority districts diminishes their ability to elect candidates of choice.” Because allowing them representation is just the point. It just concentrates minorities into apartheid-like districts where their political influence can be minimized and controlled. This new-and-improved Southern Strategy assumes “that black people can only represent black people and white people can only represent white people,” according to North Carolina State Senator Eric Mansfield.

“What’s uniform across the South is that Republicans are using race as a central basis in drawing districts for partisan advantage,” says Anita Earls, a prominent civil rights lawyer and executive director of the Durham-based Southern Coalition for Social Justice. “The bigger picture is to ultimately make the Democratic Party in the South be represented only by people of color.” The GOP’s long-term goal is to enshrine a system of racially polarized voting that will make it harder for Democrats to win races on local, state, federal and presidential levels. Four years after the election of Barack Obama, which offered the promise of a new day of postracial politics in states like North Carolina, Republicans are once again employing a Southern Strategy that would make Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater proud.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Tea Party Activist’s Racist Email Shocks Orange County GOP

Diane Sweet — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 10:17:01 +0000

Claude Rains unavailable for comment.

A Southern California Tea Party activist and Republican Party official came under fire Saturday after it was revealed that she sent an email including an altered photo depicting President Barack Obama as an ape.

The e-mail sent by party central committee member Marilyn Davenport shows an image posed like a family portrait, of chimpanzee parents and child, (That’s right, the deceased mother of the President of the US is portrayed as a chimpanzee, too.)with Obama’s face superimposed on the child. Text beneath the photo reads, “Now you know why no birth certificate.”

County GOP Chairman Scott Baugh said he “received it Friday afternoon and quickly responded with an email telling Davenport it was “dripping with racism and is in very poor taste.” Baugh has called for Davenport’s resignation, and says the incident should be referred to the ethics committee.

“If Davenport refuses to resign, she should be ousted, said Michael Schroeder, former chairman of the California Republican Party and an Orange County GOP activist. “I looked at it, and my jaw dropped,” Schroeder said.”

Davenport responded initially by blasting the leak as “cowardly,” and attacking the “liberal media.”

Scott Moxley of the OC Weekly pointed out some startling facts about Orange County:

“Orange County might be a beautiful oceanfront locale, but it’s also home to Holocaust deniers, vicious anti-gay bigots and freakish big-haired televangelists.

Here, one of our Republican politicians welcomed the inauguration of the first African American U.S. president in early 2009 by sending out an email that depicted a watermelon field in front of the White House.”

When Los Alamitos Mayor Dean Grose emailed the White House watermelon photograph, he was defended by…guess who? Marilyn Davenport. California Republican Party Michael Schroder said that whe “Newport City Councillman voted against installing grass turf near the beach because it would “attract Mexicans”,” Davenport also came to his defense as well.

Reached by telephone before her “official” comments on the matter, Davenport told OC Weekly “Oh, come on! Everybody who knows me knows that I am not a racist. It was a joke. I have friends who are black.(Emphasis mine.) Besides, I only sent it to a few people–mostly people I didn’t think would be upset by it.”

I wonder if any of Davenport’s black friends received the email, and why did she think that some people might be upset by it?

In her “official” statement, Davenport said that “I will NOT resign my central committee position over this matter that the average person knows and agrees is much to do about nothing.” The full statement can be read here.

KCAL and KCBS reported during their respective 10 and 11 p.m. broadcasts that in a telephone interview Davenport blamed the media for this controversy and slammed down the phone.