Leave Chris Matthews alone!
ThinkProgress and Politico, along with a slew of snarky, right wing and/or self-righteous non-right wing bloggers, hit MSNBC host Chris Matthews tonight for marveling at how he “forgot Barack Obama was black” as he watched the state of the union address.
And while I love ThinkP (and tolerate Politico,) the implication that Matthews’ comment was somehow racially insensitive, or indicated he thought someone “too black” couldn’t lead the country (TP’s take) is what you might politely call “B.S.” Read more
Is Chris Matthews the most evolved white man in America?
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews often gets criticized for being quick at the lip, and sometimes he says things he later has to take back (often because people think they’re sexist.) But when it comes to race, Matthews is probably the only white person on television, and certainly the only white male, who regularly and fearlessly confronts the issue of race — and I mean all the time, not just on MLK Day. Matthews, who can veer from liberal to in awe of Republicans (most of his relatives are Republicans, apparently, but he served in the Peace Corps, then worked for Jimmy Carter, and his son worked on the Obama campaign) at a moment’s notice, has an encyclopedic knowledge of American history, and maybe that’s why his views on racial matters are so fully formed. Whether you agree with him or not, you can’t say Chris is a “coward” when dealing with this issue. That said, MSNBC’s special “Obama’s America” was certainly not an open and shut solution to all things racial in America. But it was interesting, touching on everything from affirmative action to the birthers, and I give the guy a lot of credit for doing it. Here’s a clip:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Get more clips here. One more thing, in the category “dramatic changes of circumstance”: a year ago, Tavis Smiley would have been on that panel, right …?
Pat Buchanan’s forked tongue: race talk bad, race talk very, very good…
Uncle Pat is at it again. His latest column criticizes President Jimmy Carter for supposedly bringing race into the debate over President Obama’s policies (hm… I thought Glenn Beck did that when he claimed that Obama “has a deep seated hatred for white people and the white culture…”) Says Pat:
Carter’s contribution to the national debate represents a truly rare blend of malevolence, ignorance and moral arrogance.
How does he know what was in Joe Wilson’s heart when he blurted his insult? How does Carter know Wilson was racially motivated?
How does Carter know that an “overwhelming portion” of scores of thousands of agitated Americans who turned out for all those town-hall meetings were motivated by racism, “the fact that (Obama) is a black man, that he’s African-American”?
Yes, how could he? But just over a month ago, in July, during the Sonia Sotomayor hearings, we did get a glimpse into what was in the heart of one Patrick J. Buchanan, who wrote back then
Why did McCain fail to win the white conservative Democrats Hillary Clinton swept in the primaries? He never addressed or cared about their issues.
These are the folks whose jobs have been outsourced to China and Asia, who pay the price of affirmative action when their sons and daughters are pushed aside to make room for the Sonia Sotomayors. These are the folks who want the borders secured and the illegals sent back.
Had McCain been willing to drape Jeremiah Wright around the neck of Barack Obama, as Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis, the mainstream media might have howled.
And McCain might be president.
In other words, the July Pat was counseling Republicans to play “Willie Horton”-style racial politics to motivate white voters for the purposes of politics. September Pat is outraged that Jimmy Carter would dredge up race as part of a debate about politics. But it Carter was a Republican, and the racism he was describing was anti-white racism, wouldn’t Pat advise him to bring up those racial grievances explicitly, and repeatedly, in order to continually remind the downtrodden “victims of affirmative action” of their many grievances? Now as a caveat, I don’t think that was Carter’s purpose. He wasn’t playing grievance politics, he was lamenting what he sees as a rise in racist vitriol toward the president — not by everyone who opposes his policies or joins a protest — but by the most vitriolic elements of that protest movement. That’s a valid opinion, given Carter’s experiences. Pat, on the other hand, has explicitly advocated using racial grievance for political gain.
Talk about crass.
Lou Dobbs, Orly Taitz, and Obama’s ‘real’ birth certificate!
At what point does Lou Dobbs become such a liability to CNN, it’s no longer worth having him? The cable network’s in-house birther enabler is about to be the subject of an unflattering ad … to run on CNN. If CNN chooses not the run it, they risk looking scared. If they do, they risk damaging the credibility of one of their main voices (well, damaging him even more than he has damaged himself.) Dobbs is suffering, in ridicule and in ratings, and his boss, CNN chief Jon Klein, is looking more and more like a shmuck every time he defends Dobbs’ strange, frenetically race-baiting version of “news.” So what to do … what to do…
Watch the spot:
And now, take a gander at the birthers’ new gambit: Obama’s “real” (okay, they’ll take it…) birth certificate! Offered for your review by Internet-trained lawyer/dentist Orly Taitz and her good friend Alan Keyes. Problem: it’s a really, really bad forgery (probably like her law degree…) As the Huffpo points out:
Oddly, the same people who are so skeptical of Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate are willing to accept this new document despite many flaws, documented by the Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel and Markos Moulitsas.
Here are just some of the flaws:
Kenya was a Dominion the date this certificate was allegedly issued and would not become a republic for 8 months.Mombasa belonged to Zanzibar when Obama was born, not Kenya.
The number 47O44– 47 is Obama’s age when he became president, followed by the letter O (not a zero) followed by 44–he is the 44th president.
EF Lavender is a laundry detergent.
And as the Washington Independent points out:
- The kicker? The image is part of the extremely ill-informed conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Mombasa—conveniently, one of the more Muslim parts of the country.
This has always been a red flag for conspiracy theorists, so it deserves some explanation. Barack Obama Sr. was born and educated in Nyanza Province, in southwestern Kenya, on Lake Victoria. This is the area where Obama’s family lived and continues to live; Sarah Obama, the step-grandmother of the president, lives in Nyang’oma Kogelo, a small town in the province. But Mombasa is a city on the Indian Ocean, a thousand miles to the east. It didn’t even have an international airport until 1979. And the city wasn’t even part of Kenya when the future president was born. Mombasa was a part of Zanzibar until December 12, 1963, when it became part of the newly independent Kenya.
The Independent points out that the document may be a parody, or a ruse designed to discredit the birther movement. If so, Orly Taitz, you’ve been punk’d. Hell, even the Freeper King is debunking it, while his followers attack it as an assault on right wingers everywhere.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped our girl from submitting the document as part of her wacky court case against the president. And something tells me that if no one else will listen to her, or allow her to present the “document” on legit TV (that discounts you, Fox News,) Lou Dobbs just might give her some airtime. And what brand of headache medicine will Jon Klein be downing then?
UPDATE: CNN has opted for the fear card. They won’t run the anti-Dobbs ad.
UPDATE 2: Orly Taitz (whom crackpotty site WND describes as the “woman with a vibrant smile and ebullient personality…who’s also insane … okay I added the last bit…) appears on MSNBC with David Shuster and Tamryn Hall (playing the roles of the grownups), and promptly dissoves into a glob of quivering, crazy, Slavic-accented goo.
Oh SNL!!! You’re gonna need to call back Tina Fey…
So how many ‘birthers’ are there, anyway?
A new poll sheds light on just how far gone the Republican Party is. Per Politico’s Glenn Thrush:
A whopping 58 percent of Republicans either think Barack Obama wasn’t born in the US (28 percent) or aren’t sure (30 percent). A mere 42 percent think he was. That means a majority of Republicans polled either don’t know about — or don’t believe the seemingly incontrovertible evidence Obama’s camp has presented over and over and over that he was born in Hawaii in ‘61. It also explains why Republicans, including Roy Blunt, are playing footsie with the Birther fringe.
The actual numbers are as follows:
Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 7/27-30. All adults. MoE 2% (No trend lines)
Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?
Yes 77
No 11
Not sure 12How do those numbers break down?
Yes No Not sure
Dem 93 4 3
Rep 42 28 30
Ind 83 8 9Northeast 93 4 3
South 47 23 30
Midwest 90 6 4
West 87 7 618-29 88 4 8
30-44 72 14 14
45-59 82 8 10
60+ 69 17 14
So how many crazy, racist people are we really talking about? Well, if you figure that about 23 percent of voters ID as Republicans, and multiply that by the 131,257,328 people who voted in the 2008 presidential election, that gives us roughly 30,189,185 active Republicans as of November 2008. Multiply that number by 58% and you get 17,509,727 who can be classified as at least “soft birthers,” or going with the 28% hardcore birthers, you get 8,452,972 wingnuts lurking around out there, mostly in their mother’s basements, which they have fashioned into end of the world bunkers where they can plan the coming race war — a lot of people to be sure, and a damning percentage for a political party already in decline, but a tiny fraction of the mostly normal, rational U.S. population, and roughly four times the primetime viewership of Fox News (or close to the real-world weekly radio audience for Rush Limbaugh…)
[BTW those dismissing the poll because it was sponsored by the Daily Kos don't understand how polling works. Kos & Co didn't conduct the poll, they hired a professional polling firm and paid them to do it, making them the sponsor, not the creator. So unless you think Research 2000 is an unprofessional hack outfit, the poll is as valid as its methodology.]
Moreover, the 58 percent of Republicans, and 53 percent of Southerners, who either doubt or disbelieve that President Obama is an American, despite all the evidence of his Hawaiian birth (28 percent and 23 percent who have decided for sure), comes within a year of a September 2008 pre-election poll conducted for the AP and Yahoo News (again, not by them, but by researchers at Stanford University,) which found that roughly 40 percent of white Americans (Republicans, Democrats and Independents) held “at least a partly negative view of African-Americans,” the 21 percent of white respondents who said “black leaders are trying to push too fast.” and the 36 percent of white respondents who said blacks are responsible for “most or all of the racial tension today.” (Read the AP/Yahoo/Stanford survey here) plus a 2006 poll that found 13 percent of whites (and 12 percent of blacks) identified themselves as “racially biased.“ In other words, there are simply a number of peole out there with immovable racial attitudes. The birthers are just forcing the rest of us to pay attention to them.
Related: Bill Maher urges the reality based community to fight back. He ends with this zinger:
This isn’t a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It’s sentient beings versus the lizard people, and it is to them I offer this deal: I’ll show you Obama’s birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin’s high school diploma.
Amen.
Lonely Lou
How did Lou Dobbs — once a respectable television host and author — manage to get himself so far out on a limb, he finds himself to the right of Fox News??? Even the Faux News Channel (Dobbs’ natural home, truth be told,) which pursued the Bill Ayers nonsense to the ends of the earth, and thought the tea parties were so awesome they joined in … is now ridiculing Dobbs as a flat-earther, a birther weirdo, and a “grassy knoll nut” who’s fanning the flames of racism with his constant peddling of the birther conspiracy. The birthers, by the way, have become so toxic, even that dude Ann Coulter won’t touch them (scroll down to the comments here to get a gander at the birthers in their habitat.) Watch, as Dobbs is pitched under the bus by both cable competitors, and even within the House of CNN:
Next, enjoy the irony as Fox News’ Chris Wallace explains what “journalism” is supposed to look like on a “credible” news outlet. And, he does it without bursting out laughing!
Meanwhile, Matthew Norman of the UK Independent has the must-read birther-bash of the day. An excerpt:
That rag-tag coalition of shock jocks, publicity hungry attorneys, the credulous and simple-minded, plain nutters and above all frustrated racists collectively known as “the birthers” have spent a year banging on about Mr Obama’s arrival in this world, and their successors will be banging on about it long after he’s left it for the next.
With the hissing wrath of those struggling ferociously to repress the volcanic pressure to screech “uppity nigger” at their head of state, these people conveniently conclude that Obama isn’t their head of state at all. The second article of the US Constitution dictates that “no person except a natural born citizen” can be president, and the birthers argue that since Mr Obama was born in Mombasa, Kenya, he is disqualified.
Read the whole thing here.
UPDATE: The birther obsession is starting to impact Lou’s ratings… and not in a good way. TVNewer’s Wednesday ratings chart shows Dobbs barely — and I mean barely — edged out the Chris Matthews re-run at 7:00 in the 25-54 “money demo,” or for that matter, in total viewers (neither show touched Fox News, whose geezer viewing population is nothing if not faithful.)
And TV Newser also answers the question: what ever happened to that Lou Dobbs-O’Reilly booking? Could CNN execs be in fear of Dobbs discovering his natural audience? No inside scoop here, just a prediction, but I’d bet that by the end of the year, Dobbs will either be full-time on winger talk radio (and off cable news entirely), or he will have migrated to FNC.
Petitions call for CNN to fire Lou Dobbs
Has Dobbs gone so far over the edge that he should be booted from CNN? Two petitions (at least), say yes. One from the Southern Poverty Law Center and another, from ColorofChange.org. I’d say it’s a longshot. CNN is not MSNBC. Media Matters has taken up the anti-Dobbs cause, too, calling for CNN chief Joe Klein to “credibly address” his “Dobbs problem.” They even have a website, just for Lou.
Glenn Beck makes it unanimous: Obama hatred is mostly about race
President Barack Obama “has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture [Sic].” So says Glenn Beck, the often unstable Fox News and right wing radio talk show host. Surprised? You shouldn’t be.
From the birthers, to the tea partiers, to the Jeremiah Wright controversy, to the Palinites who toted stuffed monkeys to the campaign rallies and screamed “sit down, boy” and “kill him” (referring to Obama), to the outcry over Sonia Sotomayor, to the raw, on-the-record racism of Rush Limbaugh, the racist, violent (but curiously anonymous) Freepers who regularly describe the first lady as an ape, and recently described the pre-teen Obama girls as ghetto whores, and now Beck, does any sane person doubt that Obama Derangement Syndrom is really just unrepressed racism on steroids, practiced by people who are frustrated that they don’t live in an era when they can just lynch the people they hate, or force them to sit in the colored section of the bus? What we’re witnessing — and it was probably inevitable with the election of the first Black president — is the unleashing of frustration by unreformed racists boiling under the restrictions of the modern world. They’re very much like the Taliban, in that they’re fighting against modernity with everything they’ve got, but they’ve got to do it online, with anonymous screen names, in order to keep their jobs (and keep from getting the shit kicked out of them by normal people, black or white.)
Each of the dust-ups we’re seeing on the right, from the presidential campaign onward, has had a common thread — the object of their hatred: Barack Obama and everyone he appoints, associates with or knows, especially if they aren’t white and Christian, are aliens, who didn’t win (including the election) or earn anything they have — they stole their accomplishments from white men, and are deep into the process of stealing away their very country. And yet in the addled minds of these throwbacks, the foreign implants hate their white “victims.” According to Beck, Obama even “hates white culture!” (What is white culture, by the way? In America, our culture, from jazz to rock and roll to television and indeed radio, are an amalgam of European, African and Latin offshoots. Even country music is a mix of gospel, soul and bluegrass … so to what “white culture” does Beck refer?) Ironically, at one time in this country’s history, people like Beck would have said the same things about the Irish, or the Italians, or Jews, who each have taken their turn in American history at “not belonging here.” Even more ironically, Barack Obama, whose mother was white and whose entire family growing up was also steeped in “white culture,” since he didn’t even meet the African branch until he was an adult, doesn’t even carry a legacy of slavery in his personal history. If he “hates white people,” doesn’t it stand to reason that he hates his own mother, grandparents, and himself??? Somebody out here needs a shrink (and I think his name is “Beck.”)
They may use different formulations (he’s foreign, he’s a Muslim, he’s going to put people in “concentration camps,” he’s the one who’s “racist…”) but it all boils down to what Roger Simon said so succinctly last week on CNN: there are simply some people who can’t accept that a Black man is president of the United States. And what’s really frightening, is not that there is a racist fringe out there, but that it extends into what was supposed to be the respectable portion of the “conservative movement” and the Republican Party. The Birthers, for instance, haven’t yet lost Michael Steele, have only recently, finally, lost Michael Steele, who’s got to be the most awkwardly positioned Black man in America.
Meanwhile, to the substance (as it were) of Glenn Beck’s rant, which you can watch below:
Beck, on “Fox and Friends,” insisted that Obama “has a problem” with “white culture” because he “immediately jumped on the police” regarding the Gates arrest (never mind that he didn’t volunteer an opinion, he was asked about the case at a press conference. Well, what does it mean that the very white Miami police chief, John Timoney, also said the Cambridge cop was in the wrong??? EURWeb recently collected a series of quotes from high ranking police offocers around the country, all of whom are as white as Timoney, and all of whom, including Timoney, have spent their careers patrolling streets a hell of a lot meaner than Cambridge, Massachusetts. Said they:
– Miami Police Chief John Timoney told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd: “There’s a fine line between disorderly conduct and freedom of speech. It can get tough out there, but I tell my officers, ‘Don’t make matters worse by throwing handcuffs on someone. Bite your tongue and just leave.’ ”
– San Jose, California’s retired police chief, Joseph McNamara, told the Los Angeles Times: “The law is clear. You can’t be guilty of disorderly conduct simply because you are saying bad things to a police officer.”
– Jon Shane, 17-year veteran of the Newark, N.J. police department who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, tells TIME magazine, “…a police officer can’t go out and lock you up for disorderly conduct because you were disrespectful toward them. The First Amendment allows you to say pretty much anything to the police. You could tell them to go (expletive) themselves and that’s fine.”
– Norm Stamper, ex-chief of the Seattle PD, told the L.A. Times that Sgt. Crowley “lured (Gates) outside…and cuffed him up.” Stamper added that Dr. Gates’ anger at Crowley was typical of “a true American” with “a healthy skepticism about authority.”
Dr. Richard Weinblatt, a former North Carolina police chief who oversees the education of would-be police officers as director of Central Ohio Technical College’s Institute for Public Safety, studied Crowley’s arrest report and concluded that the sergeant provoked Dr. Gates by continuing to question him after he established that Gates was inside the house legally. Weinblatt wrote on his blog (http://richardweinblatt.blogspot.com): “While perhaps the Professor was overly agitated, it was the police presence that was creating the agitation. Remove the police presence, and the agitation is gone.”
Weinblatt believes that Sgt. Crowley lost sight of his duty as a peace officer.
“We in policing are supposed to be professional problem solvers…We are supposed to deescalate situations even if it means walking away,” Weinblatt writes. “While I believe in officer discretion, I do not believe that it was executed wisely here. I feel that (Sgt. Crowley) should have seen that the big picture of what we do and why we are here was forgotten for the heat of the moment. We in law enforcement are supposed to be above that.”
Weinblatt believes that Sgt. Crowley’s actions will damage the public image of police, making it harder for cops to do their jobs. He closes his blog by lamenting: “Officers nationwide will have to contend with folks that have yet another seed of discontent with law enforcers. All because the big picture was not heeded here.”
And throw in Andrew Napolitano, the Fox News legal analyst, who goes even further, saying Sgt. Crowley violated Professor Gates’ Constitutional rights.
Do these men hate white culture too, Glenn? And by the way, this is the same Glenn Beck who back in 2007, didn’t think Barack Obama hated “the white culture” at all. On the contrary, he found Obama to be “very white” and “colorless,” adding that “you don’t notice that he is Black, so he might as well be white.”
BTW, we await Mr. Beck and El Rushbo’s pronouncements of racism against the even blacker (than Obama) Gen. Collin Powell, since he criticized the Henry Louis Gates arrest, too.
UPDATE: Fox News executives, ever mindful of the need to hold on to advertisers, distance themselves from Beck’s comments.
“During Fox & Friends” [Tuesday] morning, Glenn Beck expressed a personal opinion which represented his own views, not those of the Fox News Channel,” Bill Shine, senior vice president of programming for Fox News said in a statement. “And as with all commentators in the cable news arena, he is given the freedom to express his opinions.” [New York Daily News]
Limbaugh on Obama: ‘let’s face it, he’s Black…’
No, seriously, he really said it:
As Oliver Willis points out, you’d think El Rushbo was diagnosing the president with a fatal illness.
Ironically, Barack Obama has been called “the least angry Black man in America,” and indeed by being essentially the Black Mister Rogers (or perhaps more applicably, the Black Fred Astaire,) he has been able to navigate the spike-filled playing field of race and politics to get elected first to the Senate in Illinois, then as the Senator from Illinois (and only the fifth Black U.S. Senator) and then to the presidency. Had he been otherwise, and showed the slightest hint of being affected by his race, he would have been finished. That’s why the Reverend Wright controversy was so potent — it had the potential to make some, maybe most, white voters see Obama as one of “them” — the Michael Eric Dysons, the Tavis Smileys, or worse, the Al Sharptons and Jesse Jacksons, who are always lurking, seething with resentment against white America, and waiting for the opportunity to get payback. Well Obama isn’t any of those guys, but on Wednesday, we found out that he understands where they’re coming from. Will that make white America uncomfortable? Will the right allow the “teachable moment” to progress? Well… the officer himself, and his union, seem ready to move on, but clearly not all of the right will do so.
After all, isn’t it pretty clear that the fixation with the president’s birth certificate, his supposed “foreignness,” or even the whacked out notion that he might be an illegal alien, pushed by the doddering Watergate criminal G. Gordon Liddy and now by the increasingly unhinged Lou Dobbs, is almost enriely about race (and islamophobia, which is also almost entirely about race…) and about a certain small but tenacious fringe segment of the population refusing to accept that this n—er is in the White House?
Rush Limbaugh (like Pat Buchanan and the fringe winger blogosphere, among others) speaks for them.
Obama walks back on Crowley
The union, predictably, backs the officer in the Henry Louis Gates arrest …and then escalates, demanding the president apologize … Sgt. Crowley does some television, and some more televison, and some more television… getting his side of the story out quickly (does this guy have a publicist or what?) And on Friday, President Obama calls the press back in, and while he doesn’t go the whole hog and apologize to Sgt. Crowley for his “stupidly” comment, he does qualify his remarks, removing the “stupidly,” and says he called Crowley and discussed having a beer with the guy (and Gates). Watch:
And the parties involved are well pleased … except of course for those living on the fringes of the right, who have made race baiting the organizing principle of opposition to Obama (and to his Supreme Court appointee, and to the Ricci case, and to … well … everything. One question: does Obama’s walk back resolve the question of whether the arrest itself was proper? On that, I’m not so sure.
Harvard professor Henry Lous Gates led away in handcuffs.
Meanwhile, the AP makes the startling discover that the Black Cambridge police officer on the scene of the arrest (pictured in the bottom right of the picture at left) backs Crowley’s version of the arrest “100 percent.” And the alternative would be …? I mean I’d hate to be in the station with a bunch of guys carrying guns had I been him and not backed Crowley up.
UPDATE: Gates is down for the beer meet-up.
UPDATE 2: The Village Voice’s Roy Edroso sums up the rightosphere’s reaction to the provocations of race…
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