They're Not Even Trying to Hide the Racism Any More

Rush Limbaugh Calls The First Lady ‘Uppity’ (VIDEO) | Addicting Info:

I’ll tell you something else. We don’t like paying millions of dollars for Mrs. Obama’s vacations. The NASCAR crowd doesn’t quite understand why when the husband and the wife are going to the same place, the first lady has to take her own Boeing 757 with family and kids and hangers-on four hours earlier than her husband, who will be on his 747. NASCAR people understand that’s a little bit of a waste. They understand it’s a little bit of uppity-ism.

There's no way he can spin this. Oh, he'll try, but 'uppity' is a racially charged word, and Limbaugh  knows it.

Rush Limbaugh's ratings are falling sharply. Hardly any Republican pol feels compelled to kiss his butt any more. He's trying desperately to get attention, and it's only going to get worse. 


This is mostly useful as a way of outing those idiots who claim "we're not racists, Democrats are the real racists, because Robert Byrd was in the KKK before any of us were born." Watch closely: anyone trying to defend Limbaugh and/or his use of the word 'uppity' is ipso facto racist. And I don't care if it offends them to be called what they are. 

Just When You Think They Can't Go Any Lower

A writer for the conservative magazine American Spectator claims Shirley Sherrod was lying when she says her father was "lynched." Why? Because Sherrod's father was beaten to death by white cops, not hanged.

You cannot make this stuff up.

Lessons Learned? I Wouldn't Bet the Farm On It

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It's been, to say the least, an interesting couple of weeks in American race relations. Things kicked off when the NAACP voted, at its annual convention, on a resolution that "condemns the bigoted elements within the tea party and asks for them to be repudiated." Note that the statement doesn't call all TPers racist. And as we know, it's not unusual in American politics for one group to ask another to "repudiate" its more fringe elements - so long as those fringe elements are on the so-called "left."

On one occasion, for instance, the late Tim Russert called on Barack Obama to repudiate, of all people, Harry Belafonte, for referring to President George W. Bush as a "terrorist," as if the rantings of an aging calypso star were somehow the responsibility of every black politician.

But, boy howdy, ask the TPers to distance themselves from the people at their rallies who carry signs showing the president as a witch doctor, complete with bone in nose, and just watch their old gray heads explode.

The immediate reaction was to go into their standard attack mode - as always, a variation on the old schoolyard riposte, "I know you are, but what am I?" It was the NAACP, the tea partiers asserted, who were the real racists.

Then the leader of a group called the Tea Party Express, a guy named Mark Williams, published a mock letter from the NAACP to Abraham Lincoln. "We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing," Williams wrote. "Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house."

Nope, no racism there.

Within a few days, Williams was, as requested, repudiated. He and the Tea Party Express were tossed out of the the Tea Party Federation. The NAACP issued a press release commending the federation. A new day of tolerance and understanding dawned in America.

Ha ha! Just kidding.

Enter Andrew Breitbart, the man who gave the world the infamous ACORN "pimp" tapes, in which members of the community organizing group were supposedly caught on tape advising a fake pimp and his prostitute how to set up in business and avoid taxes. The tapes were later discovered by the California attorney general's office to have been "heavily edited." They cut out the fact that, among other things, one ACORN worker had called the cops and that the supposed "pimp" (shown in the intro in full Superfly regalia) had actually been dressed in a suit and tie and claimed he was a law student.

After that, Breitbart was discredited and never again believed or taken seriously by anyone of any significance.

Hee hee! Got you again!

Breitbart claimed to have found a tape of a U.S. Department of Agriculture functionary named Shirley Sherrod telling an NAACP group that, in a former job, she hadn't given a white farmer who came to her for help "the full force of what she could do." She'd taken him to a white lawyer ("one of his own kind") and, as the clip ends, left him there.

The NAACP, apparently unaware of what a dishonest propagandist Breitbart is, condemned Sherrod. She lost her job with the USDA. Then the rest of the tape came out. Once again, things were not as Breitbart had presented them. Imagine that.

Sherrod found out that the lawyer she'd referred the farmer to hadn't done much. In fact, the poor guy was about to be foreclosed on. At that time, she went on to say, she realized that "it's really about those who have versus those who don't ... and they could be black; they could be white; they could be Hispanic."

She got to work, she helped save the man's farm, and she and hisfamily remain friends to this day. He and his wife even went on CNN to try to clear Sherrod's name. Instead of a story of racism, it was a story of overcoming it. The NAACP and the White House apologized and USDA head Tom Vilsack offered Sherrod her job back. She's not sure she wants it, and who can blame her?

In the end, everyone learned a valuable lesson. From then on,everyone listened to what other people were actually saying, instead of filtering it through their own prejudices and trying to pick out little out-of-context nuggets to pelt their perceived enemies with.

Ho ho! That's a real knee-slapper, that one is.

GOP Senators Go After Kagan By Attacking...Thurgood Marshall?

Dana Milbank:

As confirmation hearings opened Monday afternoon, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee took the unusual approach of attacking Kagan because she admired the late justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked more than two decades ago.

Justice Marshall's judicial philosophy," said Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, "is not what I would consider to be mainstream." Kyl -- the lone member of the panel in shirtsleeves for the big event -- was ready for a scrap. Marshall "might be the epitome of a results-oriented judge," he said

It was, to say the least, a curious strategy to go after Marshall, the iconic civil rights lawyer who successfully argued Brown vs. Board of Education. Did Republicans think it would help their cause to criticize the first African American on the Supreme Court, a revered figure who has been celebrated with an airport, a postage stamp and a Broadway show? The guy is a saint -- literally. Marshall this spring was added to the Episcopal Church's list of "Holy Women and Holy Men," which the Episcopal Diocese of New York says "is akin to being granted sainthood."

With Kagan's confirmation hearings expected to last most of the week, Republicans may still have time to make cases against Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and Gandhi.

Every day, in every way, the GOP continues to present themselves to the world as the party of cranky old white men who think the civil rights struggle and desegregation were bad things and who wish all those noisy brown people would just learn their place (and who indignantly shout about "playing the race card" when anyone points out this very obvious fact).

GO LEMMINGS GO!

Conservatives Love the Constitution, Except When They Don't

Power Line's Scott Johnson explains why it's really no big deal that Israeli commandos killed an American citizen in international waters. See, Furkan Dogan, despite being born in America, shouldn't really be considered a citizen, according to Johnson; he was a Turk, because he lived in Turkey. As for that pesky 14th Amendment, which states that anyone born here is a citizen:

Birthright citizenship is an anachronism, and in some respects a dangerous one, in an era when millions of people travel internationally and millions more enter the U.S. illegally, some for the specific purpose of having a baby here.

Conservatives love the Constitution, and get all self-righteous when it's suggested that it's not perfect as originally written...until it becomes an impediment to killing or torturing people who aren't the "right" color, or the "right" religion.

The Party of Love, Again

There's a rather nasty Governor's race going on in South Carolina, with Nikki Haley as the GOP frontrunner. She's been dogged by accusations of an affair with a political blogger. But now Republican State Senator Jake Knott, apparently assuming that marital infidelity is not enough of a handicap for a SC politician in the post-Sanford era, takes the ugliness to a whole new level.

Noting that Haley was raised as a Sikh, Knott (who supported another candidate) went on the radio and said that 'we've got one raghead in the White House, we don’t need a raghead in the governor’s mansion.’

But don't ever forget, it's the liberals who are the hateful racists.

Wake up, Democrats. Bipartisanship Is Dead and Joe Wilson Signed the Death Certificate

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I had originally planned to compare Joe Wilson, the Republican representative from South Carolina who hollered "you lie!" at President Obama during his address on health care, to Kanye West.

In case you missed it, West is the rapper who disgraced himself during the MTV Video Music Awards by running on stage, taking the mike from award winner Taylor Swift and insisting that Beyonce should have won the award. Both have apologized: West to Swift, and Wilson to President Obama.

Wilson's apology, however, might have seemed a little more sincere had he not immediately started using his outburst as a fundraising tool. He began posting on his Web site that those nasty liberals were trying to "muzzle the American people who have been outspoken against their risky plan" and pleaded, "Will you please make a donation to help me fight back against these partisan attacks?"

I guess I missed the meeting where acting like trailer trash on the floor of the U.S. Congress was declared to be a conservative principle.

In contrast to Wilson, Kanye is apologizing every chance he gets, including a tearful scene on Jay Leno's new show when Leno asked Kanye what his mother might have said about his behavior. He's not using the fuss to tell people they should buy his records because he's being persecuted.

Good Lord. How low have you sunk when a world-class twit like Kanye West is showing more class than you?

The "partisan attacks" that Hollerin' Joe was whining about referred to a resolution introduced in the House for the lowest possible sanction for someone who committed a serious breach of decorum: a "resolution of disapproval."

The idea of even this mild a rebuke set off the usual fits of the vapors from the usual gang of right-wing pundits. Commentator Bill Kristol, for example, warned that if the Democratic leadership pursued a reprimand, they'd be "leading the party off the cliff."

Let me get this straight: The idiot who hollers out during a presidential address like a drunk redneck at a cockfight isn't "leading his party over a cliff," but the people pushing for the mildest reprimand of his boorish behavior are? But, hey, thanks for your concern, Bill. I'm sure you only have the best interest of the Democratic Party at heart.

I want to make one thing clear: I don't think it should be forbidden to call the president a liar. I did it myself during the Bush years, quite a bit, back when it was still considered the Worst Thing In The World. I just didn't do it on the floor of the House during a presidential address.

If a Democratic representative had yelled, "Bush lied, soldiers died!" during, say, the 2006 State of the Union address, the same people lining up behind Hollerin' Joe right now would be demanding he be impeached, at least those who weren't demanding he be sent to Guantanamo.

In any event, the resolution passed upon nearly a straight party vote, and I dearly hope that the tally serves as a wake-up call to the Democrats. Bipartisanship in the House is dead, Wilson's outburst was its obituary, and this vote buried it. President Obama is to be commended for trying to bring the Republicans into the tent, but the GOP has slapped away his hand every time it's been extended.

You want to look at the face of Republican "bipartisanship," look at the face of Joe Wilson captured at the moment when he's yelling at the president of the United States: red-faced, finger pointed in indignation, his pig-eyed, slack-jawed fury a chilling echo of those awful photographs from the early '60s of people shouting at civil rights protesters. Lucky thing Joe Wilson didn't have access to a police dog or a fire hose.

Fact is, when a Republican these days talks about bipartisanship, what he's really demanding is minority rule. He's demanding that his party still set the agenda and make policy for the nation after being soundly defeated in the last two elections.

Sorry, guys, it doesn't work that way. And it's time the Democrats started acting like it.

A Small People, A Silly People

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If there was any doubt that the modern American right has gotten too silly to be taken seriously and that the movement that once boasted intellectual heavyweights like William F. Buckley and Milton Freidman has now turned into a combination insane asylum and Klown Kollege, it's the recent outbreak of outrage over President Obama's speech to America's schoolchildren.

The very idea that this president would have the unmitigated gall to do exactly what his predecessors, like Saint Ronald Reagan, Bush the Elder and Bush the Lesser have done -- that is, actually speak to the children of America -- was enough to send these people into such a paroxysm of frothing outrage, you'd have thought he was a representative of the North American Man-Boy Love Association, not the duly elected leader of the executive branch.

Vowing that their little ones were never going to risk exposure to the "Socialist Agenda" of the Scary Dark Man, some even swore they would keep their children home from school.

Apparently, they feared that every word spoken by the president was going to worm its way into the ears of their delicate offspring like one of those bugs the bad guys used in "The Wrath of Khan," with the result that pretty soon, their kids would rise up, chanting slogans from the Little Red Book of Chairman Mao, murder their parents in their beds, then establish a Thousand Year Democratic Reich, despite not actually being old enough to vote.

Or maybe the parents were afraid the kids would start nagging them like they do for toys or breakfast cereals advertised on TV until the parents finally break down and accept universal health care.

I didn't say it made any sense.

The profound silliness of the right-wing agenda was revealed in full when the White House released the actual text of the speech before its delivery. The speech, as it runs out, was actually pretty standard stuff: Stay in school. Work hard. Take responsibility. It was something you might hear from Mr. Rogers.

I expect that the majority of kids who were actually allowed to hear the speech quickly tuned out and began texting their friends across the room or playing with their PSPs or whatever it is they do nowadays.

So then the wingnuts, as is their habit, began moving the goalposts. It wasn't the speech they were objecting to, they claimed (even though that's exactly what they'd been doing the day before). The problem was now the "lesson plan" sent out by the Department of Education, which was apparently full of hidden socialist mind control voodoo.

One fellow named Michael Knowles, a self-described leader of the San Antonio "Tea Party" movement, insisted in an interview on MSNBC that the lesson plans were actually illegal under federal law because they encouraged students "to reveal personal information about themselves" during discussions and to "reveal information about their goals."

Yep, that's right. Remember grade school, when some teachers would ask you to "tell us a little something about yourself"? Bet you never knew you were a victim of a federal crime. I sure didn't. And neither did MSNBC's Dr. Nancy Snyderman.

"You must be kidding me," Snyderman said. "Do you not want kids to be talking about what they want to be when they grow up?"

Yes, Dr. Nancy, they really are that crazy.

I'm sure you'll be shocked to know that I was never a big fan of George W. Bush. But you know what? If he'd given a televised speech to the nation's schoolchildren, I wouldn't have kept my kids home from school that day for fear he'd pollute their brains with his scary "legislative agenda."

I know full well that if I had even suggested doing such a thing, the wingnuts would be all up in arms about how "hateful liberals" couldn't even give the president a respectful hearing.

But apparently, under the Wingnut Code, the president is entitled to a respectful hearing, even on the most innocuous issues, only if he's Republican.

And white.