States Humiliate the Poor With Food Stamp Crackdown

(The Progressive) Legislators across the country are launching a mean-spirited campaign to block poor people from purchasing certain kinds of foods, products, or services.

Missouri state Rep. Rick Brattin has introduced a bill to prevent food stamp recipients from buying “cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak.”

A bill in the Wisconsin Legislature would require people who apply for food stamps or unemployment insurance to pass a drug test. Lawmakers also want to prohibit those on food stamps from purchasing “crab, lobster, shrimp, or any other shellfish."

Slideshow: Political scapegoats 'thrown under the bus'

From theGrio:

The Urban Dictionary defines the term "throw under the bus" as: "to sacrifice some other person, usually one who is undeserving or at least vulnerable, to make personal gain." In the Obama administration, for example, green jobs czar Van Jones, ACORN, and now U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod were thrown under the bus. But the practice did not begin with the Obama administration. Throwing people under the bus, especially within the context of racial politics, is a time-honored tradition.

Metaphorically speaking, the political landscape is strewn with the victims of such bus-related incidents. Many of these individuals were caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and served as convenient scapegoats for some larger political agenda. Others did or said something that was twisted, misconstrued and used against them. Still, in other cases, their wounds were self-inflicted. With that said, theGrio takes a look through some pre-Obama moments in modern politics, at a mix of race-related bus victims.

Click HERE to read more.

Lou Dobbs, Lobbyists, and Lynchmobs United Against Obama

Freedom of speech is a beautiful thing. But inciting a riot with corporate underwriting and support of the mainstream media is a completely different thing. Add to that the endorsement of a major political party, and what you have is a danger to our democracy.

That is what comes to mind when I look at this crazy Birther movement, those people who refuse to believe that President Obama is a U.S. citizen, and demand that he produce his “real” birth certificate that shows he is Kenyan, or Arab, or Martian, or whatever. At the same time, there is the unwashed, thuggish opposition to healthcare reform- the angry people who are disrupting town hall meetings throughout the nation, hanging lawmakers in effigy and threatening the safety and lives of members of Congress.

These two groups are cut from the same cloth-a white sheet, that is. They are among the right-wing hate groups that were the subject of a report by the Department of Homeland Security called “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” The report warned that the current recession and the election of a Black president have provided recruitment opportunities for White supremacist and radical right-wing groups. The current environment could lead to confrontations between these extremists and government authorities, such as the Oklahoma City bombing and other examples of domestic terrorism in the 1990s.

These right-wing, anti-government groups are united by their hatred of immigration and Latinos, their hostility towards gun control legislation, and their racial resentment towards President Obama. Those sentiments were on full display at the McCain-Palin campaign rallies in 2008, in which crowd participants called Obama a terrorist and a traitor, carried around Obama monkey dolls and called for his death. And the sentiments were on display at the tea parties, with their abundance of racist, anti-Obama signs. It is no accident that hate crimes and hate groups have increased in recent times, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. James Von Brunn, the White supremacist who opened fire and killed a security officer at the National Holocaust Museum was part of the Birther movement, which itself has racist and anti-Semitic roots. And the President receives 30 death threats a day, posing a challenge to the Secret Service charged with protecting him.

The tea parties were an example of “astroturfing”: top-down, corporate-sponsored activities disguised as a grassroots movement. Two of the lobbying organizations that orchestrated the tea parties include FreedomWorks (a conservative action group led by former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey), and the free-market group Americans For Prosperity. Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, these two entities are also involved in the orchestrated fringe opposition to healthcare. They provide the loud protestors who disrupt healthcare town hall meetings for the sole purpose of shutting off debate. Americans For Prosperity, for example, operates under the front group Patients United Now. And another anti-healthcare reform group, Conservatives For Patients’ Rights (CPR), has claimed responsibility for recruiting Tea Party activists and other third parties to disrupt the town hall meetings. CPR operates in conjunction with the people who brought you the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth during the 2004 presidential campaign. CPR is operated by George W. Bush business partner and private healthcare executive Rick Scott, who was forced to pay an unprecedented $1.7 billion settlement for defrauding taxpayers.

These activities should be denounced, but instead have earned the blessings of the Republican Party. Consorting with Birthers, tea-baggers, fringe hate groups and angry mobs is the way of the new GOP. And the new GOP is actually the old GOP on steroids. A party that thrived for years on the Southern Strategy-appealing to White racism for votes-the Republicans have little else but a Southern Strategy left. Divested of any real ideas and lacking broad-based support, the GOP lost a presidential election, holds a minority in both houses of Congress, and is facing long-term minority party status. They appeal to their shrinking Neanderthal base by displaying their disdain for Latinos and Latino judges, in the face of rapidly shifting demographics. Their base cannot undo the election that placed Obama in office, and they cannot keep back the winds of change that have swept through Washington and the country. Their only alternative is to hate the man for what he is, to question his American-ness, and to stop his administration and its agenda of universal healthcare.

Trying to fight progress, the GOP base is now reduced to playing the role of Bubba, that character from 1950s central casting who was always on hand to beat up a civil rights worker at the segregated lunch counter.

And mainstream media court jesters-cable TV entertainers such as CNN’s Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck of Fox News- use the airwaves to legitimize the hate groups, with the apparent support of their respective corporate networks. Dobbs expressed his support for the Birther movement, and Beck charged that Obama hates White people. We would expect nothing else from Fox. But CNN-which touts its journalistic professionalism-cannot claim to be the network of “Black In America”, “Latino In America” or “Generation Islam” while also harboring and enabling an extremist sympathizer such as Dobbs. The Southern Poverty Law Center called on CNN to oust Dobbs for his racism and questioning of Obama’s citizenship, but he remains on the network.

Protest and dissent have played an invaluable role in American history. However, so too has the extralegal presence of the lynchmob. What is passing as the current public “discourse” regarding healthcare reform has only served to elevate the lynchmob. Fortunately, the Democrats have caught on. Hopefully it is not too late.

Republicans Display Their Racial Hatred at Sotomayor Hearings

I learned very little about nothing much in particular from the Sonia Sotomayor hearings.

I already knew that Sotomayor has impeccable credentials, and is far more intelligent than many of the senators, and all of the GOP senators, who were in judgment of her. I heard a great deal about the Republican agenda - as demonstrated at the hearings for the first Latina Supreme Court justice, that is, White male privilege, gun worship, the evisceration of the reproductive rights of women, and corporate pimping - but I already knew about these things.

I learned little about a liberal-progressive agenda for the courts and the justice system. Democrats played it safe on the whole, with the exception of senators such as the newly minted Al Franken (D, Minnesota), who decried the loss of civil rights in America, and Benjamin Cardin (D, Maryland), who invoked his memories of growing up in a segregated Baltimore, when schools and movie theaters were segregated, and community swimming pools had signs which read “No Jews, No Blacks Allowed”.

One thing that I did learn from the hearings, however, was the extent to which the Republican Party will demonstrate the extent of their hatred for civil rights, diversity, foreign cultures and foreign law, Latino folks in particular and people of color in general. And in that regard, they did not disappoint. The Senate Republicans, which one political observer notes, ran the risk of appearing more like a “Republican Cracker Caucus” than anything else, showed nothing but utter contempt for Judge Sotomayor and those who look like her. Pandering to a dwindling, increasingly racist and jingoistic electoral base, these retrogressive senators showed their ignorance. They betrayed their poorly guarded secret - which is, that nothing less than an unexpected scandal or election defeat separates these neo-Dixiecrats from the backwoods outhouses from whence they came.

Having no concern for the judge’s record, they focused on a speech she gave at UC Berkeley Law School in 2001, in which Sotomayor, and rightly so, praised the virtues of a diverse court in which judges are informed by their life experiences and backgrounds. “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life,” said Sotomayor in that speech.

Throughout the line of questioning, the Republican senators treated the judge like a child at best, and like the cleaning lady at worst, with their concerns that she is unable show fairness and impartiality because of her ethnic background. One was given the impression that they would not be happy until Judge Sotomayor repudiated her ethnicity and made herself more suitable for White conservative consumption, like conservative Linda Chavez of the Center for Equal Opportunity. One after another, the good ol’ boys greeted the judge with a barrage of racist invective. Seemingly engaged in a game of good Latino, bad Latina, their line of questioning seemed to focus less on her and more on Miguel Estrada, a failed Bush appellate court nominee who has nothing in common with Sotomayor except that both are Latinos. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma even tried to joke his way through his racism by channeling his inner Ricky Ricardo and telling Sotomayor that “you'll have lots of 'splainin' to do.”

But the ringleader, or perhaps more aptly, grand wizard, of the good ol’ boy caucus was Senator Jefferson Beauregard “Jeff” Sessions of Alabama, who was nominated by Reagan for a federal district court spot, but was dinged by a Republican-controlled Senate judiciary committee because of his problems. His problems? He was a critic of the Voting Rights Act, and called the NAACP and the ACLU “un-American” and “Communist-inspired” groups that “forced civil rights down the throats of people.” As a U.S. attorney in Alabama, he reportedly called a Black assistant U.S. attorney “boy”, and told him to “be careful what you say to white folks.” And as a federal prosecutor, Sessions engaged in a voter-fraud witch-hunt against three Black civil rights workers, including a former aide to Dr. King. Moreover, during a 1981 KKK murder investigation, Sessions was heard by several colleagues commenting that he “used to think they [the Klan] were OK” until he found out some of them were “pot smokers.”

And to pour even more salt into the wound, Sessions is affiliated with White nationalist and anti-immigration groups. So it is only fitting that Sessions would become ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in judgment over nominees to the federal bench, and an arbiter of who is fair and impartial. Sessions had the temerity to scold Judge Sotomayor for not voting with another Puerto Rican judge in an affirmative action case. “Had you voted with Judge Cabranas, himself of Puerto Rican ancestry, had you voted with him, you could have changed that case,” Sessions admonished Sotomayor.” Why, because all Puerto Ricans are supposed to vote alike?

Pat Buchanan - another paragon of on fairness, justice and integrity - says that Judge Sotomayor is an unqualified “affirmative-action appointment” by Obama, someone who was admitted to Princeton University to the exclusion of other White candidates with higher scores. He believes that the Republicans were not hard enough on Judge Sotomayor, that they should have racially attacked her in the hearings in order to gain the support of aggrieved White workers “who pay the price of affirmative action when their sons and daughters are pushed aside to make room for the Sonia Sotomayors.” When MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked Buchanan why 108 out of 110 Supreme Court justices have been white, he said “this has been a country built basically by white folks.” Buchanan added:

White men were 100% of the people that wrote the Constitution, 100% of the people that signed the Declaration of Independence, 100% of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, probably close to 100% of the people who died at Normandy. This has been a country built basically by white folks, who were 90% of the nation in 1960 when I was growing up and the other 10% were African-Americans who had been discriminated against. That’s why.

If anything good comes from the Sotomayor hearings, it is that the Latino community, and everyone else for that matter, got to see the GOP in true form: angry and raw in their bigotry, and turning to the divisive racial strategies of the past in a futile attempt to fight changing demographics and an new understanding of what America should be.

Steven Colbert hit it on the head when he spoke of the “Neutral Man’s Burden,” this notion that “in America, White is neutral.” Whites do not let their experiences bias their decisions because they are White. After all, imagine how a Black justice would have upset the neutrality of the all-White court in the Dred Scott decision, or how an Asian-American judge would have threatened the neutrality of the court when it upheld the internment of Japanese Americans in World War Two!

People of good will can use this opportunity - not unlike the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings, which were replete with sexism and misogyny - to seek to diversify the Senate with more women, more senators of color, and specifically Latino senators. Latinos are America’s largest so-called “minority group”, in a nation in which minorities are edging their way into a majority. The nation’s leadership must and will reflect this reality. The people must break up the good ol’ boys’ club that is the U.S. Senate, and ensure that no judicial nominee is disrespected ever again.

(From BlackCommentator.com)

An End to the Southern Strategy, But No Post-Racial America

By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com
Color of Law
November 20, 2008

Lee Atwater, GOP political operative and mentor of Karl Rove, was a Machiavellian conman and a purveyor of sleaze. And through the various political campaigns he ran, he not only won races, but also destroyed lives in the process.

I was reminded of all of this when I watched the recent PBS documentary on Atwater called Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story. Even in the already distasteful arena of American politics, Atwater dared to go where few others had ventured. He started his career as a protégé of Sen. Strom Thurmond, someone who thrived on white supremacy and the manipulation of the race card, yet had a Black daughter and concealed his hypocrisy until his death.

Obviously, Atwater learned well from his racist mentor. The father of the modern dirty tricks school of political campaigning, Atwater helped claim victory for Congressman (later Governor) Carroll Campbell by characterizing his Jewish opponent, Max Heller, as someone who “should not be elected because he was not a Christian and did not '’believe Jesus Christ has come yet.’” In addition, Atwater was the mastermind of the infamous Willie Horton ad, which was used for George Bush Sr.’s presidential bid against former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. The Horton ad — which played on the narrative of the menacing Black man who rapes White women, and in this case was supposedly released from prison by Dukakis— represented the ultimate in the Southern Strategy, that is, the Republican Party’s raw, unabashed appeals to White Southerners through the invocation of white-skin solidarity and fear of Black folk. Appointed to Howard University’s board of trustees in 1989, then-Republican party chair Atwater was shown the door by Howard’s students, in a level of protest not seen on that campus since the Vietnam War. As Time magazine reported:

“Outraged by his appointment in January to the Howard board of trustees, more than 200 students seized the school's main administration building in the most intense burst of campus unrest since the Viet Nam War. Hundreds of other students demonstrated outside, chanting slogans and demanding Atwater's resignation from the board. Four days after the rebellion began, with riot police threatening to storm the building, Atwater stepped down. In a Washington Post piece…he complained that the students had distorted his record on civil rights and failed to recognize the good he could do. Wrote Atwater: ‘I had a lot to offer Howard.’

Atwater's appointment to the board was a marriage of convenience. The R.N.C. chairman wanted better ties with the black community, and Howard President James Cheek was eager to curry favor with the new Administration….Howard's students, however, were not so willing to go along. Atwater's appointment, declared an editorial in Hilltop, the campus newspaper, undermined ‘the principles this school was founded on.’”

Perhaps Atwater thought his love for Black music would get him over, but it didn’t. And all those years of destroying people for political gain, all on the backs of the children of slaves, caught up with him. He reportedly had his “coming to Jesus” moment before succumbing to a brain tumor, repented, and apologized to those he had harmed and defamed along the way. He died on March 29, 1991, his Bible still wrapped in its cellophane.

Atwater died a second time, on November 4, 2008, with the election of Barack Obama. And the Southern Strategy died with him. As the party known for little else than “starting wars and jacking votes,” as comedian David Alan Grier recently noted, the G.O.P. could no longer depend on racism for their bread and butter. Try as the McCain-Palin ticket did to stoke the flames of racial anger and resentment by conjuring up the image of Obama as the uppity communist Muslim terrorist with a radical Black pastor, the Southern Strategy made its last stand in national politics. Obama carried nearly every demographic across race, age, gender and income, and his opponents soon learned that there was not enough racism in the country to carry them to victory. They soon learned that their time-tested strategy had become their albatross.

Now, the Republicans are relegated to the South — an extremist backwater party of white heterosexual Christian fundamentalism, cultural intolerance and political irrelevance. They embrace xenophobia, islamophobia and homophobia as America becomes a browner, more diverse nation. They uphold the plutocratic interests of free market capitalism at a time when the public demands greater government intervention in the economy, as a check against corporate excess and upward wealth redistribution.

But hold it, wait a minute: let’s not lull ourselves into thinking that all is well, and that we have somehow waved a magic wand to bring us into a post-racial America. The election of the first Black president has sparked over 200 hate-related incidents, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. And while the president-elect is African American, Black men are still the most marginalized, at-risk segment of the population. They are funneled into a cradle-to-prison pipeline, and while they are overrepresented among the clients of social service agencies, rarely are they sought for leadership positions in the nation’s nonprofit organizations.

Nevertheless, recent developments are promising. Now is the time to look for leadership in new places, and from new faces. And while we’re at it, perhaps we can reject the Atwaters of the world who seek to defile the political discourse, detract from the real issues and divide us from each other. Southern Strategy, rest in peace, and may we never see you again.

The Failure of McPalin Lynch Mob Politics - You Betcha!

Color of Law
By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com
October 16, 2008

“Terrorist!” “Traitor!” “Kill Him!” “Bomb Obama!” “Obama Bin Lyin!”  

These are the words one can hear from the crowds at the McCain-Palin rallies. Through race baiting and inflammatory xenophobic, anti-Muslim and anti-Obama rhetoric, the GOP presidential and vice-presidential candidates, and their surrogates, have whipped their supporters into such a frenzy, one can only include that they hope physical harm befalls their Democratic opponent. Truth be told, the assassination of Black leaders is not a new story in America. It is no accident that Senator Obama had to receive super duper Secret Service protection earlier than any other presidential candidate. And it should be noted that a group of White supremacists planned to assassinate Obama during the Democratic convention in Colorado.

Senator McCain was offended and outraged when Rep. John Lewis of Georgia compared McCain’s incendiary tactics to that of the late Alabama segregationist George Wallace. I conclude that had McCain’s race baiting succeeded, he would have found a way to get over his anger. After all, when you purposefully stoke the fires of hatred, you should expect that someone will call you out on it. Rather, it is likelier that the Manchurian candidate’s sense of indignation stems from the feeling that the time-tested Southern Strategy—the Republican Party’s dutiful use of the race card to scare the White electorate in national elections, with a bonus if the other candidate is actually Black—was supposed to work as it has always worked. It was supposed to work as it did eight years ago, when operatives for then-candidate Bush (who now work for McCain), smeared McCain in the South Carolina primary by claiming he had fathered a Black child. But apparently, in 2008 it did not work for McCain against Obama.

Stirring up disgruntled, frustrated and bitter White folk over fears of a Black planet, the Republicans borrowed their strategy from the segregationist Dixiecrats of the Jim Crow South. Back then, racist politicians, members of the White Citizens’ Council, the “white-collar” Klan, spewed invective when it came to verbal attacks on African Americans. While keeping their hands clean of any wrongdoing, these politicians stirred up the “unwashed masses,” their poorer, uneducated Klan brethren, who could be then counted on to respond to that rhetoric through assassinations and lynchings of civil rights workers, the bombing of Black churches, and other acts of physical violence and domestic terrorism. It was understood that the words of the politicians went hand in hand with the murderous crimes of the foot soldiers, cause and effect.

As for today’s ideological descendants of the Dixiecrats, the conservative Republicans, racism and inciting racial violence have won them elections. And given this crowd’s emphasis on killing to meet public policy and foreign policy objectives— whether through the second amendment, unjust wars, coups or assassinations— I wouldn’t put anything past them.

And color-coded character assassination is all you have left when you are a party bereft of any ideas and vision short of war profiteering, trickle-down economics, corporate welfare and tax cuts for the wealthy. And the self-proclaimed mavericks who would mis-lead this nation have been operating on smoke and mirrors. At the top of the ticket is a man whose only claim to fame was being in a country where he had no business, fighting people who meant him no harm (sounds familiar), then getting captured and refusing to leave when the “enemy” told him he could go. His running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, was sly and vindictive enough to unlawfully abuse her authority as governor of Alaska, and is dumb as bricks on any matter of domestic or foreign affairs. Palin—who has used hate speech to stir up crowds across the country, causing them to boo Obama in absentia—came into the national spotlight at the Republican convention by quoting an anti-Semite who had hoped for the assassination of President Franklin Roosevelt.  

In past years, the race card might very well have worked even for this pair of untalented, mediocre individuals. Perhaps it is too early to write their political obituary, although many commentators across the political spectrum have already done so. And the fact that their campaign is fighting for dear life in bright-red Bush country may provide all the proof we need that it is done, time to stick a fork in it. Nevertheless, it appears that McPalin is a casualty of the changing times, changing demographics, an economic collapse, the youth vote, and an opponent who has excited a multiracial electorate like no other politician in generations. Has the Southern Strategy already made its last stand? Time will tell.

Meanwhile, Palin now has had the tables turned on her. This self-described “hockey mom” was booed while throwing out the puck at the opening game of the Philadelphia Flyers. Philly is Obama territory, to be sure, but the hockey fans? They were supposed to be her people, or so she thought. But even having her two daughters there could not save her. Perhaps some people are determined that they will not be fooled again, that the cost is simply too high for any of us to bear.

Breaking Down the Far Right’s Attacks on Michelle Obama

Color of Law
By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
June 19, 2008

Are the spouses of the presidential candidates fair game? Republican presidential candidate John McCain - as well as McCain surrogates at Fox News and elsewhere - seems to think they are open for attack, particularly when they are Black.

The Far Right decided to wage warfare against Michelle Obama after she stated in a Feb. 18, 2008 speech in Wisconsin that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”

The next day, Cindy McCain, wife of John McCain, took time from her busy schedule of plagiarizing recipes to attack Michelle Obama’s statement. This, despite the rule that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. “I am proud of my country. I don’t know about you? If you heard those words earlier, I am very proud of my country,” Mrs. McCain said while introducing her husband to a crowd in Wisconsin. Sen. McCain reiterated, “I just wanted to make the statement that I have and always will be proud of my country.”

Taking cues from their candidate, McCain’s shadow campaign staff at Fox News fell in line and proceeded with racist and sexist attacks against Michelle Obama.

The attacks have relied on three stereotypes about African Americans. The first is the image of the angry, uppity Black woman. Fox host Bill O’Reilly, in a discussion with a listener about Mrs. Obama as an angry and militant woman, suggested that Mrs. Obama should be lynched:
O’REILLY: I don't want to go on a lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there's evidence, hard facts, that say this is how the woman really feels. If that's how she really feels - that America is a bad country or a flawed nation, whatever - then that's legit. We'll track it down.

During a June 14, 2008 discussion about Michelle Obama, Fox News commentator Cal Thomas said:

THOMAS: Look at the image of angry black women on television. Politically you have Maxine Waters of California, liberal Democrat. She's always angry every time she gets on television. Cynthia McKinney, another angry black woman. And who are the black women you see on the local news at night in cities all over the country. They're usually angry about something. They've had a son who has been shot in a drive-by shooting. They are angry at Bush. So you don't really have a profile of non-angry black women.

The second component of the McCain-GOP-Fox race card strategy against Michelle Obama is the offensive image of the “baby mama.” On June 11, Fox News displayed the words “OUTRAGED LIBERALS: STOP PICKING ON OBAMA’S BABY MAMA” several times while on-air. I decided to consult Urban Dictionary for a definition of baby mama. The primary definition of the term is:

The mother of your child(ren), whom you did not marry and with whom you are not currently involved.

The secondary definition is more telling:

A term used to define an unmarried young woman (but can be a woman of any age) who has had a child. As mentioned before in another definition, most of the time it is used for when it was simply a sexual relationship, compared to ex-wife or girlfriend. Usually this has a negative connotation, a lot of baby mamas are seen as desperate, gold digging, emotionally starved, shady women who had a baby out of spite or to keep a man. Sometimes they may act like this because of missed child support payments, unfulfilled promises by the father, or convenient sex by the father. Either or both may exist in any situation.

So, to use this term against anyone, in this case a dignified woman from the south side of Chicago with a Princeton and Harvard Law pedigree, the people at Fox know what they are doing.

Finally, the third racist stereotype that McCain’s people are utilizing is that of the unpatriotic and un-American Black person. Unveiled characterizations of Barack Obama in the Neanderthal conservative media as a Muslim terrorist who refuses to wear a flag lapel pin or place his hand over his heart during the pledge of allegiance have been plentiful. And when Michelle and Barack Obama pounded each other’s fists during a campaign event in St. Paul, Minnesota, one Fox commentator described the harmless and popular hand gesture as a “terrorist fist jab.”

It is common to characterize African Americans as un-American and unpatriotic (translation: ungrateful). And what exactly is patriotism? Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) said that “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” In the case of John McCain, perhaps patriotism is endorsing the use of torture, although he was a torture victim, or voting against the G.I. bill, or voting against women’s reproductive rights, or hoping to continue an immoral war in Iraq that has claimed thousands of lives and will certainly claim many more.

And McCain and the GOP have surrounded themselves with “patriotic” Americans such as Rev. Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church in Columbus, Ohio, who said that America was founded to destroy Islam, which he calls a false religion; Pastor John Hagee of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, who said in a late 1990s sermon that Adolph Hitler was sent by God to hunt the Jews and carry out the Holocaust; fundraiser Clayton Williams, who made a comparison between rape and weather, saying that “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it”; and ex-Hillary Clinton supporter turned McCain democrat Paula Abeles. Abeles, who facilitated a conference call between McCain and disgruntled Clinton supporters, led an effort by White descendants of Thomas Jefferson to exclude the Black descendants of Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings from family gatherings. We won’t even get into Sen. Joe Lieberman.

And while McCain may not be able to control all of the statements and actions made by his surrogates or by independent organizations, this belies the point. McCain is the beneficiary of the attacks on Michelle Obama, and he can play good cop while the right-wing slime machine does the only thing it knows - sow the seeds of racial division. The conservative movement has employed this tactic, known as the Southern Strategy, for years, in order to win elections. (McCain knows what they are capable of doing. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, the Bush campaign spread rumors that rival McCain had fathered a Black child.) This time around, unencumbered by morality, ethics, scruples or good taste, it is literally all that they have left. They had the opportunity to rule, and they have turned the nation into a shambles. All out of ideas, and faced with major losses in the Senate, the House of Representatives, and possibly the presidency, they cannot run on the issues, the economy, or their energy policy, or domestic policy, or Iraq, or the environment.

Meanwhile, those who are members of political, cultural and ethnic minorities have every right to be angry at a nation which has for years locked them out of the mainstream, humiliated them, promulgated unjust laws against them, and treated them like anything but a child of God. Yet, these folks, shut out, have emerged as the greatest patriots of all - those who are angry because they see a nation that does not live up to its promise, and who decide to fight to make that promise a reality for all people.

Fannie Lou Hamer was one of those angry Black women that Fox News hates so much, as were Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Barbara Jordan, Shirley Chisolm, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, Audre Lorde, and many others. In their day, they would have received a far better reception from the conservative White men, had they known their place, stayed at home, baked some biscuits and shut the hell up. I do not know if they wore flag lapel pins, although I am inclined to believe many did not.

I do know, however, that these women could have taught John and Cindy McCain, Bill O’Reilly and Cal Thomas a great deal about patriotism.

Republicans Would Chisel the Anger Out of Dr. King’s Face

By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com
June 12, 2008

It is true that the dead are unable to defend their reputation. Such is the case with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. With four decades since his assassination, it is very easy for society to lose sight of the man’s philosophy and his great works. Just to take this a step further, there is a not-so-subtle attempt by conservatives to recast Dr. King either as a mild-mannered and milquetoast individual, obsequious and not easily roused, or as a conservative who, if alive today, would side with the interests he railed against in the 1950s and 1960s.

One example of these efforts is the controversy surrounding the King memorial. Chinese sculptor Lei Yixing has been commissioned to render a 28-foot sculpture of King, carved from Chinese granite, the cornerstone of the $100 million King memorial in Washington, DC.

Frankly, Lei’s proposed likeness of King is a bad piece of work, bad meaning good. King stands erect, back not bent, with a stern face and his arms crossed.

But the United States Commission of Fine Arts, which must give final approval of every facet of the memorial, said in a letter that the statue made Dr. King look “confrontational,” that “the colossal scale and Social Realist style of the proposed sculpture recalls a genre of political sculpture that has recently been pulled down in other countries.” The Commission, a federal body that supposedly provides “expert advice” on issues of design and aesthetics in the nation’s capital, “consists of seven ‘well qualified judges of the fine arts’ who are appointed by the President [in this case, that would be Bush] and serve for a term of four years.”

How deviously ironic that the Commission would show concern that a sculpture of King is too confrontational, too political, too angry. King was a man who confronted the three-headed beast of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism, from the unjust laws of Jim Crow segregation, to the White clergy in Birmingham who told him to wait, to the injustice faced by Memphis sanitation workers, to the atrocities of the Vietnam War, and was hunted by the government and gunned down in the process. Let us remember that J. Edgar Hoover called King “the most dangerous man in America, and a moral degenerate.”

Understandably, the artist is aggravated the Commission has asked him to alter King‘s appearance (a depiction they initially voted for unanimously) so that he doesn’t seem to have so much on his mind.

Meanwhile, the National Black Republican Association (NBRA) has kicked off a campaign to place billboards across the country that read “Martin Luther King Jr. was a REPUBLICAN.” One such billboard was placed off exit 145 of I-26 in Orangeburg, South Carolina. According to Frances Rice, who founded the NBRA in 2005, the association “is dedicated to promoting the traditional values of the black community which are in concert with the core Republican Party philosophy of strong families, personal responsibility, quality education and equal opportunities for all.” Further, according to Rice, “Our vision is to help black Americans become power players in the political arena and move into our ownership society, emphasizing small business and home ownership.”

The problem with the NBRA’s argument regarding King is that it is intellectually disingenuous and lacking in historical context. You get the sense that there are people operating the controls, the Republican National Committee perhaps, who hope you don’t see them behind the curtain. On its website, the NBRA states that “It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks.”

Proclaiming that King was a Republican is not so outlandish. Frederick Douglass was a Republican, as were the 22 Black members of Congress (two senators, including Blanch Kelso Bruce of Mississippi, a former slave, and 20 representatives, including John R. Lynch, who was speaker of the Mississippi House before coming to Washington) and one Black governor (Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback of Louisiana) who served during Reconstruction. The Republican Party also claimed Black lieutenant governors, a secretary of state, judges, state treasurers, superintendents of education, mayors and generals of state militias.

The Radical Republicans who were responsible for the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the Freedmen’s Bureau, and other post-Civil War legislation, represented a brief glorious period for the Republican Party, but that was a long time ago. The party of Lincoln is not the party of the Bush-Cheney-Rove criminal enterprise. And in the twentieth century, the Republican Party that had a vibrant and viable liberal wing in the form of Sen. Jacob Javits and Mayor John Lindsay of New York, of Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Arthur Fletcher, the “father of affirmative action,” is no more, and has not existed for some time. With no diversity on the national scene, the GOP can offer up only a paltry few prominent faces of color these days, token faces such as Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, an Indian American.

To be sure, the Democrats must answer for their long history of racism, and even today, the 2008 presidential primaries revealed the problem of racial division that won’t go away. The NBRA likes to argue that “the Democrat Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S's: Slavery, Secession, Segregation and now Socialism.” But this analysis suffers from historical amnesia.

In its narrative, the NBRA conveniently omits the role of the GOP’s Southern Strategy in steering White segregationists from the Democratic Party to the Republicans, and winning elections by appealing to White fears of African Americans. It started with Nixon, following Johnson’s passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act, which ensured a massive loss of White Southern support for the Democrats. And the Southern Strategy was perfected by Reagan, who kicked off his presidential campaign by invoking states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney - two Jews and a Black - were murdered by domestic terrorists in 1964.

As the now-deceased Republican strategist Lee Atwater said in 1981, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger. By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’ - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

The Southern Strategy has had a long run in American politics, and it may very well fail miserably in the midst of an Obama candidacy. And yet, this is the last idea the Republicans have left, aside from permanent war, tax cuts, and ending abortion and gay marriage.

The Republican brand, badly damaged, would be taken off the shelves if it were pet food. In this season of discontent, Americans are in dire straits and the economy is ready to jump off the deep end. Foreclosures and food stamps abound. It would seem that eight years of Republican rule have ruined the nation so badly that more parlor tricks, more bait and switch, more smoke and mirrors will not work this time.

McCain, the GOP standard bearer, has the unenviable task of attempting to distance himself from the most unpopular president in American history, a president whose policies are in line with his own. His party, like America’s two-party system as a whole, is a dinosaur. And it faces well-deserved extinction by clinging to anti-immigrant fervor at a time of changing demographics; anti-Muslim sentiment when the U.S. needs to reach out to the rest of the world; robber baron economics which is exacerbating the gap between rich and poor; the elimination of civil liberties ostensibly to make us free, and an unjust and immoral war in Iraq which is bankrupting the nation and sucking the life out of essential social programs.

Uninspiring, stiff and crotchety, McCain is, according to David Letterman, “the guy at the hardware store who makes the keys.” Unable to energize even his own base, McCain faces predictions that as many as 40 percent of evangelicals will support Obama in the general election. With a 50-state strategy and a massive voter registration drive, the Obama train hopes to change the electoral map and make it rain blue in the red states.

So, in light of this, the NBRA hopes for a McCain victory by siphoning off 25 percent of the Black vote in the 2008 election. A quixotic endeavor at best, such a feat would not have been possible even when the Democrats ran boring wooden candidates for president every four years. Their plan for achieving this - not unlike the conservatives who would eliminate affirmative action on the grounds that King wanted a “colorblind” society - is cynically to portray Dr. King as someone who had much in common with today’s atrociously regressive and bigoted Republican Party. Moreover, McCain voted against the King national holiday.

Like Bush’s art critics, expert lackeys who would use a chisel to remove all the anger from Dr. King’s face, it simply won’t work.

The Hard-Working White Americans

By David A. Love
Black Commentator
May 15, 2008

In desperation, those who cling to the old paradigm of gutter racial politics will do or say anything to get elected. We were told that this is the way the game is played, that we cannot nor should not expect anything more. If it works, it is fair game, and if you can’t take the heat, then stay out of the kitchen.

And certainly, the race card is a time-tested strategy for dividing people down the middle, ensuring that they are at each other’s throats, responding to fear rather than reason or self interest, and in tune with their reptilian brain. The clarion call that Whites are all in this together, against people of color - that they must hide their women from the Black boogeyman, protect their jobs from Mexican “illegals,” ensure that the unqualified affirmative action student does not steal their child’s seat in college, and defend their nation against the Yellow Peril, or Islamofascists, or the enemy du jour - has precipitated lynchings and riots, and won elections. Bereft of vision, of ideas, and often of charisma, these race-baiting politicians have stoked the fires of hate for generations, all to make a name for themselves and build their careers. Since the days of President Lyndon Johnson and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, race-baiting has been the crack pipe of the Republican Party.

In a recent USA Today interview, Senator Hillary Clinton, that failed and bitter presidential candidate, decided to go for broke. She said that when compared to her rival Senator Barack Obama, “I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.” To prove her point, Clinton cited an Associated Press article “that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

“There's a pattern emerging here,” Senator Clinton said. A pattern, indeed, but not the one the senator had in mind. While some would give Clinton the benefit of the doubt and attribute her statement to a misstep, or perhaps lack of sleep from answering all of those 3 A.M. calls, I am willing to give her more credit than that. As a skilled lawyer and a cold, calculating politician, she, like Bill, chooses her words carefully; she knows that which she speaks. Plus, she has a track record.

As BlackCommentator.com has reported in recent months, since Bill Clinton’s race-based mischief during the South Carolina primary, in which he attempted to marginalize Obama as the Black candidate with limited appeal, the Clintons have exhibited a disturbing pattern of race-baiting against Barack Obama.

Hillary Clinton has offended millions of voters with her cynical appeal to White racial solidarity. Of course, she offended those members of the electorate who are not White, and presumably not hard-working Americans, including Latino Americans, the nation’s largest minority group, African Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans.

But Clinton also insulted a multitude of White Americans as well, those who have voted for her not out of a visceral sense of whiteness, nor out of a fear of a Black planet in the form of Obama, but out of what they perceived as a legitimate reason, be it nostalgia for the 1990s, Clinton’s positions on the issues, the possibility of electing the first woman president, etc.

Furthermore, she offended the multiracial, multiethnic and multigenerational coalition that voted for Obama and gave him numerous victories in the primaries, including many overwhelmingly White states throughout the nation’s heartland. These voters, Democrats, Republicans and Independents, are disenchanted with eight years of catastrophic Bush policies and understand what is at stake. These voters have the potential to fundamentally alter the electoral map. Apparently, they did not fall for raw racial pandering, and understood that a crass appeal to white skin solidarity should be relegated to the past. Clinton has insulted their intelligence in the process.

To be sure, there are millions of White Americans who will not vote for a person of color under any circumstances. So what? The reality is that we don’t need them and we don’t want them. We cannot concern ourselves with votes that never were and never will be available. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a key Clinton surrogate, was correct when he said that some Whites in his state would not vote for an African American, although his motives were questionable. In a state with entrenched racism - including hate groups and neo-Nazi activity in its middle “Alabama” region between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia - it is surprising that Obama trailed Clinton by a mere nine percentage points.

In the end, considering Clinton’s failure to surpass her party’s presumptive nominee in the primaries, the narrative of Obama as an unelectable Bantustan candidate who is unable to draw blue collar White votes rings hollow. Far more fascinating and relevant than Clinton’s edge among White voters in a limited number of contests is the nearly total evisceration of her Black support in only a few months. Early in the primary season, Senator Clinton enjoyed more African American support than Obama, when President Clinton was still the first Black president in the eyes of some. When the once-inevitable Hillary Clinton decided to become the Great White Hope in this presidential race, desperate in the face of the Obama steamroller, and her husband decided to assist her in sowing the seeds of division, things changed.

And indeed, the winds of change are upon us, and people are looking for a different way. We already know that the Clintons no longer own the Democratic Party that they so greatly influenced for two decades. Their “kitchen sink” strategy against Senator Barack Obama has tarnished their image and perhaps their legacy. Time will tell us if the Clintons’ cynical Southern Strategy against Obama will cost them their political future. One thing is certain: It is a long walk back to the Senate for one of the Clintons, and an even longer walk back to Harlem for the other.

Why Clinton’s Jeremiah Wright Strategy Failed

By David A. Love
Published by The Black Commentator
April 17, 2008

It is fitting that Lanny J. Davis - former special counsel to President Bill Clinton and supporter of presidential candidate, Senator Hillary Clinton, chose the right-wing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal once again to attack Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor and mentor.

And it reflects the actions of a desperate campaign eager to use the time-honored race card, but this time few are listening.

In an April 9, 2008 editorial titled, Obama’s Minister Problem, Davis erroneously argued that Obama still has questions to answer regarding his ties to the “extremist” pastor, and that this is a problem that will not go away.

Enlisting the help of the Journal’s editorial page, Davis has found a willing and eager participant in the racial scapegoating of an African American man with a long record of service to his country and to his community. For the far-right Wall Street Journal, along with the New York Post, its sister publication, and Fox News - all a part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire - trashing Black people is their bread and butter.

This is particularly true of the “fair and balanced” Fox News, with their daily racist tirades against people of color, on the air and on their website. In a recent post to the Fox News website, where comments are moderated, one person declared: “You blacks would be naked and eating bugs if it weren’t for white people. Name ONE successful society started by blacks. Any sign of civilization in Africa was started by Europeans. Any city in America with predominately black leaders is a cesspool. Look at New Orleans, Philadelphia, D.C., Detroit…”

Another person commented: “No wonder most whites have the opinion that blacks are worthless, lazy sloths who know only how to make more babies and steal everything not nailed down. Barak (sic) Lenin Obama, the big eared Muslim, is only fostering this “wo is me” attitude with his obvious prejudices. I, for one, like my white race over that of any other, so does that make me a racist? I don’t thing so. The black man will not break free from his self-imposed shackles until he picks himself up, dusts himself off and begins to provide for himself just like every other race has done who came to this country. Before the blacks can do this, however, they have to rid themselves of the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Farakan (sic), and the good reverend Wright.”

So, it is no surprise that the right-wing media would take the opportunity to race bait. And in the 24-hour news cycle of cable television, stories such as the Wright “controversy” are promoted for their entertainment value and the advertising revenue they can generate.

And in presidential politics, the Republican Party’s Southern Strategy - winning elections by appealing to White nationalism and White racial anxieties - has helped many a politician up the political ladder. In his 1988 presidential bid against Michael Dukakis, George Bush Sr. used the infamous Willie Horton ad. Horton, a convicted murderer, was the embodiment of the menacing Black man. After being released from prison on a furlough, while Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, Horton raped a White woman.

In the 2000 presidential primaries, Bush Jr.’s campaign spread rumors that his then-rival, Senator John McCain, fathered a Black baby out of wedlock. Oddly, in his second quest for the presidency eight years later, McCain embraces Bush, an unpopular president who has waged an equally unpopular war in Iraq.

To the cynical race-card dealer, operating under the old political paradigm, Barack Obama should have provided the perfect target. After all, he is a Black man with Black affiliations running for the nation’s highest office, and blackness scares some Whites. The Clinton campaign, knowing their candidate could not take the nomination from an ascendant Obama except through graft, placed their hopes in conjuring an image of his wild-eyed, hate-spewing, anti-American, anti-White, and anti-Semitic B lack preacher.

But this time, it didn’t work. And the frustration is reflected in Davis’ embarrassing and unfortunate Wall Street Journal tirade.

To be sure, vast reservoirs of racism still exist in the United States. There are some voters in this country who do not like Black people, and will not vote for a person of color, nor anyone who is not a White man, for that matter. But given that those votes never were for the taking, let us focus on the real issue at hand. Obama’s campaign is bringing millions of new people into the process, a multiracial and intergenerational coalition of democrats, republicans, independents, and young people. For these voters, the racial buttons simply are not working. And for young people in particular, who did not grow up in a segregated America, they do not share the bigoted hang-ups of their parents. A generation of Whites who grew up listening to and embracing Public Enemy is not fazed by this notion of righteous Black anger a la Jeremiah Wright. In fact, many who have lived under the injustices of the Bush regime, the worst administration in American history, must share Dr. Wright’s sense of indignation. Perhaps, forty years after The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Black rage, justified and historically contextual, is not so foreign and shocking a concept to mainstream America. And since when did anger, filled with constructive criticism and a patriotic demand that one’s country do better, amount to hatred? It is far easier to paint the truth-teller as a loathsome crackpot - and compel African American leaders to repudiate their own in the process - than to deal with the sobering realities they articulate.

Wright said “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.”

In his rant, Davis claims that “If my rabbi ever uttered such hateful words from the pulpit about America and declared all Palestinians to be terrorists, I have no doubt I would have withdrawn immediately from his congregation.”

Interestingly, Wright’s words on American foreign policy were inspired by Ambassador Edward Peck, retired career diplomat who was chief of the U.S. mission to Iraq under President Carter. Peck’s words, in turn, were inspired by Malcolm X’s 1963 “Chickens Coming Home to Roost” speech, which placed the assassination of President Kennedy within the context of America’s role as a purveyor of violence. Malcolm, of course, was vilified in life and labeled a hatemonger, yet was commemorated with a U.S. postage stamp in death.

Rev. Wright said “The government…wants us to sing God Bless America. No, no, no. God damn America; that's in the bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.” Lest we become guilty of historical amnesia, Dr. King, when he was assassinated, was working on a Sunday sermon entitled “Why America May Go To Hell.” In the sermon, King wrote that “If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell.”

In his April 30, 1967 sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church titled, “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam,” King declared: “And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, ‘You're too arrogant! And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power, and I'll place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still and know that I'm God.’”

The Dr. King who called for a revolution of values against the triple threats of racism, materialism and militarism, was a far cry from the watered-down image of the innocuous dreamer which today’s mass media have created. In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, King wrote, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Perhaps if Dr. King were alive today, Lanny Davis would ask us to repudiate him, and disassociate ourselves from his hateful, divisive speech.

Some people say that all is fair in politics. Unfortunately, the race card has been an accepted part of politics for years, primarily because that’s the way people liked it. The politics of division worked because of the willingness of bitter and frustrated working-class Whites to act against their own self interests, placing racial solidarity with White elites above economic solidarity with struggling Americans of all backgrounds. The emergence of the Rev. Wright issue as a non-issue - and the public rejection of Clinton’s attempts to render Wright the boogeyman, shows that all is not lost, and perhaps issues really do matter.