I’m not into team sports, so I’m not a Republican or Democrat, nor do I consider myself left-wing or right-wing, despite the fact that most team-playing Idea Drones have a neurotic need to scamper around with their Baby Label Juniors slapping labels on everything.
I sat out the 2008 election but voted in five presidential elections before that one, and I’ve never voted for anyone who ever got elected. The only time I ever voted for a Republican was in a 2010 local Georgia election, and it wasn’t because the person I voted for (a chick) was a Republican, it’s because my Congressman (who won again anyway) is certifiably retarded. People who think that islands can capsize if you put too many soldiers on them shouldn’t be holding public office, no matter their color or party affiliation.
I also think Mitt Romney is a charmlessly icy robo-putz and I will not be voting in November.
But along comes this article this morning, dispassionately arguing that Obama needs a 60% or better turnout among black voters in battleground states to win this fall’s election.
Imagine any news story about how Romney needs a major white turnout. It’s obvious (at least to me) that Republicans, whether they’re motivated by race or not, are scared shitless to make a peep about it. Yet the same cuckoo-bird major-league witch-hunters who say the term “kitchen cabinet” is “racist” are the same ones pulling out the spreadsheets saying, “Well, you see here, in Florida, we estimate that if Obama can pull in 97% of the black vote and 43.7% of the Latino vote, he’ll win this crucial battleground state.”
Anyone care to take a stab at explaining how it’s possible to “get beyond race” if you’re encouraging certain groups to bask in their racialiciousness while forbidding whites from even mentioning the fact that they’re white unless it’s couched in some sort of apology?
When Obama openly addressed Latinos and urged them to help him “punish our enemies,” that wasn’t racial pandering? Really? Can you look at yourself in the mirror and repeat that, please? Can you film it on your iPhone and upload it so I can review it for research purposes?
It’s astounding to me that you hear Democrats and their cheerleaders constantly accusing Republicans of playing racial politics. These days, it seems like Democrats’ entire political strategy consists of accusing anyone who disagrees with them of being racists.
The Democrats have a long, uninterrupted history of playing racial politics, whether it was during their 100-year stretch as the KKK Party, or when they flipped in the mid-60s and began openly pandering to nonwhites.
Maybe it’s not so wise to make it SO obvious, guys. By making it tribal, you may actually be motivating all those “racists” you insist are lurking everywhere and can’t stand to see a brother man in the Oval Office. And did it ever occur to you that this specific accusation, which is repeated roughly 200 to 210 billion times a day—”Your white ass can’t stand to see a black man as president”—is its own form of racial taunting?
No? Do you also think that islands can capsize?
At the very least, maybe you should take your holy thumbs out of your holy asses and try to realize that when you throw a deck’s worth of race cards at your opponents every day—then, without blinking or seeing any irony, talk about openly and specifically appealing to blacks and Latinos and women and gays and Muslims and everyone except the cartoonishly villainized Straight White Male—somebody somewhere is going to poke you in the eyes like Moe Howard and call bullshit on your hypocrisy.
Please, no politics. Just show pictures of hot, weird girls and freaky street people.
In the mid-60s the democratic party did the right thing by passing the civil rights act and the voting rights act, yet paid the political cost by the loosing their previously firm hold on the racist and pro-segregation southern states. But i guess that was just ‘pandering to nonwhites’ huh? Just like ending Dont-Ask-Dont-Tell is pandering to the non-straights? Talk about “certifiably retarded”. Thank you for not voting.
oh shut up, you’re a white male.
Nice try, Eric, but Republicans supported both the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in larger percentages than Democrats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act#Vote_count
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#Vote_totals
Also, it’s spelled “losing,” not “loosing.” Tard Crown’s back on your head, Chumpy.
i like the Marty Robbins album cover pic. i still have the album.
Also from Grand Humanitarian LBJ, who “did the right thing” by signing those acts:
“Son, when I appoint a nigger to the court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.”
That’s from the NY Times.
Also attributed to LBJ but possibly apocryphal:
“I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” — Lyndon B. Johnson to two governors on Air Force One Ronald Kessler’s Inside The White House
“These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.” — LBJ
“This civil rights program about which you have heard so much is a farce and a sham–an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty. I am opposed to that program. I fought it in the Congress. It is the province of the state to run its own elections. I am opposed to the anti-lynching bill because the Federal Government has no business enacting a law against one kind of murder than another…(And) if a man can tell you who you must hire, he can tell you who not to employ. I have met this head on.” Austin, Texas May 22, 1948 quoted in Quotations from Chairman LBJ, Simon and Schuster, NY 1968
Yeah, no racial politics there. Nor in the idea of the National Council of La Raza, the Congressional Black Caucus—NONE of it. It’s the “invisible” and ‘institutional” racism we have to worry about.
Anyone who thinks ALL politicians aren’t lying, conniving, power-mad weasels jockeying for votes in slimy, cynical ways is making a case for their own certifiable retardation.
Again, I wouldn’t trust a Republican as far as I could spit, but to hear Democrats accusing Republicans of playing racial politics—when that’s ALL that Democrats have EVER done—is fucking ridiculous. Besides Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” the last time I can think of a Republican openly using race as a political tool was when Lincoln (a Republican) issued the Emancipation Proclamation midway through the Civil War.
Love, lust or loathe him, you can’t fuck with the Goad on facts or grammar. I took his challenge in the Answer Me! and couldn’t find any grammatical errors.
Jim:
1. Sure, Republicans in 1964 supported the Civil Rights Act in greater numbers than Democrats. And then the Southern Democrats — who accounted for 90% of the Democratic “no” votes — basically disowned their party, became “Dixiecrats” and Republicans. But Eric’s larger point was that the Civil Rights Act was the right thing to do, not (as you say) “openly pandering to non-whites.” Expanding and protecting the rights of citizenship to and for all citizens isn’t pandering.
2. What does “getting beyond race” even mean? Does it mean that we pretend that race has no impact on an individual’s options in life? Because race *does* make a difference. It *does* exist. And in black communities, latino communities, and Asian-American communities, there’s an understanding of that. Whites are frequently totally unaware of race because they *can* be — that’s part of racial privilege. So when “black voters” need to show up for Obama to win, sure, maybe that’s “racial politics” by some definition, but race is *already* political. It’s not so different from asking poor voters to show up to vote for their interests, or young voters to do so for theirs.
3. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the image of “team-playing Idea Drones.” That sharp writing kept me reading and I’ll come back for it again. That and the promise of hot weird girls.
Hello, Jay, and welcome to the Bear Cave.
“Eric’s larger point” is an entirely subjective moral statement and is therefore simultaneously unprovable and unfalsifiable. “The right thing to do” usually depends on who’s doing it, just like a blowjob depends on which side of the dick you’re on. And Eric was the one who brought up those two specific acts of Congress, which for some reason have been lodged in the popular consciousness as a Democratic achievement.
As far as “pandering to nonwhites” goes, there are the LBJ quotes I’ve cited, plus the provable fact that oodles of race-based political-interest groups with “black” and “Latino” and everything except “white” in their names are forever consorting with, having open-air picnics with, and night-time riverside taijutsu classes with, the Democratic Party. Plus the aforementioned constant spreadsheets about what percentage of the black and Latino votes that Obama needs to win.
“Getting beyond race” seemed to be a promise of the 2008 Obama campaign—that he was a unifier, was transformational, and would lead us into a “post-racial” era. This has not happened. And I honestly think it has more to do with the brain-dead pop-culture zombies who call everything “racist” than it does with anyone actually harming others for racial reasons. I also think it has something to do with the fact that human ethnic groups are innately tribal and that politicians exploit this fact to divide people.
And yes, race is political. But whites are not currently permitted to make politics a white thing, despite the fact they’re constantly accused of doing it. An accusation of being openly pro-white is a career-killer in modern American politics.
Your assignment now is to move to China and lecture everyone there about how they’re unaware of their Chinese privilege and need to open their borders and diversify the nation they built.
From an outsiders perspective, this conversation is like watching the crew of a sinking ship arguing over whose turn it is to swab the deck.
I view life from a faggot’s perspective. That’s because I’m a faggot. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.
Re: the LBJ quotes: doesn’t the fact that he was coming out with this sort of thing sort of indicate the historical tendency of white politicians to keep the brother man down…? Not saying anybody wants to do that any more, but I’m just sayin’.
And yeah, politically correct whites are human excrement. With you on that.
Politically correct whites should hang from trees.
Thank God for the sickle cell!!!
Yeah, I noticed the typo right after I hit submit.
I never said LBJ was a saint, and I definitely am not saying the D or R parties themselves are forces for good. Eisenhower didn’t have to dispatch the national guard because of republicans. My previous point was that it is stupid to blame the modern D party for the racist segregationists who split off from the party specifically because the party was “pandering to non-whites”.
The “larger percentages” point is just a sneaky way to game the numbers. If look to the section right below, where it breaks down the votes to region, you can see it’s the southerners regardless of party who voted against the act in landslide numbers. These southern Democrats / Dixiecrats / Segregationists melted away from the D party, and glommed onto the R party because of Goldwater and the continual string of R politicians who pander the racist and xenophobic crowd with dog whistles like: welfare queens, illegals, food stampers, etc.
Ever since Obama hit the national stage, this country’s discussion and treatment of race has become ridiculous and nauseating, both with the hyper-sensitive racism accusations, and the actual racism coming out of the woodworks. That said, it’s not two sides of a pander coin for Obama to grant amnesty for children and for Romney to want to build a high-tech border fence. One treats humans with respect, the other like wild animals we don’t want digging in our lawn.
‘Gaming the numbers’ isn’t the right way to put it. Those were the actual party numbers. It’s just not correct to attribute those party votes to the current parties. The majority of southern democrats switched parties ( ie. Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond ), and the few that remained spent the rest of their lives apologizing and denouncing it ( ie. Robert Byrd ).
The concepts of “welfare queens, illegals, food stampers, etc.” aren’t dog whistles. They’re legitimate issues that are actually part and parcel of a political strategy used by the Blue team so that it can maintain its stranglehold on (highly lucrative) urban machine politics. And urban machine politics is a system that clearly fails to help its constituents in a litany of ways. It is about fooling the constituency into voting for the status quo (as opposed to raising quality of life in the community). This cuts both ways of course, and applies to red states as well. But for the Red team to point any of this out makes them “RACISTS!” who wouldn’t begin to understand what it’s like to be a black man living in Atlanta, Memphis, Chicago etc.
This is roughly the equivalent of Democrats being portrayed as legitimately evil if “liberals” were to ever point out all the largesse Republicans receive through corporate or private support, which, incidentally, is how Republicans are portrayed in the popular media.
Anyone with a brain can see that what’s good for the goose obviously isn’t good for the gander (who is actually a white swan and therefore should not discuss such issues since they have been born into white privilege).
The fact that we have a two party system in which the average/wealthy are pitted against the destitute/up-and-comers is a farce. But what is even more farcical is that there are people who legitimately believe the stream of effluent that pours forth from the mouths of their political idols. Not to put words in his mouth, but Goad is right, people who choose to make politics a proxy for team sports (complete with rooting interests and partisanship) are what’s wrong with this country.
And I really can’t wait for the wave of black conservatism that is going to put this nonsense to bed for a little while. The fact that Herman Cain screwed up was a little hiccup. I assure you, it’s coming.