John Kelly gave a press conference yesterday in which he said:
D-FL Congresswoman Frederica Wilson has responded by claiming that the term is racist.
What is she talking about? How is the term “empty barrel” racist? She says she ‘looked it up in the dictionary’. Is there some official dictionary of racist terms that I’ve been unaware of all these years?
There are some online dictionaries that note the racist origins of various terms, the notoriously unreliable Urban Dictionarycomes to mind. The online version of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary gives a definition of Buffalo Soliderthat notes the term is only applied to African-Americans.
I’d never noticed “Noisy Empty Barrel” before, so I assumed it was something like *If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. * 1 Corinthians 13:1
The other thing is that Kelly was … not telling the truth … about what she actually said at the opening of the building. Video recordings of the time from the local TV station show she never made any such claim.
So congrats, General Kelly. You associated with a serial liar, you become a liar yourself when you try to defend him.
And why is the Chief is Staff doing this political attack on a congresswoman? Chief of Staff isn’t meant to be the President’s attack dog.
Kelly just wasted his own integrity.
Just curious, do you think Frederica Wilson also “was … not telling the truth” / became a liar herself / wasted her own integrity when she claimed it was a racist attack?
I had not heard the phrase before. On its surface, it doesn’t strike me as racist. I got the idea that empty containers make more noise than full ones, and I thought it was kind of a clever metaphor (coming as it did in the middle of a pack of falsehoods). CNN has an articleup about the phrase. They trace several versions of it. including one from Shakespeare:
Again, I wasn’t familiar with the phrase before today, but I don’t see a racist subtext.
What a “great” way to “debate”.
OP: “Is “empty barrel” a racist attack?”
Knee-jerk responses: “Kelly is a liar!”
SDMB really is deteriorating.
Maybe he was already a liar.
I don’t know enough about racial terms in the US to comment on that, so I reserve judgment on that point.
However, I have seen several media stories about the video from the opening of the building which confirm she didn’t try to take credit for the funding.
ETA: up to this point I’ve had a great deal of respect for General Kelly. I’ve had a clear impression of someone serving his country in a very difficult situation. But, lie down with dogs, get up with fleas, I guess.
Actually, there were two responses addressing the question posed, then an examination of the context in which the phrase was uttered (rather than a knee-jerk response). The first knee-jerk response I saw was your attack on members of the board without either addressing the issue or providing a useful commentary on the question.
I don’t think that I’ve ever heard of Frederica Wilson before this week, but so far she seems to be a bit nutty.
Also, she thinks that she is the moon barking at a dog.
I am completely on Wilson’s side on this affair. But is a sign of how bad journalism is nowadays that no-one involved in writing an article called “JOHN KELLY’S ‘EMPTY BARREL’ ATTACK WAS RACIST” thought to ask the question in the OP. They don’t have an intern who could spend a couple of hours researching whether the term “empty barrel” is actually a racist one.
Journalism is often like the guy who posts “First!” as a reply in a new thread.
It sounds more like another term for “airhead” to me.
The fact that Kelly used “empty barrel,” not the more obvious “empty hat” or “empty suit” implies that it has some meaning to him. I can believe that it is a racist term.
And if it wasn’t already, well, it probably is now.
Empty barrel means you’re a loudmouth with no brains. “Empty hat” and “empty suit” don’t include the loudmouth aspect of it. That’s the meaning it has to him.
It’s not racist.
Yes, I think that he was saying that the dumbest person has the loudest mouth.
My only guess at a racist angle is that maybe it could be implying that a black person is a monkey with a reference to a ‘barrel of monkeys’, but that seems like a pretty big stretch.
Apparently, Kelly has a history with that term. Maybe it’s just a favorite phrase. I don’t know what Frederica Wilson is on about, but what I said above holds.
If a white person tends to use that kind of term for PoC and not for whites, then it is racist in use. Again, I don’t know what she’s going on.
I have heard the term “empty barrel” a handful of times, and I cannot say that from those other uses that there is the slightest bit of racism that would be apparent in those contexts.
As far as the criticism that some members of Congress are prone to say crazy things to get attention, there is no doubt whatsoever that if you pick a random member of Congress, there is at least a 1:3 chance that they could be called an empty barrel for some of the things they have said.
But even stopped clocks are right twice a day. And it appears that on this occasion that the congresswoman had her charge against Trump backed up by the soldier’s family. I think it is remarkably undignified of Kelly to attack a congresswoman for saying something that the family itself believes to be true: that Trump came across as an asshole in talking to a bereaved family.
Let’s all step back for a second and imagine that we aren’t talking about politics figures, but your family and friends.
Jane’s son was killed. Uncle Roger calls Jane and ends up being a dick in the phone call. Jane’s friend Barbara complains to everyone about it. Harry, Uncle Roger’s friend, says Barbara is an idiot.
In that scenario, Roger comes off as a dick, but Harry as an even bigger dick.