Charge of smoking pot. No biggie.
Charge of doing cocaine. No biggie!!
Charge of Plagiarism. What’s Plagiarism?
Charge of not paying taxes. Who cares?
Charge of cheating on your spouse. Go ahead, have a little fun on the side!
Remember the days when being divorced was a biggie? (You’ve read about, I’m sure-- you’re probably too young to actually remember!)
Charge of racism? What is ‘racism’? Everyone is a little racist. Saying ‘nigger’ does not mean a person is racist. You can call a grown man “boy” and not be racist. Not all conservative Boomers from Alabama are racist. Racism died in 1968. You can be racist and still be a decent person. Obama is racist and yet everyone loves him.
Charge of racism? No biggie.
Tell that to George [macaca] Allen.
The whites have all the money and the Jews have all the power,
and I’m always in a taxi-cab with dliver who no shower!
[/Christmas Eve]
One of the lesser known calypsos of Bokonon. Deservedly so.
If “macaca” had actually been a big deal, George would not have come as close to winning the senate seat in 2012 as he did.
People have very short memories. There was outrage over “macaca” for a couple of news cycles. But an apology wipes the slate clean for the majority of Americans when it comes to racism. And why shouldn’t it? The majority weren’t the ones being likened to monkeys.
On August 10th, 2006, the word “macaca” as a racial slur was essentially unknown in the state of Virginia. If you had approached 1,000 random people and asked if “macaca” was racially offensive, you’d have gotten 1,000 confused looks.
By August 24th, everyone knew how horrible and racially insensitive this disgusting and aggressive word was.
Hats off to the Democrats. The game seldom got played better than that.
I don’t think Allen knew that it was a racial slur (though it’s probably possible, since his mother came from a region in which the slur was used). But I do think he was more likely doing the equivalent of “Mr. Ching-Chong here” (for an Asian person) when he called the brown-skinned gentleman “Macaca” – using a nonsense word as a shorthand to indicate foreign-ness (along with “Welcome to America”, which he followed it with). And thus, still a dumb thing to say, and something that can reasonably be criticized as bigoted (maybe mildly bigoted, if you want to be charitable). And obviously taken to the limit by his political opponents.
I think that’s the most likely explanation, anyway.
The Dems would have been idiots to ignore their opponent taking a swipe at someone based on that person’s perceived nationality. The racial slur was just hot fudge on a shit sundae. I don’t think pointing out the obvious is skillful gameplay. It is a minimum job requirement…one the Republicans would have not have hesitated to perform if the shoe had been on the other foot.
I repeat my initial suggestion: IF Jeff Sessions is a racist, surely he has said or done something in the past 20 years as a Senator to prove it.
IF Sessions is a racist, there is no need to dig through his distant past for evidence. Surely, his fellow Senators would have seen or heard him say the N word, or do something distasteful.
If he HAS, there’s no need to subpoena people who may have heard something in the Seventies. The Democratic Senators who’ve worked with him all this time should state publicly that they’ve seen Sessions doing unacceptably racist things, and spell out what those things were.
If they can’t think of anything racist he’s said or done, they should confirm him.
If they can, they should vote against him- after explaining what those things were AND why they never, ever, ever tried to censure him.
From Wikipedia:
From super-star, record breaker to loser. Yeah, no big deal at all since he didn’t lose by that much…
Agree completely.
Could be. But it doesn’t matter if we’re discussing what happens to “racists”. Or, if anything, it tells how much of a scarlet letter you get for being perceived as one.
It gives us some info about the consequences for saying something perceived as racist. In this particular case, it may be that it was perceived as very bigoted, when in actuality the intention was probably only moderately or slightly bigoted.
Which bothers me less than an error in the other direction would. He should be harmed politically for saying something bigoted.
Personally, I think that burning flags is silly, but I wouldn’t try to ban it either legally or socially.
I still don’t understand your “PC run amok” criticism. Is it “PC run amok” to criticize someone for shouting racial slurs from their front lawn? Or to criticize someone for flying a flag bearing racial slurs and “go back to Africa”?
:dubious: Whoa, that’s quite a false dichotomy you’ve got there. There are a lot of possible scenarios in between “Sessions is a die-hard outspoken racist” and “Sessions is an unobjectionable nominee who should be confirmed”.
Even leaving racism out of the picture altogether, what about these other issues that I quoted in an earlier post?
Getting back to the racism question, as I said, supporting racist policies is an objectionable thing even if one doesn’t personally hold racist beliefs. For example, voter ID schemes (at least all the ones I’ve seen proposed for the US) prioritize the non-problem of voter fraud, for which there is no significant evidence despite intense scrutiny, over the documented disparate suppressive impacts of voter ID requirements on minority voters.
In my book, that illogical and facts-averse disregard for impeding the voting rights of minorities makes voter-ID (at least in the form we’ve seen it in the US) intrinsically a racist policy, even when it’s advocated by people who do not personally endorse racist beliefs.
Support for this and similar policies with unfairly disparate racial impacts, along with prejudiced opposition to scientific findings on climate, equal rights for gay and transgender people, and established protocol for appointing SC justices, are well documented in Sessions’ record. As far as I’m concerned, that’s ample reason why he’s a lousy pick to head the Justice Department, even if we could somehow be reliably assured that Sessions personally has never made any directly racially offensive remark to or about any black person in his entire life.
Thank you.
Are we supposed to feel sorry that a man derailed his own political career by saying something that was hurtful and stupid? Why should hurtful and stupid get a special pass just because it is not hurtful and stupid to the ears of conservative whites (a group that does not hesitate to label their foes as racist for faux pas much more innocent than “macaca”).
Kimstu, I don’t think I’ve stated this directly, so let me take this opportunity to say that I really appreciate your nuanced view on racism. I think it’s the best approach and I wish it was the attitude more people had.
I agree that “PC run amok,” does not remotely describe the process by which someone flying a Nazi swastika becomes a social pariah.