Maureen Dowd and "You Lie, Boy"

[BrainGlutton]

@MOIDALIZE

This is not new or unprecedented.

I’m sorry, what part of that link was supposed to make us feel better about all this bullshit?

[Cisco]

@MOIDALIZE

Racism may be a small factor in the Obama hate. Some haters may privately be bigoted but have other rationale for criticizing him. But I don’t think race is the reason for more than a small portion of the nonsense we’ve seen. This is not new or unprecedented.

Do you realize that school districts were calling parents at home and telling them Obama would be speaking to students and they realized some parents might not find that acceptable and they could keep their kids home if they wanted? That’s exactly how they would treat an enemy or extremely controversial figure. It’s extremely disrespectful and not the way the leader of your country should be treated. If there is a precedent for treating our president that way, I’d like to hear it.

[MOIDALIZE]

@BrainGlutton

I’m sorry, what part of that link was supposed to make us feel better about all this bullshit?

Well…at least it ain’t mostly about racism?

[MOIDALIZE]

@Cisco

Do you realize that school districts were calling parents at home and telling them Obama would be speaking to students and they realized some parents might not find that acceptable and they could keep their kids home if they wanted? That’s exactly how they would treat an enemy or extremely controversial figure. It’s extremely disrespectful and not the way the leader of your country should be treated. If there is a precedent for treating our president that way, I’d like to hear it.

Read my link’s description of the treatment Clinton received.

To see that, just look at what that movement’s leading figures said and did during the Clinton years. In 1994, Jesse Helms, then-Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, claimed that “just about every military man” believes Clinton is unqualified to be Commander-in-Chief and then warned/threatened him not to venture onto military bases in the South: “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He better have a bodyguard.” The Wall St. Journal called for a Special Prosecutor to investigate the possible “murder” of Vince Foster. Clinton was relentlessly accused by leading right-wing voices of being a murderer, a serial rapist, and a drug trafficker. Tens of millions of dollars and barrels of media ink were expended investigating “Whitewater,” a “scandal” which, to this day, virtually nobody can even define. When Clinton tried to kill Osama bin Laden, they accused him of “wagging the dog” – trying to distract the country from the truly important matters at hand (his sex scandal). And, of course, the GOP ultimately impeached him over that sex scandal – in the process issuing a lengthy legal brief with footnotes detailing his sex acts (cigars and sex talk), publicly speculating about (and demanding examinations of) the unique “distinguishing” spots on his penis, and using leading right-wing organs to disseminate innuendo that he had an abandoned, out-of-wedlock child. More intense and constant attacks on a President’s “legitimacy” are difficult to imagine.

[Jimmy_Joe_Meager]

@Cisco

Do you realize that school districts were calling parents at home and telling them Obama would be speaking to students and they realized some parents might not find that acceptable and they could keep their kids home if they wanted? That’s exactly how they would treat an enemy or extremely controversial figure. It’s **extremely disrespectful **and not the way the leader of your country should be treated. If there is a precedent for treating our president that way, I’d like to hear it.

But it is not racist.

[Squink]

@Jimmy_Joe_Meager

But it is not racist.

True, yet schoolchildren are still suffering for that overreaction:
Six days after drawing fire for not showing President Barack Obama’s speech to schoolchildren, the superintendent of the Arlington Independent School District announced Monday that he also will not be allowing 600 fifth-graders to attend a Super Bowl event next week featuring former President George W. Bush.

[Captain_Awesome]

[obligatory Daily Mash link]Duuuh, Everyone Tells Jimmy Cater[/link]

[ElvisL1ves]

@Lochdale

Can we just be clear one more time, Dowd MADE IT UP.

Absolutely. Taking anything she writes as more than frivolous blather is a serious risk. Life’s too short to even bother reading her.

[Squink]

@ElvisL1ves

Life’s too short to even bother reading her.

Not if you hate yourself, and want to suffer.

[willthekittensurvive]

@BrainGlutton

And regardless of the white man’s and black man’s respective ages. (White men would also address younger white men as “boy,” but not elders or contemporaries – not even if they were also distinctly social inferiors.) Mostly. Really old blacks sometimes got to be addressed by whites as “Uncle.” Or, on terms of personal acquaintance, by their first names (a form of address the black was definitely not allowed to reciprocate). But never, outside a courtroom, as “sir” or “Mr. Jones.” It was that way in large parts of the South well into the 1970s, actually.

I grew up in seventies South Africa, and we would call all black men who worked for us “boy”, even elders…we had man who worked in the garden. Who must have been 40 or 50(not sure… I was 6 at the time) and I always called him boy as did my father who was younger then the gardener

So for me calling a grown black man “boy” does have a racist connotation, not that he said it…

[Shot_From_Guns]

@The_Other_Waldo_Pepper

No, I think you’re missing his point – though I should maybe back out and let him make it, if this keeps up. Still, I figure the analogy would be more like what aldi just did: the claim is that “I read a book,” all by itself, sounds a little weird in present tense unless we tack something additional on – in this case, setting it up with a question before following it with yet more present-tense stuff. “I reed a book” sounds about as strange “You lie” all by itself – the implication being that it’d only sound perfectly normal if we threw in some extra stuff

Yup, you got my point. (Of course, it’s **her **point, not **his **point. ;))

@Carmady

Also, to me “You lie!” seems like a more natural outburst than “You’re lying,” or, “You’re a liar,” or “That’s a lie!”

Even more natural might just be “Liar!” or “Lies!”

I agree that the lattermost would be a good natural outburst. “You lie” still feels to me like it’s missing something. Can you think of a time when you’ve ever said **just **“You lie,” with no epithet attached? I can’t.

[Gyrate]

@Cisco

Do you realize that school districts were calling parents at home and telling them Obama would be speaking to students and they realized some parents might not find that acceptable and they could keep their kids home if they wanted?

A friend of mine who is a teacher reported that a parent called in and told the school admin that “I don’t want my kid watching that black man.” Not all opposition to Obama is racist, but not all accusations of racism are false either.

[PrettyVacant]

It’s kind of interesting to see the Obama team using bogus smear tactics for once and the opposition getting all prickly.

[BrainGlutton]

You do understand, don’t you, that Maureen Dowd, whatever her political views may be, is not on the “Obama team”?

[gonzomax]

When I was growing up calling a black “boy” was a big insult. The response would be " my name is not Roy, I am sure you weren’t calling me boy. Nobody calls me boy. You must think my name is Roy.

[DanBlather]

For those of us keeping score at home, Wilson did not say “boy”, but Obama does still hate white people, is a Muslim, pals around with terrorists, and was born in Kenya.

[ElvisL1ves]

@PrettyVacant

It’s kind of interesting to see the Obama team using bogus smear tactics for once and the opposition getting all prickly.

It’s kind of interesting to see that fluffbrain called “the Obama team”. It’s almost as if that were a bogus smear tactic, huh?

[JThunder]

@Shot_From_Guns

“You lie” still feels to me like it’s missing something. Can you think of a time when you’ve ever said **just **“You lie,” with no epithet attached? I can’t.

I’ve heard that a great many times, actually. I distinctly remember one episode of Married With Children, for example, where Bud said to Al, “You lie!”

[Shot_From_Guns]

@PrettyVacant

It’s kind of interesting to see the Obama team using bogus smear tactics for once and the opposition getting all prickly.

We need a smily that holds up a big sign that says, “IRONY!”

[Captain_Amazing]

@Shot_From_Guns

I agree that the lattermost would be a good natural outburst. “You lie” still feels to me like it’s missing something. Can you think of a time when you’ve ever said **just **“You lie,” with no epithet attached? I can’t.

Well, there’s this song.

Or as Touchstone in As You Like it put it “If again it was not well cut, he would say I lied: this is called the countercheck quarrelsome.”