NAACP makes "more money off of race than any slave trader ever" comment

[foolsguinea]

@Bricker

OK, let’s assume that, as OtakuLoki opines above, “It’s not simply a lunatic fringe of the Tea Party. It’s a lot more central than that.”

What could be better news for Tea Party opponents? Does anyone think there are many more explosive charges than that of overt racism in the U.S. political spectrum? Who, apart from the actual racists, would support such an organization? Wouldn’t this statement, if true, relegate the Tea Party to a John Birch Society-like status as richly deserving political pariahs?

In other words – if true, it would seem the problem would take care of itself.

Why? Years of Hollywood stereotyping have programmed the lily-white sectors of the USA to see blacks as stupid & criminal. Also the USA is so vast we are entirely to ready to see those from other regions as evil & somehow mentally deformed. Racism, regionalism, religious bias, are selling points, not reasons to turn off a given party.

[foolsguinea]

@OtakuLoki

Which party controls both houses of the state legislature? The Democrats. Which party controlled both branches of the Legislature last year when they passed the budget last year that set us up for the massive defict we’ve got, now? The Democrats. Which party took time out from their busy debates about how to close the nearly $10 billion deficit to vote meaningless reform bills in each house of the legislature that don’t have any provision for a matching bill from the other house? The Democrats. Not that the Republicans are a whit better, the bastards last year had a leadership battle with a couple of turn-coat Democratic Senators who felt that they had to act to protect the state from their colleagues. What was the issue that got them up in such fervor? Was it the no-debate budget that got passed last year that upped spending by 8% while revenues dropped by some $20 billion dollars? No. The rat-fucking assholes were concerned about the possibility of SSM.

Dude. Not to defend the general financial ability of politicians, but you’re in New York. The losses on Wall Street were going to blow your budget no matter what.

[Bricker]

@Captain_Amazing

Sorry, off topic, but where? Are they coming back to DC? I missed them the first two times they were here and haven’t forgiven myself for it.

Yep, at the Lansburgh.

[OtakuLoki]

@foolsguinea

Dude. Not to defend the general financial ability of politicians, but you’re in New York. The losses on Wall Street were going to blow your budget no matter what.

Oh, I agree. Had they passed a zero growth budget in 2009, I would accept this year’s budget deficit as a natural and inevitable consequence of the Wall Street meltdown. The kleptocrats in Albany didn’t think that through, though. The 2009 budget increased spending by 8%, when revenues went down $20 billion. This is not a sensible budget, and is the major reason why the cuts required this year are so painful.

[descamisado]

@A Monkey With a Gun

Oh please. Jackson wanted to “cut Obama’s nuts out” because he was “talking down to black folks”; Sharpton is never going to get the stink of the Tawana Bradley hoax off of him, and the NAACP is far more likely to make average Joe aware that the NAACP is a bunch of morons who think a fucking Hallmark card is racist. None of these assholes have been relevant for a long long time and to hold them up as beacons of truth is absurd.

@Chessic_Sense

Now, what’s that have to do with the Tea Party and racism? Nothing. Nothing at all. They may be right about the TP. They may be wrong. Either way, they’re still generally useless.

So because you and Monkey have decided a long time ago who’s worthy of speaking for Black folks and you’ve gone even further by saying, even when they “may be right,” you’re rather be dismissive of the issue because of the messager. Easy out, eh?

What do they have to do with the tea baggers? A well-known justice advocate brought up what even you admit is a major aspect of the TP movement. The TPers tried to dismiss them as irrelevant. Folks here are asking why they were simply dismissive (and frankly derisive and not as funny as they thougth they were) rather the dealing with the issue at hand.

Kind of like you and monkey and other are doing. Questions for you: are there any issues that the NAACP, Sharpton or Jackson bring up or that exist otherwise that, to you, are examples of something that really happens or is worthy of discussion?

[Catfood_Purrito]

@Chessic_Sense

Are you unfamiliar with the phrase “pie in the sky”?

Of course not. I think it’s hard to get across one’s tone through text alone, and “pie in the sky,” to me, has different implications than “what color is the sky in your world.” “Pie in the sky” is more of a cute crazy, while “what color is the sky in your world” is more of an annoying, unpleasant kind of crazy. So I guess I was too vague. Try this instead:

Chessic Sense, you are an annoying and unpleasant nutbar.

[foolsguinea]

@OtakuLoki

Oh, I agree. Had they passed a zero growth budget in 2009, I would accept this year’s budget deficit as a natural and inevitable consequence of the Wall Street meltdown. The kleptocrats in Albany didn’t think that through, though. The 2009 budget increased spending by 8%, when revenues went down $20 billion. This is not a sensible budget, and is the major reason why the cuts required this year are so painful.

Whoa. Your legislators have read Keynes? I’m jealous. Can I trade you my idiot pro-cyclical Missouri legislators for some of your counter-cyclical NY legislators?

[Frank]

Tea Party Federation kicks out Williams over blog post.

Webb called the blog post “clearly offensive.”

…

NAACP President Benjamin Jealous told CNN that other Tea Party leaders besides Webb, who is African American, should come out against racist elements in the movement.

Interesting.

[elucidator]

Of course, its always possible that he might “splinter” and challenge the authority of the Tea Party Federation to decide who is a “real” Tea Party person and who is not. That could happen.

Now, Universe, I know I haven’t been a very good pantheist, but if you could give me this sign…

[The_Second_Stone]

@Rand_Rover

I don’t know about everything you brought up in the OP, but the Williams quote makes sense to me. It’s time for those who who are professionally offended on behalf of their racial group to give it up.

How about we extend this beyond race, and those who are professionally offended on behalf of their cause that they are paid to lead give it up? Like the NRA? The Lou Dobbs immigrationists? The Rush Limbaughs?

Why should people who make a very, very good living stirring shit up cease doing that? Not everybody can be a talentless fictional architect, some of us have got to advocate for a living.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@sleeping

If the mainstream media ever gets around to actually reporting critically on them, they’ll be toast.

Don’t hold your breath.

@Chessic_Sense

They had their time and place.

They might need to change their emphasis on perceived racial slights but their mission still need pursuing.

@Miller

Why? It is, after all, the term they originally picked to describe themselves.

If they want to call themselves teapartiers then fine by me, I prefer to use descriptives and just call them assholes.

@Chessic_Sense

You know why.

Yes, because they have a very poor understanding of history when they equate their current actions with the actions of the American revolutionaries.

@Onomatopoeia

I gotta tell ya, and as Sampiro above alluded, the Presidency of Obama has done more to bring racists and overt racism out into the sunlight than anything in recent memory I can think of.

Well theres no real need for closet racists to become overt racists when there were institutions in place that kept blacks in their place. But now that one of them is President, well, SOMETHING has to be done.

@sleeping

So, you’re saying that many of them are indeed racists, while some are merely exploiting racism to push their socioeconomic policies? Okay, I agree with that.

I think its more complicated than that. I think its magnification of the Republican party as a whole. The tea party is, in part, a conglomeration of the most radical elements of the Republican party and while you would think that the libertarians would schism away from the religious right and the racists, 30 years of mutual dependence has forced the libertarians to marinate in the ideology of the racists and religious right and they now kinda sorta believe it. Just like religious fundies who couldn’t care less about any issue besides abortion 30 years ago have now all read a road to serfdom, the bell curve and atlas shrugged. The racists just go where people will make room for them.

@Sampiro

I hate to, I really do, but it simply has to be done. It’s the law.

Wow, I gotta see this for myself.

@A Monkey With a Gun

Yes, they ensure we talk about racism, but they ensure we talk about racism the same way that PETA ensures we talk about animals.

To some extent we need to have radicals to help shape the debate.

@Captain_Amazing

Sorry, off topic, but where? Are they coming back to DC? I missed them the first two times they were here and haven’t forgiven myself for it.

They are here now.

@foolsguinea

Whoa. Your legislators have read Keynes? I’m jealous. Can I trade you my idiot pro-cyclical Missouri legislators for some of your counter-cyclical NY legislators?

Be careful what you ask for. What if we give you our worst legislator in exchange for Claire McCaskill.

[elucidator]

…Not everybody can be a talentless fictional architect, some of us have got to advocate for a living.

Well, people who live in glass Bauhaus…

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Chessic_Sense

Because Bricker hasn’t said that the Tea Party is a racist party. Others have. Bricker doesn’t call them “tea baggers”. Bricker has said there are racists in the party, as have I. But we’re saying (correct me if I’m wrong here, Bricker) “whaddaya gonna do?” You can’t get rid of them any more than the Democrats can get rid of douche bag flag burners and eco terrorists.

I can’t remember the last time there was a flag burned at a Democratic rally.

They can “make it clear that racists aren’t welcome”. They can’t “expel them from their ranks”. I’m saying they’ve done the former while you’re saying they need to do the latter.

Well, now that they have expelled Williams, do you want to rethink the whole They can’t “expel them from their ranks” comment? Now I understand that it was pretty overt racism that precipitated the action but it is clear that they can expel racists from their ranks.

@Frank

Tea Party Federation kicks out Williams over blog post.

That letter was ridiculous. It was a concentrated blast of welfare mom combined with bell curve combined topped off with invoking patriotic images to sanitize the vileness of the racism.

@elucidator

Of course, its always possible that he might “splinter” and challenge the authority of the Tea Party Federation to decide who is a “real” Tea Party person and who is not. That could happen.

Now, Universe, I know I haven’t been a very good pantheist, but if you could give me this sign…

You want the racists to win and you want them to take over the Republican party don’t you?

I’d rather have a moderate republican party again.

@The_Second_Stone

How about we extend this beyond race, and those who are professionally offended on behalf of their cause that they are paid to lead give it up? Like the NRA? The Lou Dobbs immigrationists? The Rush Limbaughs?

Why should people who make a very, very good living stirring shit up cease doing that? Not everybody can be a talentless fictional architect, some of us have got to advocate for a living.

Well because the NAACP is full of blacks.

[The_Second_Stone]

@Damuri_Ajashi

Well because the NAACP is full of blacks.

Well the tea bagger party and the Republican Party are full of racists.

[Chicagojeff]

@jsgoddess

The idea that I can get angry, furious, with my boyfriend (who is black) and can call him a nigger and that has nothing to do with racism (or rather that it isn’t revealing something about my own personal racism) just baffles me, and that seems to be what John McWhorter is claiming.

Ahh John McWhorter.. a man who’s gone from being a random Linguistic Prof at Berkerly to a goto black conservative commentator. I guess somebody needs to be on deck since Thomas Sowell is getting up their in years.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Damuri_Ajashi

I can’t remember the last time there was a flag burned at a Democratic rally.

Bingo. I saw Michelle Obama speak during the campaign, and some loony Truther stood on the edges with a “Truth about 9/11” sign. Truthers, in general, seem to be the modern left’s equivalent of some of the yahoo Tea Party folks. Anyway, the rally organizers basically ran him off.

The Democratic party has effectively purged its ranks of flagburners and ecoterrorists. Find yourself some flag-burners, some eco-terrorists, and I guarangoddamntee you that you’ll be talking to a group that absolutely loathes liberals and Democrats. They mostly loathe the idea of voting.

You simply do not find these wackos in the Dem party any more. Their nutjobs are folks like Cynthia McKinney–and even she’s left the party because of the hostility toward her brand of nutjobbery.

[Bricker]

@Chessic_Sense

Because Bricker hasn’t said that the Tea Party is a racist party. Others have. Bricker doesn’t call them “tea baggers”. Bricker has said there are racists in the party, as have I. But we’re saying (correct me if I’m wrong here, Bricker) “whaddaya gonna do?” You can’t get rid of them any more than the Democrats can get rid of douche bag flag burners and eco terrorists.

No, not precisely an accurate summary. I think there’s more the party/group leaders could be doing to make clear their distaste at racism. I don’t agree with those that claim they’ve done nothing, but neither do I agree they’re done everything humanly possible, or even everything desirable.

[BrainGlutton]

@Damuri_Ajashi

You want the racists to win and you want them to take over the Republican party don’t you?

I’d rather have a moderate republican party again.

Good luck with that. Sasha Abramsky, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, says all that is a symptom of something deeper:

Yet while the rage in some ways transcends politics, in important ways it is deeply rooted in contemporary conservatism. Indeed, if Islamic terrorism is the outward manifestation of a civil war within Islam between modernists and advocates of a notional, romanticized “purity,” as is frequently posited, the season of rage that American domestic politics has entered is to a large extent the externalization of a battle of ideas inside one part of the polity. Within the conservative movement—which has, in many ways over the past 40-plus years, provided the intellectual backdrop against which American political discourse has developed and the linguistic tools with which we now define and debate our political choices—there is a growing schism over the role of government in American life. As a result, anger over big government and the incumbents alleged to have brought it into being is sweeping across party lines.

Is conservatism about good government or no government? Responsible tax policy or against the very idea of taxes? Engagement with change or refusal to contemplate change? The great conservative thinkers of decades past, Sam Tanenhaus argues in his book Death of Conservatism (Random House, 2009), believed that government has a role to play in moderating markets and shaping society; today’s conservative leadership, in contrast, are committed to a one-size-fits-all antigovernmentalism.

In the long run, many conservative political figures, like Sen. Robert Bennett, recently defeated for renomination at the Utah GOP convention, will probably see their careers destroyed not by liberal opponents but by other conservatives. In the meantime, rage will increasingly come to be seen as a leitmotif running throughout America’s political discourse. And as the language of rage percolates throughout the country, as people of all political persuasions borrow from a vernacular hardened in the kilns of conservatism, the collateral damage threatens to send fissures cascading through the entire body politic, as well as the public, for years to come. Incumbents will be defeated—which isn’t necessarily a bad thing; but they will be defeated not so much because of their individual successes or failures as legislators as because they represent an old, and increasingly discredited, order.

Why is inchoate anger such a motif? Obviously, there’s the decline of economic security faced by tens of millions of Americans in an era of home foreclosures, stock-market volatility, and unemployment. Economic crises rattle the political status quo. But the discontent runs in deeper, less logically grounded veins, too. Culturally the country is changing, as what it means to be an American is profoundly shifting. Sexually, ethnically, religiously, the country is a different animal than it was even a generation ago. The culture wars, as well as the growing backlash against immigration, are reactions against those trends. But above and beyond all of the cultural issues and all of the temporary woes surrounding the deep recession, I believe that what is happening to the United States on the world stage is providing the most crucial seedbed for that anger.

As America’s undisputed global dominance ebbs—trimmed by China’s surging economic might, by the European Union’s growing presence as a global player (even given the travails triggered by the recent European debt crisis and the fears of a Greek default dragging the euro zone into a deeper recession), by the United States’ own economic and military overstretch—the rage culture has matured to the point where it is coming to be a dark, and perhaps even a dominant, part of America’s identity.

<snip>

It brings to mind a quote from William Hazlitt’s 1826 essay “On the Pleasure of Hating”: “The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others.” Cultures that self-identify as victims and come to see their defining historical references as a series of grievances have a tendency to mutate in ways that range from unpleasant to catastrophic. Examples include the American South in the post-Civil War decades, Germany in the post-World War I years, the Soviet Union, post-Yugoslav Serbia, and Rwanda. One could argue, as well, that much of the potency of Islamicism today arises from similar forces, as does some of the extremism of the settler community in Israel and the occupied territories. As cultures, hate movements perform somewhat similarly to feuding families or clans, their raison d’être increasingly defined by violence and fury.

I do believe that American democratic institutions are particularly durable and resilient. But it is at least possible to envision a scenario in which, after years of high unemployment and declining living standards, the Tea Party essentially takes over the GOP. And it is possible to see how, over a series of election cycles, that movement could plant a brand of extremism in the center of American politics that would fundamentally change America’s identity. It would very likely be characterized by a series of negatives: being anti-intellectual, anti-foreign, blustering in its assertion of an increasingly fragile American superiority, unwilling to engage with the rest of the world on environmental policy, nuclear disarmament, or human rights. A tapestry of rage defined by what its practitioners oppose rather than support.

[Chessic_Sense]

@Damuri_Ajashi

Well, now that they have expelled Williams, do you want to rethink the whole They can’t “expel them from their ranks” comment?

Only if you’ll rethink your side’s “They don’t expel them from their ranks” comments. Which is it? Does that count as an expulsion or not?

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

Well, we’re talking about them, and Williams is a him. Are you under the impression that there are no Tea Party racists left now?