Party Trumps Race for Steele Foes

[Renob]

Actually, Republicans do a pretty good job of policing racists in their midst. Even a remark by Trent Lott that was clearly not intended to be racist but which did sound a bit racist resulted in him losing his position as majority leader. Sure, certain Republicans may, at times, say something racist, but they always get the smack down and there are profuse apologies by the GOP leadership.

The quotes pulled up by rjung are examples of ignorance, but I don’t really see much in the way of racism. They certainly don’t compare to some of the things said by blacks about Clarence Thomas (comparing him to a lawn jockey, for instance) or Michael Steele. And they certainly don’t compare to Ray Nagin complaining about New Orleans being overrun by Mexicans. If you are a black Democrat you can get away with saying racist things that no white Republican or Democrat could ever say. It’s disgusting.

[Weirddave]

@rjung

What makes you think I was defending anything? I’m just pointing out that Republicans wailing “boo hoo hoo, look at the ugly racists” is as plausible as OJ Simpson’s pledge to find the real killers.

Why? Racism is either wrong no matter where it pops up, or it isn’t. Republicans have just as much right to condem it when it occurs as Democrats do.

[SteveG1]

@Crotalus

As Bricker mentioned, the country club in question has been used by other politicians, including democrats. It was debated in [thread=324991]this thread[/thread]. Singling out Steele for simply defending what democrats have also done doesn’t seem consistent.

It IS inconsistent, and it IS hypocritical.

[rjung]

@Weirddave

Why? Racism is either wrong no matter where it pops up, or it isn’t. Republicans have just as much right to condem it when it occurs as Democrats do.

Yeah, I remember all the condemnation from the right over the Willie Horton ad. And the GOP would never use Spanish-speaking caricatures in a radio ad, or associate Latinos as illegal immigrants. And you’d never see a commercial about pulling white kids out of inner-city schools emblazoned with the directive, “Vote Republican” Maybe we can get JC Watts to testify about the Republicans’ intolerance for racism, eh?

[Renob]

Again, rjung, your examples are not the clear examples of racism you take them to be. Take the Horton ad, for instance. While many people see this as a clear sign of racism, the ad itself was simply stating a fact: Willie Horton was released on furlough during the Dukakis adminstration and he killed some people. That’s a fair campaign issue. The fact that Horton is black shouldn’t disqualify using him as a an example of the fact that Dukakis was not tough on crime. Furthermore, the other instances were portrayed as racist by Democrats but I fail to see racism in them. I’ll give you the St. Louis advertisement – it’s quite troubling. Of course, it was also denouced by the state GOP.

I’m not saying the Republicans don’t have racists in their midst. They do, but the GOP is usually pretty vigilant in dissasociating itself from them. The Democrats, on the other hand, have just as many racists, and they do little to discourage them. Hell, they even embrace one (Al Sharpton) as a national leader.

[rjung]

If you seriously believe the Willie Horton commercial had nothing to do with race…

“[T]he only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.”
–Roger Ailes, Bush Sr. media consultant

[Willie Horton is] every suburban mother’s greatest fear."
–Larry McCarthy, Americans for Bush

[Renob]

Again, those statements have nothing to do with race. Willie Horton is a criminal. He committed horrible crimes while out on furlough. Using him to illustrate the nature of the Massachusetts prison system is perfectly legitimate.

[RTFirefly]

@Weirddave

The [Washington] Times is about as fair and balanced as the Washington Post or the New York Times, just in the other direction.

I believe the phrase goes something like, “My days of not taking you seriously have come to a middle.”

[RTFirefly]

That title was supposed to go with this post; seems that weird things happen when you do a carriage return from the ‘title’ field.

Anyhow, it seems that no independent observers have been located who can confirm the incident:

“It was raining Oreos,” Schurick said. “They were thick in the air like locusts. I was there. It was very real. It wasn’t subtle.”

As for those who question the story, Ehrlich said yesterday: “They’re not going to be able now to reinvent something that a lot of people saw. Just go ask people who were there.”

Several debate attendees, however, could not corroborate Ehrlich and Schurick’s version of events.

“It didn’t happen here,” said Vander Harris, operations manager of the Murphy Fine Arts Building at Morgan State. “I was in on the cleanup, and we found no cookies or anything else abnormal. There were no Oreo cookies thrown.”

The incident is said to have occurred when Steele walked to his seat before the debate started, not during the event on stage when it would have been captured on video. Newspaper articles and television news reports from that night didn’t mention it, and representatives of the news departments at television stations WBAL, WJZ and WMAR and Maryland Public Television said they have no video of the incident.

Also, the tale, as told by Ehrlich, Steele, and their reps, seems to have started slowly, then grown in the telling:

The first reference to the Oreo incident came five days later in an article in The Sun in which Schurick, then a spokesman for the Ehrlich campaign, said Townsend supporters distributed the cookies in the audience. He also said the crowd booed Ehrlich’s family - a detail that was reported on debate night - and scratched the paint on Ehrlich supporters’ cars with their keys.

Clint Coleman, a spokesman for Morgan State who was at the event, said he saw lots of unseemly behavior but no Oreos.

“There were a lot of things, disturbances, by this group of outsiders who were bent on disrupting the debate,” Coleman said. “But I never actually saw Oreo cookies being thrown at him.”

As for “raining Oreos,” Coleman said, “I can tell you that did not happen.”

Neil Duke, who moderated the event for the NAACP, said last week that he didn’t see any cookies.

“Were there some goofballs sitting in [the] right-hand corner section tossing cookies amongst themselves and acting like sophomores, as the legend has it?” Duke said. “I have no reason to doubt those sources; I just didn’t see it.”

Wayne Frazier, president of the Maryland-Washington Minority Contractors Association said he watched Steele walk into the auditorium that night but saw no Oreos.

“I was there the whole time and did not see any of the so-called Oreo cookie incident,” Frazier said. “It could have happened and I didn’t see it, but I was in the auditorium from start to finish.”

Steele was quoted in two articles that appeared in the next day’s newspaper talking about the pro-Townsend crowd and what he called race-baiting by her campaign, but he said nothing about cookies.

Three weeks later, Washington Post writer George F. Will wrote in his column that “some in the audience had distributed Oreo cookies.” That day, while campaigning at a Jewish day school in Pikesville, Ehrlich told the audience that Townsend supporters threw the cookies at Steele.

Just before the election, the London Daily Telegraph said that Steele “was bombarded with Oreo cookies” during the debate. Most reports that month, however, referred to cookies being “passed around.”

After the election, Steele told a writer for the Capital News Service that an Oreo rolled to his feet during the debate.

“Maybe it was just someone having their snack, but it was there,” Steele told the news service. “If it happened, shame on them if they are that immature and that threatened by me.”