But Sen. Aqua Buddha had to add this today:
No, if a white person talks to blacks about black history as if he’s telling them something they don’t already know, he’d better have his shit together and be telling them things they don’t already know. And not skip over the last 50 years of the history of the parties with respect to race relations, which pretty much everybody, black and white, IS aware of, as if it didn’t matter compared to the racism of a prominent Democrat who died in 1919.
Well, he has to work with what he’s got, and . . . what else has he got?
Next time I’ll include a smiley. 
Oh, I knew you were being facetious; I just thought it was a good jumping-off place to mention that Howard students did have a nontrivial black-studies requirement, and so forth. Hope you didn’t mind. 
Moreover, to paraphrase the guy you’re referring to.
If a Senator is going to go to a college founded by some prominent 19th Century Republicans where all the students are required to take courses in African-American history he shouldn’t be shocked to discover they’re all well aware that without a single exception all the founders were Republicans.
Hell, they all probably knew that Martin Luther King Sr. and Jackie Robinson were Republicans before switching in 1960 and 1964 respectfully.
I have to ask: Why Senator Aqua-Buddha?
Give Paul credit for venturing outside his bubble of Comfortable Conservative Truths, at least. It does remain to be seen if it will sink it that they’re not all truths, and that those that are are badly incomplete.
Did he? I think he stayed in his bubble, he just tried to expand the bubbleverse to well educated, intelligent young adults attending Howard.
Had he ventured outside his bubble, he would have acknowledged that what the Republican party did sixty years ago, and what they’ve done in the last decade, do not bear equal weight.
Hey dumbfuck, how many times do we need to rehash this same point. Yes, the GOP has to broaden their appeal; specifically they need more minority voters. The problem with your stance is two-fold:
Rand Paul, a Kentucky senator, accepting an invitation to a moderately covered event to speak to a largely Black group in Washington DC does not help him in any appreciable way. It doesn’t help him survive, nor does it do much for the party itself. It’s a near certainty that the audience cannot and will not vote for him. Furthermore, the only reason we are discussing this is because the media decided to cover it more due to it being a epic failure. If Paul really felt he or the GOP really NEEDED more Black votes, he would not have gone to an HBCU whose audience would be both young and overwhelming democratic. In DC, a republican couldn’t get elected as dog catcher. His speech wasn’t effective targeted outreach, it was an olive branch. He didn’t need to do it, and it was always more likely to blow up in his face than to be successful. If hs main goal was more minority votes, he would gone to a Black church, or to a ROTC event, or to any number of targeted audiences that would have been more receptive to his message. Given that he likely knew that, I think he deserves a small bit of credit.
You cannot hold that such outreach is in actuality a slick way to solidify their current base by firing up bigoted voters who get angry seeing a republican booed by Black people, AND that it is a sincere effort to get Black votes. Even ignoring that it is the dumbest strategy of all time, those to aims work against one another seeing as if you give a speech that causes the audience to boo you, you are likely not gonna ever get your vote.
And before you try to make some distinction about only Romney having to get booed by the NAACP so that rednecks would vote for him, please realize that it doesn’t even make sense for him to do that.
Rand Paul went to Baylor? What, the admission standards at Texas A&M were too high?
It was most likely something he can fraudulently wave around to impress undecided voters in the middle. It was a big show, a pretense. That he bungled it only shows how deeply ignorant the sap really is.
Its kind of like that stereotype of the stupid American abroad, who seems to think that if he just speaks English loud enough and slowly, he will be understood. He has been told so often that his ideas are brilliant and ground-breaking, he’s come to believe it. And that all he has to do is lay them out clearly enough, and all reasonable people will agree.
He’s also burdened with a reputation as a math-addled budget wonk, based on little more than a fervent faith in libertarian economics. Same sort of deep dish batshit pizza that Poppy Bush described as “voodoo economics”.
I don’t think he’s a stupid person, I think he’s a mildly bright person pretending to be brilliant, which in the real world only works if you have tenure.
Rand Paul thought that he could simply deliver his CPAC bullshit at Howard University and got his head summarily handed to him.
Actually, he has a fair amount to work with. As a Libertarian he could talk about the failed war on drugs and the resulting disproportionate black incarceration. You could remind the listeners of the Republican’s former commitment to civil rights, as opposed to framing it as an amazing little-known fact (it’s not). You could rail on pointless foreign wars and the budget deficit: there are plenty of African Americans who share these concerns and will give that a respectful hearing.
What you shouldn’t do is lie through your teeth about your comments on the Civil Rights Act, as Rand Paul did. That won’t fly at Howard and it won’t earn the respect of anyone capable of using google or wikipedia.
h/t and quite frankly wholesale borrowing: the consistently awesome Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic magazine.
Sad to think how many people, you say The Atlantic, and they think of an ocean.
No. If it had been coupled with a promise to do something in the future (1) beneficial to the African-American community and (2) significantly different from what the GOP has done before 'cos let’s face it, then it might have been an olive branch.
So then there was the Aggie whose girlfriend told him to do it where it’s dirty and nasty. So he drove her to Beaumont.
Well, apparently Rand Paul don’t roll that way. He’d rather roll the CPAC way. Which should tell you something both about him and about the present state of the libertarian movement, such as it is.
A six pack of Pearl and a possum
“Wash an Aggie sheven coursh dinner, Trebek, your shlut of a mother told me that one…”
Certainly that’s true, given the way he did it. But whether it could have helped him or the party is something we have differing opinions about. And given that he’s gearing up to run for President in 2016 from all appearances, he needs to be part of a party that can win a majority.
If Paul can get blacks to only vote Dem by 87-13 instead of 97-3, that’s a change of 1% of the national vote. Stuff like that can make a difference, given how close our elections have tended to be in recent years.
Oh, bullshit. They’d have LOVED to cover a “Republican successfully reaches out to blacks” event. They love ‘reaching across’ and all that stuff.
More later.