Fair enough. I’ll accept that. Still, it was wrong of El_Kabong to imply that Attwater was doing Reagan’s will and that he was implementing racial policies on behalf of Reagan.
Still, I won’t contest that conservaitve polititicans sometimes attempt illegitimately to use race in ways they think will be to their benefit, just like liberals will illegitimately use false accusations of racism to sway voters their way. Politics, unfortuanately, is a dirty game. But I will say I’ve seen much more in the way of unfounded claims of racism on a grass roots level coming from liberals than I have overt racism coming from conservatives. I myself have been accused of it for most of my life (most recently and frequently on this board) not because of biased or denigrating statements I make about people of other races, but simply because I frequently disagree with the liberal line about the proper way to deal with issues involving race.
And now I really am out.
And on preview, thank you DMC for cherry-picking snippets of the discussion and posting them out of context. You really showed me.
No, I’m not making them up. I heard and read one or the other coming from lefties constantly from the late sixties to somewhere around the mid-to-late eighties, by which time the justice system had become so FUBARed that people were no longer shocked by what was going on and had begun to regard it as normal.
Drug prohibition has always been with us and only became a problem because liberals jumped on 'em like manna from heaven starting in the mid sixties. Mandatory drug sentences, just like mandatory violent crime sentences, were created in the first place as an effort to force you guys to keep people who break the law in jail. Millions of lives have been lost and ruined because of drugs. It’s not a throwaway problem.
Yeah, like how Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal knew better about his sand reefs than the scientists.. Not!
Incidentally, that was direct evidence of what conservatives that ignore science are losing, millions of dollars that could had benefited more people affected by the spill. And reality **had **a liberal bias there.
You do understand that I didn’t say that, but Lee Atwater, a Republican strategist did right? I’m not making the leap, I’m showing you a statement by someone who actively tried to develop a coded language to allow Republicans to pander to some whites’ fears about black people while avoiding charges of racism. Lee Atwater took the leap and Republicans went along for the ride.
Out of context? You made a statement. You were called on it. You claimed that you didn’t agree with the statement that you made. Then the process repeated itself with a different statement. I failed to find a context in whichyourcaprisweren’ttoasty, butthen, youknewthat, right?
But he wasn’t actually implementing policy! He was merely exploiting existing racism. And the very fact that he built in a careful deniability proves that he didn’t actually approve of racism, otherwise he would have done it openly. Which means that he himself was innocent of racism, then it follows that the Rebublicans following his advice were equally innocent of racism. And if the Repubicans are all innocent of racism, that only leaves the liberals to blame for racism.
It’s pretty clear from Post 53 that he did not in fact understand that until, er…someone…explained it to him, and his follow-on attempt to negate Atwater’s statement as “merely his take on things” is hilarious.