first, I’d like to say Hi. I’ve never started a topic before. I’ve read the tacked posts with rules/guidelines. I hope that this is an ok topic and that it’s in the right place.
Anyway, Sen Tommy Tuberville said a number of very screwy things about the topic of white nationalists and the military.
Finally somebody said what I have been thinking about Tommy Tuberville ever since he was elected.
Frank Figliuzzi, former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI and national security analyst, said on Nicole Wallace’s show: “Very problematic that this person is a senator; probably should have stuck to the X’s and O’s in Division 1 football; he was pretty good at it. But clearly this requires more brain power than he’s capable of putting out.”
Nicole said she agreed with that completely. I do too. Makes me wonder about the voters in the state he represents.
But it’s not that he can’t define white nationalists. It’s that he won’t define them as existing at all. Thass jes’ just normal red-blooded Mom’n’Apple Pie Murricanism y’all are talkin’ about.
You know how you can often take just one look at someone and know immediately that they’re a moron? Maybe it’s the bias of prior knowledge, but Tommy Potato-Head radiates that look in spades. So does the entire Trump progeny, for that matter, who all have that vacant look of someone wondering where the sun goes at night. White nationalists, all of them.
I misread the title as “can’t defend white nationalists” which is certainly not true. If he didn’t he’d be working at some second-rate ESPN. Or possibly ESPSN, I don’t know.
I will play a bit of devil’s advocate here and explain a bit about white southerners (being one myself). Their experience with race, and their language for talking about it, is startlingly limited compare to how most folks understand it. The south, as they experience it, is already a white nation where whites are supreme. That dominance is hard to appreciate unless you live here. There’s nothing to be done except hold onto it.
They further believe that the rest of the country is more or less the same (except for the dirty nasty Democrat cities, where upsetting the natural order has resulted in anarchy). They don’t understand what racism is, because they understand racial traits and hierarchy as an immutable fact of nature (except for the most extreme examples). If you ask them what a racist is, they’ll point you at highly visible examples like the KKK, or people who have actually killed someone, and then tell you that there are very few of these people, and the problem was solved a long time ago, and maybe their victims deserved it a little bit.
This leads to the third point. When challenged on the deeper nature of racism, and things that don’t fit into their schema, they shift into deflect-and-evade mode. They don’t really understand the topic of conversation, but they understand they’re being asked to admit something that might reflect poorly on themselves or their culture, so they retreat to a defensive dissembling posture.
That’s exactly what Tuberville was doing. He doesn’t understand it, exactly. He doesn’t want to understand it. He only senses that the honor of his tribe is being threatened, and that his duty is to deflect and obfuscate. If he were more intelligent and less ignorant (as say a Joe Kennedy or Lindsey Graham) he would have done it more skillfully. But since the best rhetoric he can muster is just a jock’s idiot sophistry, the smokescreen doesn’t really work, and he’s catching all the heat as a result.
He had an “R” by his name, so Alabama elected him. It was a miracle that Doug Jones won it in 2018, but that was because Roy Moore was a pedophile.
During the campaign in 2020, Tuberville had numerous gaffes, showing he didn’t know anything about government or about history. But Alabama doesn’t care.
By the way, my favorite team is Georgia Tech. We faced Tuberville twice in 2003 and 2005, when he was at Auburn, and we spanked him both times…17-3, 23-14.