So many of you guys have been trying to associate so many (basically ANY) remarks by the GOP to racism and one of Obama’s primary water carriers on the Obama-network (AKA MSNBC). As I have been saying, when you cry wolf too many times, people won’t listen when the real wolf is sighted. Presidents always get grief for too many vacations at Camp David, playing golf… so could someone please tell me, without grinning and laughing, how a smack from Superstar Mark Rubio against Obama for golfing is a freaking racial code word? Are you guys just trying so hard to defend your man that ANYTHING will be trumpeted as a racial dog whistle.
Mathews, O’Donnell, Bashir, Maddow, Mr Ed, Weird Al Sharpton… ZERO credibility as journalists. I’d even give Chris Hayes a nod to say he’s in the tank, but he is somewhat reasonable.
MARTIN BASHIR: We have seen an early draft of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s forthcoming oration. Can I quote something from you? “For four years, Barack Obama has been running from the nation’s problems, he hasn’t been working to earn re-election. He has been working to earn a spot on the PGA Tour.” How about that?
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Well, we know exactly what he’s trying to do there. He is trying to align to Tiger Woods and surely, the — lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama. Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth. They find every way they possibly can to –
BASHIR: Lawrence — don’t you think — don’t you think that what he’s really trying to do is to suggest that the president is not paying attention to the central issues that come with the responsibility he has? Is he really – Mitch McConnell really making a connection with Tiger Woods who, of course, has become infamous for chasing various cocktail waitresses around Las Vegas and so on?
O’DONNELL: Martin, there are many, many, many rhetorical choices you can make at any point in any speech to make whatever point up want to make. If he wanted to make the point that you just suggested and I think he does want to make that point, they had a menu of a minimum of ten different kinds of images that they could have raised. And I promise you, the speech writers went through, rejecting three or four before they land order that one. That’s the one they want for a very deliberate reason. That — there’s – these people reach for every single possible racial double entendre they can find in every one of these speeches.
Discuss
39 Comments . Leave a comment below.Nonsense.
If you want to be taken seriously, please write seriously.
this golfing comment was a racially motivated remark about Obama’s golfing?
…as is the basic claim that he golfs too much. I feel like I’ve heard less about Obama golfing than previous Presidents of either party doing likewise. I do think O’Donnell and Schultz overreact sometimes, but Maddow is the best actual journalist of the primetime lineup. I think MSNBC recognizes this too, which is why they make her anchor for events like convention and election night coverage.
Boehner! There’s an hysterically funny article about his golfing habits by Matt Taibi.
How about Schultz saying that when Romney said the world calls on an American to do great things, that was a shoutout to the Birthers. How warped is Schultz to even think that? The whole MSNBC crowd are baboons. Too bad Warren likes to conduct interviews on that network, yet avoids local talk shows right here at home.
Won’t be the last typo I make either
buffoons on Moody Street, to be sure.
Unfortunately, Talk like a Pirate Day isn’t until September 19th.
The 2008 election was a demonstration by America that a black man could be elected president with white votes. For America to be a truly post-racial society, we will have to be able to vote against Obama without being called racists.
is too claim that calling people racist , is, well, racist. That’s aside from the old, tried-and-true accusation of over-sensitivity on the part of liberals.
This is part of the GOP making fun of the whole dog whistle concept. What’s telling is that I don’t find anything about dog whistling and golf, except by right wing sources.
So John, you’re falling into (or setting) two traps here: 1) lumping all of us in with Lawrence O’Donnell and Martin Bashir and MSNBC 2) you’re carrying water for the GOP attacking the whole dog whistle concept. Thanks, but no thanks.
I am lumping you in with your media leaders by pointing this out (please note how some BMGers are defending the comments). And I say “sorta” because any and every time I say “all you guys”… I don’t really mean ALL you guys. Don’t we have that assumption here that we don’t speak in absolute terms? (as when you say ALL Republicans are “x” and I could clearly show you some Republicans which are NOT “X”.
Second, I am carrying the GOP water in that I don’t believe the dog-whistle charge is justified in nearly the number of cases that you guys comment on. This miss use of the term is an example. I do believe there is racism being used by the GOP (and the DEM) but again, not in all the cases you decry.
Wikipedia:
The risk that Republicans have accepted in their chronic need to indulge in racism is that those times when they aren’t being racist, they’re still suspect, anyway.
Want to solve the problem? Stop being racist.
I will start with a few assumptions. First, that there exists resentment on the part of white middle- and working-class populations throughout the country. Second, that there exists racial hostility on the part of that same group toward non-whites. Third, that the former resentment, even if legitimate, is difficult to separate from the latter racial hostility. And fourth, that there has been a long-established political strategy to appeal to the resentment, legitimate or not, with a wink to the racial hostility. And fifth, that this political strategy has been used by Republicans to make the Old South into a Solid South once again.
Given these things, Democrats don’t give the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they shouldn’t have to. But in reality, Democrats defeat themselves when they denounce something as silly as the golf thing as “dog whistle” and “racist” because the next time people hear a denunciation like that, they are going to tune it out as the product of a hyperactive imagination seeking partisan political advantage.
In the end, calling everything racism gives an awful lot of cover to racists.
To who? Dog whistles exist. They are utilized by the cynical. Who gets the benefit of the doubt? Any given GOP voter x could get the benefit of the doubt. The party as a whole can’t, unless you think the party doesn’t stain itself with these tactics. Certainly ‘calling everything racism’ is inapt. But defending every specific charge with “you’re just calling everything racism” is empty, inadequate, and a rationalization. Do you really think that if less was pointed out the charge that ‘we call everything racism’ would diminish? Should we, when we see racism, demure for strategic reasons and put up with it endemically?
Golf, and golf culture, is one of the last bastions of white male privilege: the upper echelon of white country club members, (you know, the Republican base…) when they think of golf and African Americans in the same thought, they think of African Americans as caddies. Anybody who’s played golf anytime in the last twenty years (I’m looking at you, John Boehner…) has been confronted with this issue, repeatedly.
Augusta finally admitted women just last week. They dug in their heels and refused to admit Blacks until the 1990′s
The truly diabolical aspect to an effective dog whistle is the ease with which people not atttuned to it are dismissive of it… The fact that you can’t hear it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. That’s why it is called a ‘dog whistle.’ The energy with which you turn to dismissing it, only enforces it.
Duh.
because I consistently refer to chocolate sprinkles as “jimmies.”
You didn’t deserve that merimackguy.
Doesn’t matter whether you mean it or not, see…
But, you might be forgetting that in most cases when you don’t hear something it means EXACTLY that there is nothing there!
Might you engage the idea, since the Nixon Southern Strategy, that GOP operatives (see, I didn’t include you!) have been carefully playing a game whereby they can appeal to “negrophobes” to use prominent campaign operative Lee Atawater’s term without offending others.
The most famous example, by the way, has been where Reagan began his 1980 campaign, but there have been plenty of others. States rights, anyone?
Discerning when dog whistling is occurring is not easy because it involves understanding 2 different audiences. One is not going to be a member of both audiences.
… don’t, its probably a dog whistle. Evidence that some don’t hear it, therefore, is not evidence that it isn’t a dog whistle. Whether you yourself hear it is irrelevant unless ‘you’ is ‘everyone’.
a racial origin for “jimmies.” I’ve met super PC people who wouldn’t say “gyp” because it was offensive to the Roma. I didn’t even know it referred to them. Of course, I didn’t know how to spell it either. I’d never written it.
Your language police officer might also keep an eye out for vanishing hitchhikers because the idea that “jimmies” is a racist term is probably an urban legend.
There’s enough truly offensive language out there already no need to search for etymological offenses.
Or less politely, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD WHY ARE PEOPLE RACIALLY PREJUDICED IN THE 21ST CENTURY! A difference in skin color to me is no more significant that a difference in eye or hair color. It would never occur to me to see someone who looks different as inferior. When you think about it this is just schoolyard bullying for adults, and it absolutely blows my mind that anyone thinks in these terms a full 150 years since slavery and two generations after the last explicitly discriminatory laws were repealed or overturned.
it isn’t skin color, it’s the culture. The GOP wants more black people to be p[art of our party. We very much like the black people who are part of our party. Maybe it’s because they think like we do so we don’t care what color they are. I really like Condy Rice and don’t care what color she is, Herman Caine is sort of strange but I have no problem with him due to skin color… I think most Republicans feel the same way.
who are not racists. Racism, however, plays out directly and indirectly in the party all the time.
The thing is that there is a certain solidarity among black folks. Part of that solidarity comes from knowing that the overwhelming poverty suffered by blacks was caused by hundreds of years of discrimination. Everyday slights serve as a reminder of how precarious the gains of the last 50 years have been. For every hand the GOP offers, there’s a Southern strategy move or an actual racist to slap black folks in the face. Voter suppression? Some of you on here talk about it like deniers talk about global warming. Black folks, on the other hand, know how things work. They aren’t apt to be fooled.
We could say instead that GOP operatives are happy to appeal to racism if it helps their bottom line, and so we’ve gotten a lot of coded racism. The “law and order” theme from Nixon’s campaigns had a definite racial edge.
But I would also, predictably, mention that DEM operatives, “are happy to appeal to charges of racism if it helps their bottom line, and so we’ve gotten a lot of charges of racism.” That’s why Lawrence O’Donnell, Mr Ed, Mathews and others will be throwing around the race card when ever they can since it may build into something which either directly will cost Republicans votes OR will divert resources and get people off message thereby costing votes.
they are not Democratic operatives.
You really don’t want me to list Mr Beck’s, Mr Limbaugh’s, or Rep Bachmann’s looseness with facts, do you?
let me replace them with Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Plouffe, Axelrod, Jim Clyburn…
but are those guys as quick to claim dog whistling?
that’s why I picked them.
but I think you get the picture.
Al
Al Sharpton is not a Democratic operative in any sense. I don’t think his views are as goofy as hers, but it is a bit like saying Sarah Palin is a Republican operative. She doesn’t run campaigns, work in the PR offices, etc. She acts as a gadfly outside the main GOP structures. Likewise, I can’t imagine Obama or the Obama people wanting Sharpton in their formal organization. Heavens, Howard Dean was too much for them.
I was referring to his conversation with Clyburn and should have denoted that.
Welfare has always been a classic dog whistle issue like states rights and law and order before it. The discussion of income inequality — which you consistently read/misunderstand as “They hate rich people!” — seems remarkably sober and staid. The conservative side of the aisle has had a disappointing response to that whole issue, by the way. It can be summarized as “There isn’t really income equality… Oh, there might be, whatever. You’re just envious.”
was from the South Side of Chicago. Hint, hint. Here’s a paragraph about actual research into the whole racism, dog-whistle thing:
if it was 1999 and Reagan was running, otherwise, it’s useless.
dog-whistle politics. Actual documentation, not just argument.
Whatever dog-whistling your morally bankrupt party does is within this context and this history. Calling Obama the “food stamp” president is a coded message. The only people I know who’ve been on welfare were white., but what comes to mind when people mention welfare?
You know this and that’s why you’re writing a cryptically stupid comment here.
Having been created yesterday, the Republican Party cannot be explained by historical evidence. The current coalition of which it is constituted was built by Mitt Romney all by himself.
« Blue Mass Group Front Page
Sat 25 May 6:50 PM