Let's face it, had this come from anyone else, we'd strike it up to a coincidence. But when Hillary Clinton, a top staffer and a top supporter start dissing the black vote within 24 hours of each other, I smell talking points.
First, last night, we had Clinton friend and supporter Paul Begala knocking Obama's supporters because they're mostly, according to Begala, "eggheads and African-Americans." Democratic SuperDelegate Donna Brazile, who is black, took umbrage at Begala's words. You can watch the video here.
I know Begala, and I like him. And I don't think he was trying to slam blacks. But after hearing what Hillary said today, I'm starting to wonder what's up:
At a Q&A in Shepherdstown, Clinton continues to make the case that her base -- working class whites, women, and Hispanics are the key swing voters.
"The base I've put together in this primary is a stronger place to start from," she says.
Hillary is saying that her base is better than Obama's base. And we all know who Obama's base is: Blacks (and elitist latte sipping pansies from San Francisco who don't have testicular fortitude, but Hillary doesn't mean gays, she means other effeminate pansies from San Francisco).
But John, you say, that's only twice, it's still easily a coincidence. Oh yeah? Then why did senior Clinton adviser brag about the "white votes" she got yesterday?
And Garin brags, specifically and explicitly, about her strength with the white vote, comparing North Carolina's white voters in North Carolina to those in Virginia. (The conversations have always been about these voters, but they're usually referred to as "blue collar" or by some less specifically racial euphemism.)
"We lost the white electorate in Virginia, started even in North Carolina among the white electorate just two weeks ago, and ended [with] a very significant win of 24 points among those voters," he said, acknowledging that among black voters, Clinton "did not do as well as we would want or need."
As Ben notes, the campaigns don't usually refer to "white" voters - so when they do, it's interestingly intentional.
So, there you have it. Black voters are bad (like "eggheads" are bad). White voters are good (like, uh, white skin?). We learned months ago that when the Clintons start invoking race, it's intentional.
PS If you've had it with Hillary's race-baiting, her scandals, and her bizarre need to continue destroying Obama even though she already lost, then give to Obama's campaign. Click the blue box at left and you can give a secure donation online. I want to try to raise $10k for Obama over the next few days. Hillary needs to be stopped. If the DNC won't do it, then our money and our words will. More to come. (We're also at over $7000 in our Scott Kleeb-athon, so give to him too if you can.)
I know Joe wrote about this last week, but you have to love the picture of the Republican congressional candidate in Indiana attending Hitler's birthday party. Why? Because he was invited. That's his excuse. I'm particularly fond of the kid-style "Happy Birthday" bunting. (H/T Ben-o.)
And, what has John McCain had to say about his fellow Republican cavorting with the Nazis?
In Hillary Clinton's disturbing attempt to rebrand herself as a Bible-totin', gun-slinging Annie Oakley, complete with right-wing talking points, I guess it's not surprising that gays would end up with the short end of the stick in Camp Clinton these days. Hillary has given lip service to supporting GLBT rights, but her actions over the past few months - not to mention the past few decades - have shown that Hillary is not only trying to distance herself from the gay community and GLBT issues but has done her best to use anti-gay sentiment to her advantage. There's a disturbing pattern at work here, folks, that should outrage any true Democrat who cares about equality....
Hillary's divisive race-baiting tactics alone were enough to ensure that I would never vote for her for anything, not even dog-catcher. And her gay-baiting tactics have now put her right up there with George W. Bush on the list of politicians that I can't even stand to look at. And this coming from a true blue Democrat. Nice going Hillary.
As we wrote yesterday, North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley introduced Hillary yesterday and said that she was no "pansy." Well, the pansies weren't amused. The LA Times reports that the story made its way to the Smoking Gun and to the Drudge Report, and now the professional gays are getting involved:
We checked with the Washington headquarters of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's premier group promoting gay rights, and it already had a statement in the works.
Trevor Thomas, the group's deputy communications director, sent out this e-mail a few minutes later: "We certainly wish the governor would have chosen his words better and have expressed our disappointment to his staff.”
We've asked the Clinton campaign for a comment but, as of now, nothing has been issued.
The New York Times blog weighs in on Hillary's pansy-gate episode from this morning. (I am amazed that Team Hillary seems to think that in order to woo votes in North Carolina they need to pander to bigotry. Talk about an elitist attitude.) We still haven't heard Hillary reject and denounce the anti-gay slur said right in front of her, said while she laughed about it. Maybe that will be coming tomorrow. Or maybe Hillary doesn't want to say the word gay, and worse yet, do something pro-gay right before the North Carolina primary. Tick tock tick tock.
She's on O'Reilly and her surrogate is accusing her opponent of being a "pansy". Classy - but vintage Clinton. Never miss an opportunity to exploit homophobia. Remember DOMA? Remember doubling the discharges from the military? Remember inaction on AIDS? Remember the Clintons' using anti-gay marriage ads in the South in 1996? And yet the gays keep coming back for more. I don't understand why. I really don't.
Not the most comfortable choice of words, but was Easley really saying that Clinton made Balboa look like a gay person? Or just an effeminate weakling? Who wrote that line for him?
Two points. First, an effeminate weakling IS a gay person. The stereotype doesn't discriminate between the fag and the faggy guy. They're the same thing. Second, Marc is right - everything in the Clinton campaign is scripted - so who wrote that line, and why?
We previously informed you that North Carolina Governor Mike Easley used the word “pansy” in his Hillary Clinton endorsement. Said Easley, “[Mrs. Clinton] makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy.”
One reader sent us a note on this poor word choice, which we’d like to share:
You might point out [to your] readers that one would use that term, say, when chasing a gay guy with intent to harm. Or, say, not hiring him. Or maybe not letting him rent an apartment in one’s building.
I expect more from her. She’s no dummy. She knows exactly what that word means.
Considering the Senator’s silence, we get the impression that she simply doesn’t care. And this is a gay ally?
After touring a bio-manufacturing training center, Gov. Easley, First Lady of North Carolina Mary Easley and Clinton held a ceremony at NC State University. The Governor formally expressed his support saying that there was "nothing I love more than a strong powerful woman." Easley concluded his remarks saying Clinton -- "makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy".
pan·sy a. Used as a disparaging term for a man or boy who is considered effeminate. b. Used as a disparaging term for a homosexual man.
So, Hillary isn't gay? Or Hillary isn't a weak gay? And of course, gays are something bad that need to be avoided. Now why would Hillary embrace gay-bashing to help her campaign? Well, putting aside the Clintons' history of embracing gay-bashing when it suited them, take a look at what Ben Smith wrote this morning:
Easley is a meaningful ally in the culture war she's waging against Senator Barack Obama, as she seeks to cast him as a hopelessly unelectable liberal elitist...
Oh, so Hillary has launched a "culture war" against Obama. And what are the three elements of the culture wars? God, guns, and gays. Hillary already pulled the God and gun card on Obama in Pennsylvania, where she couldn't even say when she last went to church, and then claimed she was a hunter after a lifetime as one of America's top gun control advocates. And now she's gay-bashing.
And actually, she started subtly gay-bashing a while back. Remember all of her "San Francisco" references? Then there was her top aides calling Obama supporters "latte sippers who only care about "feelings" (i.e., they're a bit effeminate and effete). (Then again, look who's advising her.)
It's ironic. Hillary is afraid to use the word "gay," and gets visibly uncomfortable when answering questions about gay issues. But using slurs for "fag"" doesn't bother her in the least. Hillary and her people will say anything to get elected. And if that means gay-bashing to win the bubba vote, then so be it. And her people wonder why so many have turned on Hillary in the past few months.
The recipe for success, both for John Howard as well as other so-called Coalition of the Willing members, is falling flat in 2007. Accusing anyone who is Arabic used to be very well received by the media and the general population but after so many false charges and failures, the public around the world has become wiser. John Howard, prepare to spend more time with Tony Blair very soon.
Australian authorities dropped terrorism charges against a Sydney medical student on Monday, with a judge condemning police and intelligence agents for "grossly improper" behavior in the case.
Izhar Ul-Haque, 24, had been charged with receiving weapons training in 2003 from the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is listed as a terrorist group in Australia. The case was dropped after police interviews with him were ruled inadmissible in court.
New South Wales Supreme Court judge Michael Adams said intelligence officers from the secretive Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) had kidnapped and falsely imprisoned Ul-Haque during their investigations.
"It was a gross interference by the agents of the state with the accused's legal rights as a citizen, rights which he still has whether he be suspected of criminal conduct or not, and whether he is Muslim or not," Adams said.
The development is a further blow to Australia's tough stand on national security after prosecutors in July dropped charges against an Indian doctor, saying they made a mistake by publicly charging him with supporting terrorism.
The case is also a blow to conservative Prime Minister John Howard, who won elections in late 2001 and 2004 on the back of his tough stand on national security. But his government is struggling in the polls ahead of elections on November 24.
Leave it to NBC, the Nothing But Coulter propaganda network, to again give Republican leader Ann Coulter a space to air her bigoted views. NBC always does this, they always have her on, regardless of who she attacks, who she insults, regardless of how bigoted she gets. NBC doesn't care, they want to help Coulter sell books and get ratings, so they always have her back to spew her hate every time she gets a new book deal. They know what she's going to say, but they put her on anyway - that means they endorse it, or at least have no problem with it. Well, this time Coulter says America would be a better place if we could just "fix" those pesky Jews and convert them all to Christianity.
Appearing on Donny Deutsch's CNBC show, "The Big Idea," on Monday night, columnist/author Ann Coulter suggested that the U.S. would be a better place if there weren't any Jewish people and that they had "perfected" themselves into -- Christians.
It led Deutsch to suggest that surely he couldn't mean that, and when she insisted she did, he said this sounded "anti-Semitic."
Asked by Deutsch regarding whether she wanted to be like "the head of Iran" and "wipe Israel off the Earth," Coulter stated: "No, we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say. ... That's what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament."
They never offer a real apology. It's always some well-scripted line about how they didn't mean to offend you, or they're sorry if you were offended. They're not sorry for what they said. They're sorry if you misunderstood it. To wit: This idiot Republican Congressman, Rep. Bill Sali of Idaho, who said that the Founding Fathers never intended Muslims to be elected to Congress.
"We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of Representatives now, Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Those are changes — and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers," Sali said, according to an article on the network's Web site.
Now he's offered an "apology."
Sali responded days later, sending Ellison an e-mail explaining he meant no offense.
"He said that he wanted to make sure that Congressman Ellison understood that he meant no harm or disrespect," Sali spokesman Wayne Hoffman said.
Did you get that? He meant no offense, harm, or disrespect when he said that the Founding Fathers would have never wanted a Muslim-American elected to high office in America. Then what exactly did he mean? What does he think of the substance of what he said?
Why does the media accept these non-apologies as true apologies. A real apology would be: I was wrong, I was rude, I was offensive, and I'm sorry. In this case, the congressman actually pretty much stood behind what he said, all he's talking about what his "motivation" in saying it. Well that's nice. But lots of bigotry in America isn't motivated by a desire to be a bigot. It's usually motivated by your sense that you're correct, that you have morality and God and history on your side. Very few people with bigoted views actually intend to be bigots. Usually, they intend to be Godly. But they're still bigots.
This is from OneNewsNow, the fundie news aggregation site of the American Family News Network, one of the many tentacles of Don and Tim Wildmon's "Christianist" gay-bashing American Family Association:
Doesn't it make you visualize 9/11 terrorists overrunning the municipal government, taking hostages? The news is actually more mundane.
A Detroit-area newspaper says the results of Tuesday's primary could lead to Hamtramck, Michigan, becoming the first city council in the U.S. to be controlled by Muslims.
The Detroit News says there are four Muslims in the Tuesday primary. If they are among the candidates who win and go on to run in the November election, they would have a chance to join a fifth Muslim who already sits on the six-member council and is up for re-election in 2009.
Democracy in action and religious diversity are apparently too threatening for the AFA, an organization that former staff attorney Joe Murray said in his interview with me, harbors anti-Catholic views as well, despite fundraising appeals to the conservative Catholic demographic: "During a weekly mandatory devotional at AFA, one top AFA executive made the statement that Catholics were not Christians (being a Catholic? this was news to me)."
[W]hile in the south my Christianity was constantly challenged by employees at AFA, as well as folks in the South. There is a belief among some fundamentalist Christians that Catholics are not Christian, and while such a position may not be institutionalized in AFA, it definitely runs through the minds of some of its employees. Why people feel the need to seek approval of their Christianity from fellow men is beyond me.
...Obviously, nobody can determine if a person is Christian enough-the last time I checked, such a decision belonged to a higher power.
It's no surprise to see that Muslims are painted with a terror-alert brush by the fear-mongering AFA.
There is only one God, THEIR God. Not my God, not your God, THEIR God. And the Republican party is owned by these people. We wrote about these bigots yesterday. And today they're disrupting religious prayer services that don't conform to Southern Baptist teachings. Remember, the religious right also thinks Catholics aren't even Christians, because the Pope is a representative of Satan (they say). These are the "Christian" voices of the Republican party.
The group publishing this slur on Hindus is none other than the American Family Association, one of the biggest religious right groups and a big supporter of the Republicans. The AFA is made up of equal opportunity bigots: they slur gays, Catholics, Hindus and just about everyone else who isn't a conservative Christian fundamentalist. Their vision of America is a country made up of Southern Baptists, or at least a nation in which everyone has to live under laws that conform to Southern Baptist preachings.
So now they're upset that a Hindu chaplain may join the myriad of other faiths that have been permitted to open the Senate with a prayer. And why not? If we're going to ban religions we disagree with then I'd like to start with anyone claiming to represent Christian fundamentalist Republicans. Their bigotry and hatred doesn't represent my God - for example, Christian fundamentalists call Catholicism a "Satanic counterfeit," do you really think that represents the Founders' thinking? So if we're starting a list of religions we're going to ban from the Senate because we don't like them, let's start with America's own Taliban, the people who have raised banning non-Southern-Baptist religions to an art form.
I am not going to link to these bigots, but here is their action alert, asking folks to contact the Senate in order to get the Hindu chaplain banned.
Hindu to open Senate with prayer
Send an email to your senator now, expressing your disappointment in the Senate decision to invite a Hindu to open the session with prayer.
On Thursday, a Hindu chaplain from Reno, Nevada, by the name of Rajan Zed is scheduled to deliver the opening prayer in the U.S. Senate. Zed tells the Las Vegas Sun that in his prayer he will likely include references to ancient Hindu scriptures, including Rig Veda, Upanishards, and Bhagavard-Gita. Historians believe it will be the first Hindu prayer ever read at the Senate since it was formed in 1789.
WallBuilders president David Barton is questioning why the U.S. government is seeking the invocation of a non-monotheistic god. Barton points out that since Hindus worship multiple gods, the prayer will be completely outside the American paradigm, flying in the face of the American motto "One Nation Under God."
TAKE ACTION – Call your Senators at xxxxxxx
"In Hindu, you have not one God, but many, many, many, many, many gods," the Christian historian explains. "And certainly that was never in the minds of those who did the Constitution, did the Declaration [of Independence] when they talked about Creator -- that's not one that fits here because we don't know which creator we're talking about within the Hindu religion."
TAKE ACTION – Click here to send your E-mail today!
Barton says given the fact that Hindus are a tiny constituency of the American public, he questions the motivation of Senate leaders. "This is not a religion that has produced great things in the world," he observes. "You look at India, you look at Nepal -- there's persecution going in both of those countries that is gendered by the religious belief that is present there, and Hindu dominates in both of those countries."
And while Barton acknowledges there is not constitutional problem with a Hindu prayer in the Senate, he wonders about the political side of it. "One definitely wonders about the pragmatic side of it," he says. "What is the message, and why is the message needed? And will it actually communicate anything other than engender with folks like me a lot of questions?"
Barton says he knows of at least seven cases where Christians have lost their bid to express their own faith in a public prayer.
Zed is reportedly the first Hindu to deliver opening prayers in an American state legislature, having done so in both the Nevada State Assembly and Nevada State Senate earlier this year. He has stated that Thursday's prayer will be "universal in approach," despite being drawn from Hindu religious texts.
Yeah, it's been so hard for Christians to promote their religion in America, especially with opening prayers before the US Senate. Bigots and liars. But more importantly, these are the people who control the Republican party. And people wonder why the Republicans are dropping in the polls like flies?
In a speech to Latin American and Caribbean bishops at the end of a visit to Brazil, the Pope said the Church had not imposed itself on the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
They had welcomed the arrival of European priests at the time of the conquest as they were "silently longing" for Christianity, he said.
Millions of tribal Indians are believed to have died as a result of European colonization backed by the Church since Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492, through slaughter, disease or enslavement.
The Republican party hasn't lost its ability to hate just about everybody. I had thought with all their attention of late to Muslim-bashing and gay-bashing, they'd forgotten about the Jews. But alas, no suck luck. The GOP propaganda organ, and cult-run newspaper, Washington Times has joined the recent surge of George-Soros-Jew bashing that's been on the uptick of late in the Republican party and among their surrogates (is it just a coincidence that GOP surrogate and CNN host Glenn Beck last night noted that America just can't afford a Jew as president?)
In this latest broadside in the Moonie paper, we learn that the "amoral" and "wealthy super-elite" George Soros has a "hatred of Christianity" and "control" over a vast conspiracy to take over the world.
What, no comment about his nose?
The article even attacks Atrios as part of the great Jewish conspiracy (I hear his name was Atriosowitz before he emigrated).
You can read the piece for yourself, it's equal parts bizarre (accusing MoveOn of being fringe for opposing the Iraq war (along with the overwhelming majority of the American people) and supporting John Kerry for president (along with 49% of the American people)) - yeah, pretty fringe there - and equal parts simply disgusting for its implied bigotry. At what point will Republicans learn that Jew-baiting and gay-bashing, trashing blacks and Muslims and Latinos, isn't what this country is about, and it isn't what the majority of Republicans are about?
At what point will the Republican party stand for anything more than fear? Do they have any vision for the future that doesn't include bashing someone they hate?
And really creepy sex at that. One of the lead religious right groups, the American Family Association, in addition to promoting a known hate group on its Web site (a group that is lumped together with neo-Nazis and the Klan in a report compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center), is now publishing on its site a list of what it calls "sexual orientations." The list is filthy, it's the kind of thing we would never publish on this blog under any circumstance. It's not child safe by any means, and the AFA's Web site should be banned by every child safety filter in the country (please report their site if you know how to do so). Basically, the AFA is flipping out that others groups in society, like gays and women and people with disabilities, will be included in the already-existing federal hate crimes law - a law that ALREADY covers the religious right. Yes, the religious "special" right doesn't want to share their special status under US law. So what is their latest tactic? To declare that the word "sexual orientation" in the proposed hate crime amendment will include sex with animals, feces and corpses (the following link is NOT work-safe - you can see their bizarre sex list here).
These people call themselves Christians. They're sick. Do check out the filth they published on their Web site. The religious right Republicans are simply obsessed with sex, obsessed with gays, obsessed with filth. They are simply obsessed.
I'd posted last night, asking if anyone had any information about a controversy on Facebook regarding the banning of gay user-groups. Fortunately, one of you found an update that the controversy was a hoax. Glad to hear it, thanks for helping to get to the bottom of it, and now we can share the news with others in case they hear about this in the future. It's not real.
