Taibbi on the Race-baiting Trend

[oddlots]

It's hard to top the sheer dishonesty and shamelessness of Wall Street, but I think the right wing media has done so with alarming ease:

"A sample of some of the stuff we’ve seen and heard on the air this year:

• On July 12, Glenn Beck implied that the Obama government was going to aid the New Black Panther Party in starting a race war, with the ultimate aim of killing white babies. "They want a race war. We must be peaceful people. They are going to poke, and poke, and poke, and our government is going to stand by and let them do it." He also said that "we must take the role of Martin Luther King, because I do not believe that Martin Luther King believed in, 'Kill all white babies.'"
• CNN contributor and Redstate.com writer Erick Erickson, on the Panther mess: "Republican candidates nationwide should seize on this issue. The Democrats are giving a pass to radicals who advocate killing white kids in the name of racial justice and who try to block voters from the polls."
• On July 6, the Washington Times columnist J. Christian Adams wrote an editorial insisting that "top [Obama] appointees have allowed and even encouraged race-based enforcement as either tacit or open policy," marking one of what would become many assertions by commentators that the Obama administration was no longer interested in protecting the rights of white people. "The Bush Civil Rights Division was willing to protect all Americans from racial discrimination,” Adams wrote. “During the Obama years, the Holder years, only some Americans will be protected."
• July 12: Rush Limbaugh says Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder “protect and represent” the New Black Panther party.
• July 28: Rush says Supreme Court decision on 1070 strips Arizonans of their rights to defend themselves against an “invasion”: "I guess the judge is saying it's not in the public interest for Arizona to try to defend itself from an invasion. I don't know how you look at this with any sort of common sense and come to the ruling this woman came to.” That same day, Rush says this: "Muslim terrorists are going to have a field day in Arizona. You cannot ask them where they're from. You cannot even act like we know where they're from. You cannot ask them for their papers. We can ask you for yours. Not them."
• July 29: The Washington Times asks “Should Arizona Secede?” and says the Supreme Court "is unilaterally disarming the people of Arizona in the face of a dangerous enemy” with the aim of creating a “socialist superstate.” The paper writes: "The choice is becoming starkly apparent: devolution or dissolution."
• July 29, Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy continues the Radio Rwanda theme, saying, "If the feds won't protect the people and Governor Brewer can't protect her citizens, what are the people of Arizona supposed to do?"

There’s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the Fox News crowd. But this summer’s media hate-fest is different than anything we’ve seen before. What we’re watching is a calculated campaign to demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites. They’re telling these people that their government is illegitimate and criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...2#userComments

To my eye there is nothing for the small l libertarian in this phenomenon.

The big L libertarians behind it are profiled here:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...0fa_fact_mayer

[doom&gloom]

Re: Taibbi on the Race-baiting Trend

SO, LETS SEE NOW...

"right-wingers" want the laws of the country enforced against Black Panthers who intimidated voters? check.
"right wingers" want immigration laws enforced? check.

the present administration seeks to neither enforce laws against blatant criminals. check.

now the hyperbole strikes up and... this is all bad against the right wing?

i got a suggestion for the left wing -- ENFORCE THE LAWS ON THE BOOKS and take away the ammo from the right wing.

oh, sorry, too easy when you have another political agenda in mind, huh?

[BigBagel]

Re: Taibbi on the Race-baiting Trend

I love how the right portrays the Black Panthers as a major force in the African American community. They're a non entity. With a few exceptions they only exist on talk radio for the purpose of scaring white people.

[Slimprofits]

Re: Taibbi on the Race-baiting Trend

It seems to me that the original post was about the Republican side of the mainstream media and doom & gloom took it personally.

Very interesting.

And it reminds me again of EJ's thread on the election of Scott Brown.

The operative word for Brown is “independent.” Voters believe that both parties have been for sale for more than 30 years. Regardless of party, independence expressed as a clear and simple practical set of solutions that directly confront the greatest anxieties of voters is the key to winning in the 2010 Congressional elections.

EJ is, unfortunately, politically naive and the U.S. is more politically balkanized than ever before.

There is a very small and completely non-influential subset of voters that believe BOTH parties have been for sale for more than 30 years.

Doom & Gloom is one of those people is he not?

QED.

[flintlock]

Re: Taibbi on the Race-baiting Trend

Sure the Black Panther party is probably a fringe tiny minority. But what is wrong with calling them out for some of the ridiculous stuff they say? I don't see how that makes anyone, right or left, wrong. If they remain silent they would probably someday be compared to the Germans who did not denounce the Nazis. Sorry, but I see no campaign to denounce minorities but rather a campaign to uncover the fact that our freaking laws are now selectively enforced for political reasons. And I hate Fox news.

[BigBagel]

Re: Taibbi on the Race-baiting Trend

There's nothing wrong with calling them out. There's nothing wrong with calling Aryan Nation out either. What would be wrong would be to portray Aryan Nation as an influential group in the white community.

Another old chestnut among the shouters is to blame the Community Reinvestment Act as the reason for the housing collapse. Not one of the more minor reasons among many but THE reason. The unstated message.....Community Reinvestment Act= helping undeserving black people. I've heard people like Steve Forbes throw this one out. Now you know a guy like that knows it's BS. It standard operating procedure during times of economic distress to blame the black guy or the Jew. Lynchings went up during periods of falling cotton prices. You don't want people getting angry at the real power structure. The folks need to let off a little steam on someone.

[don]

Re: Taibbi on the Race-baiting Trend

More on that 'trend' thing....

August 26, 2010
Rumor to Fact in Tales of Post-Katrina Violence

By TRYMAINE LEE

NEW ORLEANS — In the days after Hurricane Katrina left much of New Orleans in flooded ruins, the city was awash in tales of violence and bloodshed.

The narrative of those early, chaotic days — built largely on rumors and half-baked anecdotes — quickly hardened into a kind of ugly consensus: poor blacks and looters were murdering innocents and terrorizing whoever crossed their path in the dark, unprotected city.

“As you look back on it, at the time it was being reported, it looked like the city was under siege,” said Russel L. Honoré, the retired Army lieutenant general who led military relief efforts after the storm.

Today, a clearer picture is emerging, and it is an equally ugly one, including white vigilante violence, police killings, official cover-ups and a suffering population far more brutalized than many were willing to believe. Several police officers and a white civilian accused of racially motivated violence have recently been indicted in various cases, and more incidents are coming to light as the Justice Department has started several investigations into civil rights violations after the storm.

“The environment that was produced by the storm brought out what was dormant in people here — the anger and the contempt they felt against African-Americans in the community,” said John Penny, a criminologist at Southern University of New Orleans. “We might not ever know how many people were shot, killed, or whose bodies will never be found.”

Broken levees left 80 percent of New Orleans submerged, but in unflooded Algiers Point, for instance, a mostly white enclave in a predominantly black neighborhood on the west bank of the Mississippi River, armed white militias cordoned off many of the streets.

They posted signs that boasted, “We shoot looters.” And the sound of gunfire peppered the hot days and nights like thunderclaps of a second storm.

Reginald Bell, a black resident, said in a recent interview that he was threatened at gunpoint by two white men there a few days after the storm. The men, on a balcony a few blocks from his home, yelled at him, “We don’t want your kind around here!”

Then one of the men racked his pump-action shotgun, aimed it at Mr. Bell and dared him to be seen again on the streets of Algiers Point, Mr. Bell said. The next day, he said, the men confronted him on his porch while he sat with his girlfriend. They shoved guns — a shotgun and a long-nose .357 Magnum — in the couple’s faces and reiterated their demand.

“There was no electricity, no police, no nothing,” said Mr. Bell, 41, sitting on his porch on a recent afternoon. “We were like sitting ducks. I slept with a butcher knife and a hatchet under my pillow.”

The West Bank area of the city was spared any flooding, but in the days and weeks after the storm, it was littered with fallen trees and, according to witnesses, with the bodies of several black men — none of whom appeared to have drowned.

“I done seen bodies lay in the streets for weeks,” said Malik Rahim, who lives around the corner from Mr. Bell and came to his aid. “I’m not talking about the flooded Ninth Ward, I’m talking about dry Algiers. I watched them become bloated and torn apart by dogs. And they all had bullet wounds.

“We’ve been screaming it from the top of our lungs since those first days, but nobody wanted to listen.”

Mr. Bell said that he went to the police not long after the confrontation with the two gun-wielding white men but no report or action was taken. It was not until last year when he was interviewed by a federal grand jury looking into civil rights violations in post-Katrina New Orleans that people seemed to pay attention, he said.

Some of the most serious accusations surfaced after investigations by The Times-Picayune and the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, which spotlighted much of the police violence and racially motivated violence around Algiers Point.

One case is that of a former Algiers resident, Roland J. Bourgeois Jr., who is white and was accused of being part of one of the vigilante groups. He was recently indicted by the federal government on civil rights charges in the shooting of three black men who were trying to leave the city. According to the indictment, Mr. Bourgeois, who now lives in Mississippi, warned one neighbor that “anything coming up this street darker than a brown paper bag is getting shot.”

The highest-profile case involving the police is the Danziger Bridge shooting in eastern New Orleans, where six days after Katrina, a group of police officers wielding assault rifles and automatic weapons fired on a group of unarmed civilians, wounding a family of four and killing two, including a teenager and a mentally disabled man. The man, Ronald Madison, 40, was shot in the back with a shotgun and then stomped and kicked as he lay dying, according to court papers.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu in May invited the Justice Department to conduct a full review of the city’s Police Department. The Justice Department has also begun several civil and criminal investigations into post-Katrina violence involving the police and civilians.

Thomas Perez, an assistant attorney general, said the federal government was investigating eight criminal cases involving accusations of police misconduct. Many people in the city — including activists, victims and witnesses — had long contended that racial violence was being ignored by local law enforcement.

“We were dismissed as kooks for the last four years,” said Jacques Morial, a co-director of the Louisiana Justice Institute, a nonprofit advocacy organization, and the son of New Orleans’ first black mayor. “I think what we are seeing now recalibrates the reality of Katrina, and I think it vindicates lots of folks.”

The city’s police superintendent, Ronal Serpas, who took over the department in May, said he was troubled by what has come to light since the storm.

“We have to confront this and look at it head on,” Mr. Serpas said. “There have been far too many examples of men who have worn this badge and admitted in court to behavior that is an absolute insult to this city and to the men and women of this department who wear this badge with dignity and pride.”

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Rahim, 62, walked through the streets of Algiers and pointed out where, block by block, the militias had set up barricades and stood guard. He walked along the levee where the charred remains of Henry Glover were found in the trunk of a burned-out car, precipitating the indictment of three current and two former police officers.

“How can you remove the scars from the eyes of all the children who witnessed these atrocities?” Mr. Rahim asked.

General Honoré said that he had been asking himself questions, too.

“I think, every year there is more time for people to reflect on it,” he said. “I came out of Katrina with one perspective on it. And there isn’t a month that goes by that I don’t talk to someone who survived it who gives me a different perspective than I had before.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us...ricane_katrina

MSM post-Katrina coverage

[don]

Re: Taibbi on the Race-baiting Trend

Race remains one of the elites most powerful cards....

In related news, as with the last time that fascism emerged out of economic depression, we once again find the Japanese. I just read an article in the Herald Tribune which is bizarrely not available anywhere online; so I will summarize and type in a few quotes here. The title is “Venting frustration in Japan,” and it chronicles the rise of new extreme right groups in Japan called the ‘Net right’ (for the fact that they organize via the internet) and that, unlike the Old Right groups, have stepped up personal confrontations in a manner that is unheard of in Japan. From the article:

“the largest group appears to be the cumbersomely named Citizens Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Koreans in Japan, known here by its Japanese abbreviation, the Zaitokukai, which has about 9,000 members.”

One could also perhaps read the American version as “Citizens Group That Will Not Forgive Special Privileges for Mexicans, Blacks or Gays in America.”

The far right Japanese groups meet online and then hold noisy demonstrations in meat space; which often include confronting Korean or Filipino school children, taunting them to go home. More:

“Since first appearing last year, these protests have aimed at not just Japan’s half-million ethnic Koreans but also Chinese and other Asian workers, Christian churchgoers and even Westerners in Halloween costumes. In that case, a few dozen angrily shouting demonstrators followed around revelers waving placards that said, “This is not a white country.”


Stacy Herbert

[Munger]

Re: Taibbi on the Race-baiting Trend

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[doom&gloom]

Re: Taibbi on the Race-baiting Trend

It seems to me that the original post was about the Republican side of the mainstream media and doom & gloom took it personally.

Very interesting.

And it reminds me again of EJ's thread on the election of Scott Brown.



EJ is, unfortunately, politically naive and the U.S. is more politically balkanized than ever before.

There is a very small and completely non-influential subset of voters that believe BOTH parties have been for sale for more than 30 years.

Doom & Gloom is one of those people is he not?

QED.

personally? Not at all. I am tired of all the "bread and circus" shyte both sides put out to deflect from solving the real pressing issues of our times. We have immigration laws, but we don;t enforce them. We have voting rights laws, but we don;t enforce them. Or maybe we enforce laws selectibvely because the right wants cheap labor and the left wants future voters. or because we don;t want to piss off certain voting blocks. WTF? the media gets all abuzz about the "Ground Zero mosque". Let them build the damn thing, and let someone who is pissed put up a Hooters with pork sandwich daily specials next door for all I care. This is all political play fodder to keep the populace off the man issues of out-of-control spending, sinking GDP, housing collapsing, etc etc. It is all "bread and circus" when we need intellectual and political honesty.

[Master Shake]

Re: Taibbi on the Race-baiting Trend

Sure the Black Panther party is probably a fringe tiny minority. But what is wrong with calling them out for some of the ridiculous stuff they say? I don't see how that makes anyone, right or left, wrong. If they remain silent they would probably someday be compared to the Germans who did not denounce the Nazis. Sorry, but I see no campaign to denounce minorities but rather a campaign to uncover the fact that our freaking laws are now selectively enforced for political reasons. And I hate Fox news.

+1. The Klan and Aryan Nation are also fringe minorities, but no one gets their knickers in a knot when their racist antics are called out. Why should the New Black Pather Party (or Obama's pastor "Rev." Wright) get a free pass? Double standard.

Shame on Matt Taibbi for playing the race card.

[Starving Steve]

Re: Taibbi on the Race-baiting Trend

I like the idea of allowing the Ground Zero mosque, and then right next to it we could BBQ pork ribs outside, all day and all night. This is a very workable solution if the NYC Planning Department would allow it. And on the other side of the mosque, maybe we could have a topless bar. A gay and lesbian bar across the street from the G.Z. mosque would be great too. A witchcraft shop or Halloween shop across from the mosque would be great too. How about the Isreali Consulate next to the G.Z. mosque? El Al Airlines up on the second floor of the G.Z. mosque? And how about a Christian Church with a giant cross on the third floor of the mosque? A synagogue on the 4th floor? A Vegan worship centre on the 5th floor? A Buddist Temple on the 6th floor?

We have so much to learn from each other!

[doom&gloom]

Re: Taibbi on the Race-baiting Trend

The left always turns to the race card, the right to the socialist card. so what else is new?

[cjppjc]

Re: Taibbi on the Race-baiting Trend

The highest-profile case involving the police is the Danziger Bridge shooting in eastern New Orleans, where six days after Katrina, a group of police officers wielding assault rifles and automatic weapons fired on a group of unarmed civilians, wounding a family of four and killing two, including a teenager and a mentally disabled man. The man, Ronald Madison, 40, was shot in the back with a shotgun and then stomped and kicked as he lay dying, according to court papers.


The far right Japanese groups meet online and then hold noisy demonstrations in meat space; which often include confronting Korean or Filipino school children, taunting them to go home. More:

“Since first appearing last year, these protests have aimed at not just Japan’s half-million ethnic Koreans but also Chinese and other Asian workers, Christian churchgoers and even Westerners in Halloween costumes. In that case, a few dozen angrily shouting demonstrators followed around revelers waving placards that said, “This is not a white country.”

Nice to see how far we have come as a species. Nothing changes, it's just an illusion of progress.

[Jeff]

Re: Taibbi on the Race-baiting Trend

Irony alert. Decrying a government that "allows" a mosque? What part of a libertarian, small government ideal gives it the right to allow or disallow establishment of a church of any sort anywhere in the US?