And a mess of Bam's barbecue

By Zandar 

And Fox Nation leaves this in a bag on America's doorstep, lights it on fire, rings the bell and runs (h/t Oliver Willis).

Ahh, the president's birthday celebration had black people at it and didn't create jobs! This is where we are right now, it's a brutally long campaign season, folks... and the rampant, ugly, and now massively overt racism by the GOP and their enablers is only beginning. People ask me how President Obama can put up with such drooling idiocy, and I remind them that the president is never the true audience for shock-jock racism like this.

In a sick way, you have to admire the blue-steel hatred Fox has for the man. When the dog whistles are put away and the megaphones are brought out instead, it's proof that the president's most recent maneuver has demoralized the Tea Party faithful and that it's time to throw the red meat into the pit to get some action going (which gives more "moderate" conservative pundits the chance to pretend to disavow the bomb-throwing to look "centrist and principled").

It must mean, then, that the rank-and-file Tea Party disagree with John "Orange Julius" Boehner's assessment that the GOP got 98% of what it wanted in the debt deal. Indeed, many Americans are furious at the Republicans in the wake of this week's deal and the weeks of hostage-taking that preceded it.

Time both to fire up the base and to take the higher ground at the same time while Eric Cantor blames the extension of federal unemployment benefits for causing unemployment itself, and vows to hold it hostage next.  Always onwards to the next Pyrrhic victory, our GOP friends.

Obama impersonator tells racist jokes at Republican Leadership Conference

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Perhaps you've heard that an Obama impersonator, Reggie Brown, got out of hand at the Republican Leadership Conference on Saturday. Got up on stage and told some racist and other offensive jokes.

Now, he was removed from the stage when organizers thought he had gone too far, but, honestly, what were they expecting? Did they really have no idea that his "comedy" would be offensive in a way that is fairly common among conservatives?

"Unless you're simply not paying attention," Booman observes, "a day never goes by when the Republicans fail to let blacks, gays, Latinos, Muslims, and anyone else they don't like realize that they're unwelcome in their party." In this case, they can blame the impersonator, or at least they can try to. The fact is, he didn't say anything that goes against what a hell of a lot of Republicans are thinking these days, what with a black man in the White House and the country moving away from the paradise of white supremacy that many of them look to with nostalgic pride.

By the way... the audience laughed. Republicans, you see, find this sort of thing side-splittingly funny.

And as Think Progress notes, "RLC President Charlie Davis said that the Obama impersonator was 'funny the first 10 or 15 minutes.' That's when the racial jokes were told."

Here, should you care to see the offensive yuk-yukking in action, is the clip:

Newt Gingrich makes Allen West look good

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It really does take a lot to make right-wing Tea Party Rep. Allen West (R-FL) look good, but The Newt did just that by calling for the return of so-called "poll tests" and thereby allowing West, a black man, to point out, rightly, that such tests were used to deny the vote to blacks during the Jim Crow era:

THINK PROGRESS: Over the weekend, presidential contender Newt Gingrich came out and said he'd like to see some sort of poll test, throwing out the idea that maybe voters ought to have a certain standard knowledge of American history in order to be able to vote. What are your thoughts on that?

WEST: That's going back to some times that my parents had to contend with... I think that we need to do a better job educating our young men and women in school, but we don't need to have a litmus test, no.

West may be an anti-Muslim bigot, but he's certainly not a self-hating racist. Give him that at least.

And as for Gingrich, well, his utterly appalling proposal speaks for itself. He's supposedly an historian. And apparently he'd like to return to an ugly time in American history to make sure that "undesirables" (to him and the GOP) can't vote.

West of the moon, east of common sense

By Zandar

(Ed. note: I'd like to welcome a new contributor to The Reaction, Zandar of Zandar Versus The Stupid. I came across his blog a while back, during one of my stints doing the round-up at Crooks and Liars, and instantly became a huge fan. He's a fantastic writer who provides incisive analysis, and he'll now be bringing his formidable blogging talent to our team -- and it's an honour to have him here with us. So I hope you keep checking back for his posts, along with all of our posts (of course), but, if you aren't already familiar with him, so check out his blog and become a regular reader. You'll love it. And now read on and enjoy his first post here, on Hedges, West, and Obama. -- MJWS)

Via Jon Pitts-Wiley at Jack and Jill Politics, a not-so-gentle reminder than not everybody who suffers from Obama Derangement Syndrome is A) a Republican or B) white. 

No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”

That's Truthdig's Chris Hedges -- not President Obama's biggest fan by a long shot -- covering Princeton professor Cornel West there, in one of the nastiest pieces of firebagging I've read in some time. The piece is mainly about Cornel West's phone calls not being returned and his hurt feelings, but with Chris Hedges driving the narrative it becomes a massive airing of the grievances at Festivus.

Take this passage:

"I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor," he says. "But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, 'Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.' And the same is true for Dennis Ross and the other neo-imperial elites. I said, 'I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade.' I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong."

Now I've made the exact same point about Geithner. I do not, however, find it to be a deeply personal betrayal. I also pointed out that the kind of folks that Republicans put forth to replace Geithner were a lot worse.  It is in fact possible to criticize the President. I did so on many of his economic, civil liberties, and military policies. I still have a number of issues with the President.

But what West and Hedges are doing is making it personal, and that's just not objective. Melissa Harris-Perry has even less tolerance for this nonsense than I do.

I have many criticisms of the Obama administration. I wrote angrily about his choice of Rick Warren to deliver a prayer at the inauguration. I have spoken on television about my disagreement with drone attacks in Pakistan and been critical of the administration's initial choice to prosecute DADT cases. I worked for more progressive health care reform legislation and supported organizations that resisted the reproductive rights "compromises" in the bill. I've been scathing in public remarks and writings about the President’s education policy. My husband leads a non-profit that is suing HUD for its implementation of a discriminatory formula in the post-Katrina Road Home program. The president has never called me. I got my ticket to the inauguration from Canada! (Because Canadian Broadcast Television who gave me a chance to narrate the day's events.) But I can tell the difference between a substantive criticism and a personal attack. It is clear to me that West's ego, not the health of American democracy, is the wounded creature in this story.

And I have to agree with that wholeheartedly. The real issue is how the "principled opposition" to Obama from the left always seems to devolve from pointed criticism of the President to hysterical pyramids of straw men set on fire to glorify and justify the people attacking him from the left. It becomes the raison d'être rather than the objective viewpoint, and much of that comes from the fact the Village exists to feed on things like this. Best way to get attention as a liberal? Attack Obama from the left. A whole number of folks have staked out this territory in the last two years or so. Cornel West is just the latest but by no means is he the sole offender here.

When the "valid criticism" of the President becomes a vehicle for your own self-advancement, it ceases being valid and starts being dangerous and detrimental. If you're going to come at Obama because of policy differences, that's one thing. If you're doing it to get shiny views and TV time in order to remain relevant, then it's your problem, not Obama's.

Some folks need to do some serious soul searching, and do it quickly. The alternative to Obama is far, far worse. But I'd be remiss if I let this passage go without a fight:

"I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men," West says. "It's understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening."

As a mixed-race person here, West's accusation involving Obama being afraid of being viewed as a "white man in black skin" is so far beneath both rational discourse as a tenured Ivy League professor and beneath contempt in pretty much any other context that I'm actually somewhat horrified that anyone would actually say that outside of David Duke. Trying to make your bones off of painting Obama as "not black enough" is just as repugnant as having a problem with him being black, and in many ways it's worse. How is that in any way germane to the discussions of his policy or the realpolitik of Washington in 2011?

This is the kind of truly damaging idiocy that will end up doing more to deliver votes into the hands of the Republicans and depress turnout among blacks than anything Newt Gingrich or Tom Coburn or Ron Paul could utter, and it's this line-obliterating nonsense that goes well beyond the realm of valid criticism of Obama and straight into Obama Derangement Syndrome territory.

And that brings us to the most maddening, frustrating, and depressing part: West does have some valid points. Obama has made some bad decisions on his economic team and economic policy that favored the wealthy over the rest of us, on continuing many of the more heinous Bush-era legal and civil liberties policies, and by not prosecuting the Wall Street offenders who decimated out economy.  But those points are hopelessly lost in the storm of his own desire to go after Obama for sleights both real and imagined, and the further rush to justify his position as morally correct.

There is a categorical difference between what West set out to do here (and what Hedges tries to assist him with) and what they actually end up doing, and it's an empirical example of how you can go way too far in the quest for ideological perfection at the expense of common friggin' sense.

(Cross-posted at Zandar Versus The Stupid.)

Is Donald Trump a racist?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

He claims not. Actually, and amazingly, he claims he's the least racist person around. The proof he gives is that a black man, one Randal Pinkett, won The Apprentice a few years ago.

Once the guffaws subside, I'll leave you to judge that claim, and the proof, for yourselves.

If Trump wants to cite the Mr. Pinkett's success, however, we may respond by citing the lack of success of one Kevin Allen, another black man who was a contestant on that detestable show:

Apparently he doesn't like educated African-Americans very much,

said Mr. Allen, a highly-educated African-American who made it all the way to Week 14, just a week prior to the finale.

Sour grapes? Maybe, though Trump's condescending treatment of Mr. Allen was certainly inappropriate, if not outright racist.

But these are anecdotes from a reality TV show. More telling is Trump's enthusiastic embrace of Birtherism, which to a great extent is a mask for anti-Obama racism, as well as, more explicitly, his ridiculous assertion that Obama needed affirmative action to get into the Ivy League.

Again, I'll leave you to make up your own minds.

(And to help you do that, allow me to recommend Joe Gandelman, Melissa McEwan, and Kaili Joy Gray.)

The appalling bigotry of Sally Kern II

By Michael J.W. Stickings

In March of 2008, I wrote about Sally Kern's ridiculous, bigoted claims that that homosexuality is "the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, "that proponents of "the homosexual lifestyle" "want to get [children] into the government schools so they can indoctrinate them," and that "no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted for more than, you know, a few decades."

Well, the Oklahoma Republican was back at it on Wednesday, this time directing her bigotry at people of color:

The Republican-controlled Oklahoma House of Representatives passed a proposed constitutional amendment [on Wednesday] that would eliminate Affirmative Action in state government. The offical GOP reasoning for the change is that while "discrimination exists," "I don't think Affirmative Action has been as successful as we like to believe," the bill's sponsor, state Rep. T.W. Shannon (R), explained. But perpetual extremist state Rep. Sally Kern (R) offered her argument for ending the system that helps minorities advance: "blacks" simply don't work as hard as whites:

Rep. Sally Kern, R-Oklahoma City, said minorities earn less than white people because they don't work as hard and have less initiative.

"We have a high percentage of blacks in prison, and that's tragic, but are they in prison just because they are black or because they don't want to study as hard in school? I've taught school, and I saw a lot of people of color who didn't study hard because they said the government would take care of them."

There isn't really much that needs to be said about this. Such bigotry, I think, speaks for itself. It's an appalling example of an all-too-common form of somewhat indirect racism. Racists like Kern don't necessarily say that blacks and other "minorities" are sub-human and don't deserve equal rights, just that they're all or mostly (note the broad generalization) lazy, uneducated, and undeserving of government support -- and, worse, "lazy" can be understood as a euphemism for un-American and worse. It's a way of explaining, justifying, and ultimately perpetuating racial inequality.

As Steve Benen asks, "where does the Republican Party even find people like this? Is there a website where a party can order cartoonish racists to serve in state government?"

It apparently doesn't have to look too hard. Cartoonish racists are right at home in the GOP.

It never ends: Racism, Birtherism, and Barack Obama

By Mustang Bobby 

It doesn't matter if it's Winston from Alabama or Donald Trump or Pat Buchanan, there is always going to be a segment of America that will never accept the fact that Barack Obama was born in the United States, grew up and went to college, including Harvard, and then was elected president. They will continue to say that all he has to do is produce the evidence, and they'll be quiet, but the truth is that no amount of facts or proof will satisfy them, and every time more evidence is produced, they'll say it isn't good enough.

There's a very simple reason for this, and we all know what it is, even if Chris Matthews or Mike Signorile is too polite to say it: it's because Barack Obama is black.

That's it. Nothing else. Period. The End. I really don't understand why we keep dancing around it, and although I know that folks like Mr. Trump and Mr. Buchanan have a reputation for, as Howard Cosell use to say, "telling it like it is," they seem reticent to come out and say that they just don't believe that a black man is capable of being admitted to Ivy League colleges or elected to office without some kind of special treatment or affirmative action. They believe so strongly that the system in America is geared towards the white straight man that it is clearly impossible for anyone else to achieve success on their own.

There really isn't any point in arguing with them or trying to prove them wrong. Like Winston from Alabama, nothing you say will convince them. Chris Matthews and all the rest of the pundits are too polite -- and too much entrenched -- to call out Mr. Trump or Mr. Buchanan for their racism, and so they just leave it out there for the rest of us to ponder. And it will never end. If it wasn't Barack Obama, it would be Hillary Clinton, or Colin Powell or even Michael Steele who got where they did by means other than the usual route of working hard and getting into college and getting a job just like the white kid from Westchester.

So clearly Barack Obama had help, either by violating the Temporal Prime Directive and going back to August 1961 and planting false records in the Honolulu newspapers to say he was born there, and then jumping ahead to get him into Columbia and Harvard without anyone knowing him at those schools -- the subtext there is that those places are so lily-white that a black student would garner attention -- or that he brilliantly bought off everyone ever connected with any of those places to plant him in the right place at the right time.

But if he's so smart and rich, there has to be someone else pulling the strings; no black man could come up with such a plan on his own. So who's really in charge? Ah, that's the conspiracy...

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Donald Trump attacks Obama with the affirmative action card

By R.K. Barry

Donald Trump has added yet another unsubstantiated claim to his list of attacks on President Obama. Now he is saying, without a bit of evidence, that Obama was not qualified to attend either of the Ivy League schools, Columbia or Harvard, that he in fact attended. As per normal, the Trump burden of proof is based on the "fact" that he "heard" that Obama was a poor student.

The reality, as is well known, is quite different. Obama graduated from Columbia University in New York in 1983 with a degree in political science after transferring from Occidental College in California. He then went to Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1991. He was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

Okay, those are facts, but Trump wouldn't recognize a fact if it bit him on the ass (as they say).

So, again, as with the Birther nonsense, this is not about facts. This is racism plain and simple. This is intended to appeal to those who can be easily manipulated to froth at the suggestion that certain individuals (African-Americans, women, etc.) are given all the breaks because of unfair government intervention. You know, the usual right-wing knock on affirmative action. On this logic, when an African-American succeeds in such a grand way, there must be something wrong.

Trump is always indignant at the suggestion that he is a racist. But to modify only slightly the words of that great American philosopher Forrest Gump, "racism is as racism does."

Trump knows what he is doing. He understands his audience. He knows that there are components of the conservative base that will follow him to hell and back as long as he continues to attack the president through whatever means required. He knows it won't get him as far as the White House, but this carnival con man also knows that this will keep him on the front pages of newspapers and on the talk-show and news-panel circuit.

Yes, Trump craves fame above all else, especially as a means to further augment his wealth, and he will crawl through the most disgusting muck to get it. Truly despicable.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)

President Obama will never be American enough for Trump and the Birthers

By R.K. Barry

Andrew Sullivan wrote recently about a new CBS/NYT poll which found that 47% of Republicans think Obama wasn't born in the U.S and that another 22% aren't sure. He cited Steve Kornacki, who said that this "doesn't mean they've thought things through and believe an elaborate plot has been carried out, and it doesn't mean that being told actual facts about Obama's birth will sway them."

[Donald] Trump's message may be resonating with so many Republican voters simply because it represents the most blunt and unrelenting attack on Obama's "American-ness" that they have heard from a major Republican. In other words, it may not be the specifics of Obama's birth certificate and hospital records that excite them, it's the idea that someone so prominent is willing to stand up and take so much heat for saying, essentially, "Barack Obama is not one of us."

As a non-white president with ties to places like Kenya and Indonesia, he represents, for many, the fact that the American Century is over -- finally and completely. Because even if these people believe in their heart of hearts that they are not racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or xenophobic, they have decided that a country that embraced these sentiments was at the top of its game in parts of the 20th Century and that this is the country they want back -- a country where a non-white person with a non-traditional life story could not be president, a country in which only those who can "prove" they are "like us" are allowed to be hold the highest office in the land.

When reporters hold up copies of Obama's birth certificate only to be met by non-specific counterarguments from Trump and other Birthers, it is clear that the interlocutors are arguing past each other. Needless to say, when you are having an argument with someone, it's always useful to make sure you are actually in the same discussion.

The good news is that the bigots amongst us know they cannot directly argue their case and so they need devices like the birth certificate issue to give them credibility. The bad news is that when people won't say what they mean it confuses things significantly.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Racism in Republican Mississippi

By Michael J.W. Stickings

What, goes the old joke, has for 'i's and can't see? Mississippi.

It's not exactly the most progressive place:

Americans nationwide are evenly divided over the issue of same sex marriage. But Republicans in Mississippi are divided over a wholly different wedlock issue: interracial marriage.

In a PPP poll released Thursday, a 46% plurality of registered Republican voters said they thought interracial marriage was not just wrong, but that it should be illegal. 40% said interracial marriage should be legal.

It's easy to forget, given how far America has come, that such racism thrives all over the place, and not just in the overtly racist/Republican bastions of the Confederate Deep South.

But obviously it's pretty bad in Mississippi, or more specifically among Republicans in Mississippi (I shouldn't impugn the entire state, I suppose), and it hardly comes as a surprise that the leading Republican in that state is Haley Barbour, whose views on race are a tad, well, old-fashioned.

For more, see:

-- Haley Barbour, Jim Crow Republican; and

-- Haley Barbour and the KKK: A perfect Republican match?

Haley Barbour and the KKK: A perfect Republican match?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The other day, I withdrew my support for Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

It was a difficult and sad thing to do, and it's not a decision I made lightly. I came to it only after serious reflection and delirious soul-searching. I want what's best for the Republican Party, after all, and I really thought that Barbour, the seemingly perfect Republican, was the best.

But, you know, if you support and lobby for amnesty for illegal immigrants, if you show even the tiniest speck of humanity towards the many hard-working people who just want to make a better life for themselves in America, as well as for their children, you're just not a good enough Republican, and you certainly don't deserve the lofty, Reaganesque honor of being your party's nominee for the highest office in the land.

But maybe I was too impulsive. Maybe I didn't think the thing through. Maybe I didn't give Boss Barbour enough credit.

Maybe -- yes, maybe -- I was wrong. And maybe I need to send him a big fat apology.

Because he really is a great Republican, and it took something he said just this week to remind me of that:

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said Tuesday he won't denounce a Southern heritage group's proposal for a state-issued license plate that would honor Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who was an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Barbour is a potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate.

Questioned by reporters Tuesday after an energy speech in Jackson, Barbour said he doesn't think Mississippi legislators will approve the Forrest license plate proposed by the Mississippi Division of Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The group wants to sponsor a series of state-issued license plates over the next few years to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil War - or in its words, the "War Between the States." The Forrest license plate would be slated for 2014.

Mississippi NAACP president Derrick Johnson said it's "absurd" to honor a "racially divisive figure" such as Forrest. Johnson has also called on Barbour to denounce the license plate idea.

Asked about the NAACP's stance Tuesday, Barbour replied: "I don't go around denouncing people. That's not going to happen. I don't even denounce the news media."

As Jonathan Chait notes, it would appear that, for Barbour the news media are even worse than the KKK. Such crazy anti-media sentiment certainly reinforces his Republican cred.

But it's also his refusal to denounce the effort to honor not just a major Confederate figure but a leader of the KKK that really sends his star back into orbit. While he said that "there's not a chance it'll become law," and hence that there won't be a state-issued licence plate (though it's not clear if he himself supports the idea or if he just thinks the Mississippi legislature won't approve it), it's that refusal that supersizes his Republican cred.

No, he's not perfect. Alas. There's still that "amnesty" blip, and he won't be able to run away from that, just as Romney won't be able to run away from health-care reform in Massachusetts.

But he's a good Republican, a very good Republican, and very much a model for how Republicans should conduct themselves. I doubt he'll run, and maybe he's not Teabagger enough for the far right, but the party could do a lot worse, and I really hope all Americans, especially independents who may need some help deciding between the two parties, come to identify him with the Republican Party.

He deserves no less. And neither does the GOP.

(photo)

Craziest Republican of the Day: Connie O'Brien

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Even when we expect the worst, Republicans somehow seem to keep amazing us with their capacity to scrape more and more off the bottom of the barrel. Take, for example, the astonishing racist ignorance of Connie O'Brien, a Kansas Republican:

One week ago, the Kansas House Federal and State Committee held a hearing about in-state tuition being granted to the children of undocumented immigrants, which has been the policy in the state since 2004.

Speaking in favor of repealing the law, Rep. Connie O'Brien (R-KS) began telling an anecdote at the hearing about how her son had difficulty in getting financial assistance to attend college. She explained that she took her son to a financial aid office, and as she was waiting in line, she believed there was a girl waiting in line with them who was "not originally from this country." Fellow committee member Rep. Sean Gatewood (D-KS) asked O'Brien how she knew this student was "illegal." O'Brien replied that she knew because the student "wasn't black, she wasn't Asian, and she had the olive complexion": 

REP. O'BRIEN: My son who's a Kansas resident, born here, raised here, didn't qualify for any financial aid. Yet this girl was going to get financial aid. My son was kinda upset about it because he works and pays for his own schooling and his books and everything and he didn't think that was fair. We didn't ask the girl what nationality she was, we didn't think that was proper. But we could tell by looking at her that she was not originally from this country. [...] 

REP. GATEWOOD: Can you expand on how you could tell that they were illegal? 

REP. O'BRIEN: Well she wasn't black, she wasn't Asian, and she had the olive complexion. 

The olive complexion?

Yes, watch out, all you Olives, they're gonna getcha, because you're the wrong color, and you clearly don't belong.

Yes, anyone with an "olive" complexion is an illegal Mexican immigrant, no questions asked. Wow. How do you even deal with that sort of stupidity?

I bet her gaydar is fantastic, too.

They call me Mr. President

By Capt. Fogg

There's a difference between comedic impersonations and bigoted mockery; between comedy and things that make racists, bullies, mean spirited, angry people laugh. One could invoke the German Schadenfreude, yet the laughter when a clown slips on a banana peel isn't quite the same and isn't as universal as the sound that comes from the man in the white sheet laughing at the humiliation of another man.

I've seen enough bullies in my day. I've seen some of them confronted and heard the common refrains of "I'm the victim here" and the almost inevitable "didn't you know I was joking?" So I wasn't surprised to hear Glenn Beck whine to Meredith Vieira that his detractors didn't have a sense of humor adequate to know that when he advocates beating a public official with a shovel or tells us of the need to shoot Democratic leaders in the head, it's those dumb liberals who are humorless.

For the most part, the law has never found incitement amusing: shouting fire when there isn't one - for laughs. Even those orating innocently about a strike have been punished in America because someone used the occasion to toss a bomb. You don't make bomb jokes in the airport and you don't joke about killing democrats to an audience you know to include deranged and armed enemies of Democrats, even if for no other reason than avoiding making yourself look bad. But looking bad is just what many of these frustrated losers want to do.

But times seem to be changing and that old time evil is bubbling up again, or at least some groups now have enough power to make the clowns take off the blackface and to think twice about anti-Semitic rants and maybe be a bit more circumspect before going after homosexuals, women, and all the other pet victims of the Right.

Mexicans? Chinese? Well they are still targets of opportunity for those willing to descend that far. Some comedians don't realize they're being offensive to people who don't deserve it, some of them don't care as long as they get an audience and others couldn't get a job unless it was entertaining bigots. So if Margaret Cho makes jokes about her Korean family, we don't cringe, unless we are her relatives. When Michael Richards goes on an N-word binge, we question his sense of decency -- to say the least.

Watching Dennis Leary's charity benefit the other day, I was appalled at his crude attempt to make fun of the world's most widely spoken language. No, not the real difficulties of speaking, it but with facial contortions and weird sounds that didn't seem funny or sound anything like Chinese to one familiar with the language. Bad taste I think, and enough to alienate a lot of people to the objectives of his charity.

And then there's Limbaugh.

What is an American president called when he visits China? They call him Mr. President. He's only called a Marxist tyrant by detritus like Limbaugh and the lumps of fecal matter that follow in his wake. We employ a host of people to promote American interests, to show the world our best face and we have this inflated rubber gasbag mooning them.

What is Chinese President Hu Jintao called when he's a guest here? The "Chicom Dictator " says Rush. "Ching chong, ching chong, chong" mocks the flatulent Palm Beach Bastard Billionaire, who makes a living lowering the estimation of my country in the eyes of the world. Condescending, contemptuous and contemptible: "Ching chong, ching chong, chong" while millions of Americans, with or without Chinese origins cringe.

No, presidents from Nixon onward have been treated well in China, it's only in the sewers of the American Right that President Obama is called a Marxist tyrant by detritus like Limbaugh and the lumps of fecal matter that follow in his wake. We employ a host of people to promote American interests, to show the world our best face, to induce them to trust our intentions and yet we have this inflated rubber gasbag mooning them while his adolescent friends laugh and mock.

Of course he knows what he's doing, and of course he doesn't care if he puts a white sheet on Uncle Sam and confirms the belief of billions that we are a nation of snarling pirates who don't deserve respect or trust or cooperation. He'll keep doing it as long as we let him, support him, laugh at him, watch him and patronize his unworthy, unscrupulous and unAmerican sponsors.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Haley Barbour now says racism is bad

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Jim Crow Republican Haley Barbour now says those pro-segregation, white-supremacist Citizens Councils in the South, including in his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi, were "indefensible":

It was a difficult and painful era for Mississippi, the rest of the country, and especially African Americans who were persecuted in that time.

It was, to put it mildly, but you'll excuse me if I don't believe a word this racist blowhard says.

At Slate, David Weigel writes that "[t]he pattern revealed by his "gaffes," though, is of a politician who thinks racism isn't really a problem anymore, and that liberals get too much political leverage from the memory of the Civil Rights era."

I think that's understating, and somewhat misrepresenting, Barbour's race "problem." This is a man, after all -- Barbour, not Weigel -- who has a Confederate flag signed by Jefferson Davis in his office, a man who in 2003 attended a fundraiser for the Council of Conservative Citizens, a pro-segregation, white-supremacist group, a man with a long history of playing the race card to win white votes.

Is he an out-and-out racist? Maybe not -- at least not anymore. But he's certainly enough of a politician to know when to correct himself and to say what has to be said (particularly when eyeing a presidential run). Which he did. He just doesn't have any credibility. You'd have to be a fool to believe him.

Yes, Nixon was a bigot. What else is new?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

More tapes, more hatred. Isn't that the posthumous legacy of Richard Nixon, as we learn more and more about him from all those White House tapes he made? The Times has the latest:

Richard M. Nixon made disparaging remarks about Jews, blacks, Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans in a series of extended conversations with top aides and his personal secretary, recorded in the Oval Office 16 months before he resigned as president.

The remarks were contained in 265 hours of recordings, captured by the secret taping system Nixon had installed in the White House and released this week by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. 

I'm not sure whether to sigh or yawn.

So Nixon said that Jews are "insecure" and have "a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality," that Italians "don't have their heads screwed on tight," that the Irish "get mean" when they drink, and that blacks don't have a hope unless they're "inbred" over the next 500 years.

And? Is it news that Nixon said such things?

Well, I suppose it is, as it adds to the public record of a president who was, among other things, a bitter, resentful, and deeply hateful man.

As Digby notes, "[t]he fact that so many people are appalled today is a very big sign of progress." This issue, though, isn't so much that Nixon said what he said but that so many others are still saying the same things:

I think Nixon might have lost if his language and expressions were public knowledge. People didn't particularly want their leaders to be crude racist scumbags even back then. But the idea that these people have disappeared is just wrong. They are still around and they are still in politics and some of them are in high office. Like Nixon before them, they are just keeping their mouths shut in public.

Unlike him, though, they may not be taping every word they say.

But are they really keeping their mouths shut in public? Some of them, yes, but consider the anti-gay and anti-Muslim bigotry that prevails throughout the Republican Party -- and that is communicated openly and proudly.

There has been progress, yes, but it could just be that the targets have changed.