New Left Media challenges Tea Party to explain themselves: On Thursday, April 15, Tea Partiers from around the country gathered in the nation’s capital to protest what they perceived to be egregious increases in taxation under the Obama administration, despite taxes having actually been lowered for 98% of working Americans.
When a correspondent for New Left Media ventured out among the tea partiers to interview them about what it is that’s fueling their fierce opposition to the government in general and President Obama in particular — The usual nativist rhetoric and praise of Fox News personalities ensued. “Tea-bagged” answers included lots of wild-eyed claims about tyranny and socialism, with a woman gravely warning “Obama is considering banning fishing in America!” [ MORE HERE ]
NOTE: President Obama Cut Taxes for 98 Percent of Working Americans in 2009 — from the non-partisan Citizens for Tax Justice. [ READ MORE ]. CTJ has newstate-specific reportsthat aim to clear up this widespread misunderstanding over President Obama’s tax policies.They show that the President cut taxes for working people at all income levels for 2009 and they show who was helped by each individual tax break.
Huffington Post: Dozens of Second Amendment rights activists holstered their handguns and slung unloaded rifles over their shoulders Monday at a gun rights rally in northern Virginia [ MAP ], while hundreds of like-minded but unarmed counterparts converged in the nation’s capital.
The gun-toting protesters in Virginia were within the bounds of the law but promised to keep the weapons unloaded. Those in Washington, D.C., chose not to carry any firearms in compliance with the district’s strict gun laws, even though many believe the rules are unconstitutional. [ READ MORE]
Rush ‘FAT‘ Limbaugh:McVeigh attack happened because “Reno ordered tanks to be used against American citizens” in “Waco invasion.“
NOTES:1. The Waco Siege began on February 28, 1993, when the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) attempted to execute a search warrant at the Branch Davidian ranch at Mount Carmel, a property located nine miles (14 km) east-northeast of Waco, Texas. An exchange of gunfire resulted in the deaths of four agents and six followers of David Koresh. A subsequent 51-day siege by the Federal Bureau of Investigation ended on April 19 when fire destroyed the compound. Seventy-six people (24 of them British nationals) died in the fire, including more than 20 children, two pregnant women, and Koresh himself. [ READ MORE ]
2. Oklahoma City Bombing: The Oklahoma City bombing was a bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. Timothy McVeigh detonated an explosive-filled truck that he had parked in front of the Federal Building. McVeigh’s co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, had assisted in the bomb preparation. It was the most destructive act of terrorism on American soil until the September 11, 2001 attacks. The Oklahoma blast claimed 168 lives, including 19 children under the age of 6, and more than 680 people were injured. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 buildings within a sixteen-block radius, destroyed or burned 86 cars, and shattered building glass in a three mile square area. The bomb was estimated to have caused at least $652 million worth of property damage.[ READ MORE ]
LIAR Dick Morris tells purported new story about Clinton, Reno and Waco that’s “never been said before“
Ding-BAT Fox’s Steve Doocy on Americans who “trust” the government: “what are they thinking?“
It’s not happenstance that officials from the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Virginia and Mississippi have argued, as one said this month, that the Confederate Army had been “fighting for the same things that people in the Tea Party are fighting for.” Obama opposition increasingly comes wrapped in the racial code that McDonnell revived in endorsing Confederate History Month. The state attorneys general who are invoking states’ rights in their lawsuits to nullify the federal health care law are transparently pushing the same old hot buttons. The nearly all-white G.O.P. is so traumatized by race it has now morphed into a bizarre paragon of both liberal and conservative racial political correctness. For irrefutable proof, look no further than the peculiar case of its chairman, Steele, whose reckless spending and incompetence would cost him his job at any other professional organization, let alone a political operation during an election year. Steele has job security only because he is the sole black man in a white party hierarchy. That hierarchy is as fearful of crossing him as it is of calling out the extreme Obama haters in its ranks.
Welcome to Confederate History Month
By: Essayist – Frank Rich It’s kind of like that legendary stunt on the prime-time soap "Dallas," where we learned that nothing bad had really happened because the previous season’s episodes were all a dream. We now know that the wave of anger that crashed on the Capitol as the health care bill passed last month — the death threats and epithets hurled at members of Congress — was also a mirage.Take it from the louder voices on the right. Because no tape has surfaced of anyone yelling racial slurs at the civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, it’s now a blogosphere “fact” that Lewis is a liar and the “lamestream media” concocted the entire incident. The same camp maintains as well that the spit landing on the Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver was inadvertent spillover saliva from an over-frothing screamer — spittle, not spit, as it were. True, there is video evidence of the homophobic venom directed at Barney Frank — but, hey, Frank is white, so no racism there!
“It’s Not About Race” declared a headline on a typical column defending over-the-top “Obamacare” opponents from critics like me, who had the nerve to suggest a possible racial motive in the rage aimed at the likes of Lewis and Cleaver — neither of whom were major players in the Democrats’ health care campaign. It’s also mistaken, it seems, for anyone to posit that race might be animating anti-Obama hotheads like those who packed assault weapons at presidential town hall meetings on health care last summer. And surely it is outrageous for anyone to argue that conservative leaders are enabling such extremism by remaining silent or egging it on with cries of “Reload!” to pander to the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base. As Beck has said, it’s Obama who is the real racist.
I would be more than happy to stand corrected. But the story of race and the right did not, alas, end with the health care bill. Hardly had we been told that all that ugliness was a fantasy than we learned back in the material world that the new Republican governor of Virginia, Robert McDonnell, had issued a state proclamation celebrating April as Confederate History Month.
In doing so, he was resuscitating a dormant practice that had been initiated in 1997 by George Allen, the Virginia governor whose political career would implode in 2006 when he was caught on camera calling an Indian-American constituent “macaca.” McDonnell had been widely hailed by his party as a refreshing new “big tent” conservative star when he took office in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, in January. So perhaps his Dixiecrat proclamation, if not a dream, might have been a staff-driven gaffe rather than a deliberate act of racial provocation.
That hope evaporated once McDonnell was asked to explain why there was no mention of slavery in his declaration honoring “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens.” After acknowledging that slavery was among “any number of aspects to that conflict between the states,” the governor went on to say that he had focused on the issues “I thought were most significant for Virginia.” Only when some of his own black supportersjoined editorialists in observing that slavery was significant to some Virginians too — a fifth of the state’s population is black — did he beat a retreat and apologize.
But his original point had been successfully volleyed, and it was not an innocent mistake. McDonnell’s words have a well-worn provenance. In “Race and Reunion,” the definitive study of Civil War revisionism, the historian David W. Blight documents the long trajectory of the insidious campaign to erase slavery from the war’s history and reconfigure the lost Southern cause as a noble battle for states’ rights against an oppressive federal government. In its very first editorial upon resuming publication in postwar 1865, The Richmond Dispatch characterized the Civil War as a struggle for the South’s “sense of rights under the Constitution.” The editorial contained not “a single mention of slavery or black freedom,” Blight writes. That evasion would be a critical fixture of the myth-making to follow ever since.
But once again you’d have to look hard to find any conservative leader who criticized McDonnell for playing with racial fire. Instead, another Southern governor — who, as it happened, had issued a Confederate Heritage Month proclamation of his own — took up his defense. The whole incident didn’t “amount to diddly,” said Haley Barbour, of Mississippi, when asked about it by Candy Crowley of CNN last weekend.
Barbour, a potential presidential aspirant, was speaking from New Orleans, where the Southern Republican Leadership Conference was in full cry. Howard Fineman of Newsweek reported that he couldn’t find any African-American, Hispanic or Asian-American attendees except for the usual G.O.P. tokens trotted out as speakers — J. C. Watts, Bobby Jindal and Michael Steele, only one of them (Jindal) holding public office.
New Orleans had last attracted G.O.P. attention in 2008, when John McCain visited there as part of a “forgotten places” campaign tour to deliver the message that his party cared about black Americans and that “never again” would the city’s tragedy be ignored. “Never” proved to have a shelf life of less than two years. None of the opening-night speakers at last weekend’s conference (Newt Gingrich, Liz Cheney, Mary Matalin et al.) so much as mentioned Hurricane Katrina, according to Ben Smith of Politico. When Barbour did refer to it later on, it was to praise the Bush administration’s recovery efforts and chastise the Democrats’ “man-made disaster” in Washington.
Most Americans who don’t like Obama or the health care bill are not racists. It may be a closer call among Tea Partiers, of whom only 1 percent are black, according to last week’s much dissected Times/CBS News poll. That same survey found that 52 percent of Tea Party followers feel “too much” has been made of the problems facing black people — nearly twice the national average. And that’s just those who admit to it. Whatever their number, those who are threatened and enraged by the new Obama order are volatile. Conservative politicians are taking a walk on the wild side by coddling and encouraging them, whatever the short-term political gain.
The temperature is higher now than it was a month ago. It’s not happenstance that officials from the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Virginia and Mississippi have argued, as one said this month, that the Confederate Army had been “fighting for the same things that people in the Tea Party are fighting for.” Obama opposition increasingly comes wrapped in the racial code that McDonnell revived in endorsing Confederate History Month. The state attorneys general who are invoking states’ rights in their lawsuits to nullify the federal health care law are transparently pushing the same old hot buttons.
“They tried it here in Arkansas in ’57, and it didn’t work,” said the Democratic governor of that state, Mike Beebe, likening the states’ health care suits to the failed effort of his predecessor Orval Faubus to block nine black students from attending the all-white Little Rock Central High School. That battle for states’ rights ended when President Eisenhower, a Republican who would be considered a traitor to his party in 2010, enforced federal law by sending in troops.
How our current spike in neo-Confederate rebellion will end is unknown. It’s unnerving that Tea Party leaders and conservatives in the Oklahoma Legislature now aim to create a new volunteer militia that, as The Associated Press described it, would use as yet mysterious means to “help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.” This is the same ideology that animated Timothy McVeigh, whose strike against the tyrannical federal government will reach its 15th anniversary on Monday in the same city where the Oklahoma Legislature meets.
What is known is that the nearly all-white G.O.P. is so traumatized by race it has now morphed into a bizarre paragon of both liberal and conservative racial political correctness. For irrefutable proof, look no further than the peculiar case of its chairman, Steele, whose reckless spending and incompetence would cost him his job at any other professional organization, let alone a political operation during an election year. Steele has job security only because he is the sole black man in a white party hierarchy. That hierarchy is as fearful of crossing him as it is of calling out the extreme Obama haters in its ranks.
At least we can take solace in the news that there’s no documentary evidence proving that Tea Party demonstrators hurled racist epithets at John Lewis. They were, it seems, only whistling “Dixie.”
About The Author: Frank Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. His weekly 1,500-word essay helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the paper introduced in the Sunday Week in Review section in April 2005.
Mr. Rich started as a columnist on the Op-Ed Page in January 1994. He first began writing his longer-form essays for the Op-Ed page in 1999, and from 1999 to 2003 was also a senior writer for The New York Times Magazine, a dual title that was a first for The Times. Before writing his column, Mr. Rich served as The Times’s chief drama critic beginning in 1980, the year he joined The Times.
From 2003 to 2005, Mr. Rich was the front-page columnist for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section as part of that section’s redesign and expansion. He also served in an advisory role in the revamping of The Times’s daily and Sunday cultural report during that time.
Among other honors, Mr. Rich received the George Polk Award for commentary in 2005. In addition to his work at The Times, he has written about politics and culture for many other publications. His latest book, “The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina,” was published by Penguin Press in 2006 and as a Penguin paperback in 2007. His childhood memoir, “Ghost Light,” was published in 2000 by Random House and as a Random House Trade Paperback in 2001. The film rights to “Ghost Light” have been acquired by Storyline Entertainment. A collection of Mr. Rich’s drama reviews, “Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993,” was published by Random House in October 1998. His book “The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson,” co-authored with Lisa Aronson, was published by Knopf in 1987.
In May 2008, Mr. Rich signed on as a creative consultant to help initiate and develop new programming at the pay-TV network HBO. He recused himself from writing about either HBO or its parent company, Time Warner, in his weekly Times column.
Before joining The Times, Mr. Rich was a film and television critic at Time magazine. Earlier, he had been film critic for The New York Post and film critic and senior editor of New Times Magazine. He was a founding editor of The Richmond (Va.) Mercury, a weekly newspaper, in the early 1970s.
Mr. Rich earned a B.A. degree in American History and Literature, graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1971 and serving as Editorial Chairman of The Harvard Crimson.
Mr. Rich has two sons. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, the author and novelist Alex Witchel, who is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.
True or not, the Clinton campaign has been accused of playing the race card. The irony here, of course, is that Bill and Hillary only have themselves to blame for employing the kinds of political tactics now being used against them.
As the Barack and Hillary Show extended its tour to such off-off-off Broadway primary states as Indiana and North Carolina (coming soon to Puerto Rico!), it was inevitable that both sides would dust off the "playing the race card" script.
Recently, Bill Clinton was asked whether he had played the race card when he compared Barack Obama’s South Carolina victory to Jesse Jackson’s in 1984 and 1988. "No," he said in one of his typical outbursts of enraged self-pity. "I think that they played the race card on me, and we now know â?¦ that they planned to do it all along." Then Clinton added to an aide — without realizing he was being recorded — "I don’t think I should take any s— from anybody on that, do you?"Oh, the ironies. First, Clinton’s initial comments were entirely valid. Obama boasts enormous black support, more than 90%, and that’s what put him (and Jackson)over the top in South Carolina. Second, while it’s arguable that the Clinton campaign has, at the margins, played the race card against Obama, it’s hardly been with much gusto, effectiveness or racism.
Huh? Bill Clinton’s marijuana use was an issue in 1992 and, in 2000, the press went bonkers over allegations that George W. Bush had used drugs long ago. So why should it be racist to mention Obama’s even more significant drug use? Likewise, the use of the phrase "fairy tale" wasn’t racial. Even Hillary’s entirely valid, but now-infamous, observation that it was Lyndon Johnson, not Martin Luther King Jr., who secured passage of the Civil Rights Act can be described as racist only if the standard for racism is reduced to anything that hurts Obama. Dubbing inconvenient truths as "racist" is poisonous to U.S. politics. Which is why I have so little sympathy for the Clintons because it was the Clintons themselves who mainstreamed crying racism (or sexism or, in the case of Chinese fundraising scandals, anti-Chinese sentiment) in response to criticism.
Throughout his tenure as both "the first feminist" and "first black" president, Clinton Inc. routinely ascribed political opposition to bigotry. At a conference on race in 1997, Bill Clinton famously wheeled on Harvard scholar Abigail Thernstrom
– a high-minded critic of racial quotas — and bullied her with the question: "Do you favor the United States Army abolishing the affirmative action program that produced Colin Powell? Yes or no?" The tactic was no less brilliant for its cynical dishonesty. (Among the problems with Clinton’s ambush: Powell didn’t benefit from any affirmative action programs, which weren’t in place when he joined the Army nor even when he became a general.)
In 1999, when the Senate rejected his nominee for a Missouri judgeship, Clinton exclaimed that "the Republican-controlled Senate is adding credence to the perceptions that they treat women and minority judicial nominees unfairly." The Clintonites reflexively lamented how "angry white men" were standing in the way of progress, and even resorting to violence. After the Oklahoma City bombing, Clinton fingered the real culprit: Rush Limbaugh.
The first weekend of the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton suddenly invited his old nemesis Jackson to become the family’s spiritual adviser. He summoned black pastors, radio personalities and a battalion of black lawyers. Slowly — but oh so deliberately — the message went forth: Impeaching the first black president was racist. Rep. Charlie Rangel compared him to Martin Luther King. In response to the Starr report, Rep. Maxine Waters said that she was "here in the name of my slave ancestors" to thwart the racist assault on this honorary black man. When asked on BET whether Republicans wanted him impeached because of his affinity for blacks, Clinton responded, "It may be," wink wink, "that that’s a source of anger and animosity toward me."
Newsweek‘s Eleanor Clift, the Clinton’s reliable water-carrier, got the memo, saying of the all-white Republican impeachment handlers, "I mean frankly, all they were missing was white sheets. They’re like night riders going over. This is bigger than Bill Clinton."
Hillary Clinton played similar games, of course, insinuating sexism when convenient. But even if she didn’t, it’s worth remembering that she wants credit for being something akin to a co-president in the ’90s. Fine, it’s her record, too.
It’s no wonder the Clintons don’t like it when Obama and his supporters cynically complain that attacks on him are racially motivated; they’re dealing his own race card back at him. This surely stings as Bill no doubt sees this as ingratitude from a constituency he has long taken for granted. And we’d all be better off if this card were tossed from the deck. But make no mistake: Nobody should shed any tears for the Clintons.
About The Author: Jonah Goldberg is editor at large of National Review Online and author of ‘Liberal Fascism.’ He is also a member of USA TODAY’s board of contributors.
It’s kind of like that legendary stunt on the prime-time soap "Dallas," where we learned that nothing bad had really happened because the previous season’s episodes were all a dream. We now know that the wave of anger that crashed on the Capitol as the health care bill passed last month — the death threats and epithets hurled at members of Congress — was also a mirage.Take it from the louder voices on the right. Because no tape has surfaced of anyone yelling racial slurs at the civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, it’s now a blogosphere “fact” that Lewis is a liar and the “lamestream media” concocted the entire incident. The same camp maintains as well that the 
