I'm eagerly awaiting Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby's scolding of Walsh's wicked wickedness for daring to suggest there was anything the slightest bit racist about what this fine Christian patriot white man said. How do you know he wasn't trying to give helpful advice to The Negro, huh, huh, answer that! What, can you read minds or something? Bad, bad libruls!!I should have checked the Howler website again before I posted. Because Somerby had apparently already obliged: The way we liberal rubes get played! 04/24/2014.
Try to imagine I failed to check! Playing my blog readers for rubes, just like they do at Stormfront!
Somerby christens Joan's article "an instant, appalling classic." Why she's practically like Joe McCarthy, Somerby tells us! No, wait, he didn't actually say "Joe McCarthy." And I didn't produce a single quote saying that he said "Joe McCarthy." What he says is, "In the last quoted paragraph, Joan's Wisconsin background really came shining through. We get the famous, and very familiar, guilt by association." I was just mind-reading when I assumed that's what Somberby meant! I'm one of those bad, bad libruls, I guess, worse than FOX! Worse than Breitbart.com! I'm so ashamed of myself.
Somerby grumps, if you read the comments to Walsh’s post, including the long string of Mormon-hating remarks .." - now he doesn't try to suggest or imply or guilt-by-association insinuate that Joan Walsh agrees with those comments, no, no, she just points out that "you will see that Salon is creating an impressive tribe of low-IQ, pseudo-liberal cretins."
And let's give Somerby credit: he does know something about pseudo-liberals.
In today's We’re off on a mission of national import!, he writes:
The New Black Panthers were a thoroughly insignificant group. But they were repeatedly hosted by Hannity and Colmes as a way to stoke fear and excitement, and of course to build tribal identity.Understand, he's not saying that Both Sides Do It. He's asking the question if pseudo-liberals are just as back as they accuse FOX News of being. Reading his mind, what he means there by pseudo-liberals that is anyone left of center who actually express a left-of-center opinion out loud or in print.
Watching MSNBC last night, we thought of the many years of thrills provided by the New Black Panthers.
... To what extent is the pitiful Cliven Bundy our equal-but-opposite tribal thrill-and-fear child?
Yes, I read his mind! Wisconsin-style! I'm worse than Sean Hannity!
Never heard of the New Black Panthers? They were a favorite item for a while in one of FOX News' standard entertainment features: let's shore our elderly white viewers some black guy no one's ever heard of before saying how much he hates white people.
Here is part of the description of the New Black Panther Party from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in their Intelligence Files article on the group:
The New Black Panther Party is a virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers. Founded in Dallas, the group today is especially active on the East Coast, from Boston to Jacksonville, Fla. The group portrays itself as a militant, modern-day expression of the black power movement (it frequently engages in armed protests of alleged police brutality and the like), but principals of the original Black Panther Party of the 1960s and 1970s— a militant, but non-racist, left-wing organization — have rejected the new Panthers as a "black racist hate group" and contested their hijacking of the Panther name and symbol.Now, maybe there was someone sometime somewhere who could be identified as left of center that praised this group. I just completely missed every one of them.
In Its Own Words
"Our lessons talk about the bloodsuckers of the poor… . It's that old no-good Jew, that old imposter Jew, that old hooked-nose, bagel-eating, lox-eating, Johnny-come-lately, perpetrating-a-fraud, just-crawled-out-of-the-caves-and-hills-of-Europe, so-called damn Jew … and I feel everything I'm saying up here is kosher."
— Khalid Abdul Muhammad, one of the party's future leaders, Baltimore, Md., Feb. 19, 1994
"Kill every goddamn Zionist in Israel! Goddamn little babies, goddamn old ladies! Blow up Zionist supermarkets!"
—Malik Zulu Shabazz, the party's national chairman, protesting at B'nai B'rith International headquarters in Washington, D.C., April 20, 2002
"I hate white people. All of them. Every last iota of a cracker, I hate it. We didn't come out here to play today. There's too much serious business going on in the black community to be out here sliding through South Street with white, dirty, cracker whore bitches on our arms, and we call ourselves black men. … What the hell is wrong with you black man? You at a doomsday with a white girl on your damn arm. We keep begging white people for freedom! No wonder we not free! Your enemy cannot make you free, fool! You want freedom? You going to have to kill some crackers! You going to have to kill some of their babies!"
— King Samir Shabazz, head of the party's Philadelphia chapter, in a National Geographic documentary, January 2009
Maybe there were laudatory articles in The Nation on it. Maybe Mark Shields warmly defended the group on the PBS Newshour. Maybe Paul Krugman praised their perceptive analysis. Maybe Elizabeth Warren is promoting their virtues on the floor of the Senate at this very moment. And maybe Dick Cheney is planning to devote his remaining years to becoming the new Mother Teresa.
In other words, the New Black Panther Party was a tiny sect that FOX News hyped as the image of Evil. But there was no Both Sides Do It counterpart of praise and support on the left side of the spectrum. The liberals who were most likely to have heard of it were ones that paid attention to SPLC and their lists of hate groups, and therefore recognized it immediately as a weird variety of a far-right crackpot nationalist group.
FOX News, on the other hand, has been hyping Cliven Bundy's noble stand in favor of mooching off public lands to graze his cows without paying the fees other ranchers pay for the same thing. And now characters like Sean Hannity are having to tap-dance around their admiring reporting on the brave American patriots who have been gathering to gun down federal agents trying to enforce the law against shameless freeloader Cliven Bundy. See Media Matters:
Fox Finally Breaks Silence On Rancher's Racist Remarks 04/24/2014
Fox's Krauthammer Blasts Conservatives For Their Support Of Cliven Bundy (includes transcript) 04/24/2014:
When even a hardline conservative and incorrigible warmonger like Charles Krauthammer can say this ...
It's not the statement, you have to disassociate yourself entirely from the man. It's not like the words exist here and the man exists here. And why conservatives, or some conservatives end up in bed with people who, you know, he makes an anti-government statement, he takes an anti-government stand, he wears a nice big hat and he rides a horse, and all of a sudden he is a champion of democracy. This is a man who said that he doesn't recognize the authority of the United States of America. That makes him a patriot?... defending Massa Cliven and his observations on The Negro could be embarrassing.
To paraphrase a famous statement by Walter Cronkite - that was the old guy who for years narrated the PBS coverage of the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert: If Massa Cliven Bundy has lost a hardline conservative like Charles Krauthammer, he's lost America! Which I guess would be okay by him since he hates America. Although his supporters who want to shoot federal agents say they love America. It's so confusing ...
Sarah Gray reports Hannity quick-stepping on Bundy in Fox News flip flop: Sean Hannity backs away from Cliven Bundy the racist rancher Salon 04/25/2014:
And then in an effort to explain away his previous unbridled support for the man, Hannity claims he wasn't stoking the fire of a violent blowout, he was helping diffuse the armed situation between Bundy and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Right. He believes — and still does — that the BLM was “overreaching” in trying to get the million dollars Bundy owes the government, and wanted to prevent a bloody outcome.In other words, Hannity thinks Massa Cliven is guilty of bad PR.
“In this case, you’ve got a couple of hundred armed agents, snipers, sharpshooters, dogs, stun guns. And then you’ve got another group coming out because they think it’s government overreach,” Hannity said of the standoff. “It was a prescription for a disaster. Remember Waco, Ruby Ridge, all these other cases.”
Hannity also said that the comments angered him, not just because they were disturbingly racist, but because they make all conservatives look racist.
“[Democrats] want to say that conservatives are racists, conservatives hate women, conservatives want old people to die — granny over the cliff,” Hannity explained. “They don’t want the young people — they want young people to fend for themselves. They want to poison the air, poison the water. So people that, for the right reasons, saw this case as government overreach now are branded because of the ignorant, racist, repugnant, despicable comments of Cliven Bundy.”
Speaking of Joan Walsh, she has another article up on the Massa Cliven story for which Somerby will likely scold her for being mean to pore Massa Cliven, Fox News’ new laughingstock: Cliven Bundy — and Stephen Colbert — will destroy Sean Hannity Salon 04/25/2014. She notes that FOX News "dumped Glenn Beck when he became a laughingstock and a liability for the network, and for conservatism. Hannity has done the same" by his promotion of Massa Cliven, she writes. "Beck’s sin wasn't his increasingly extreme conservatism; it was damaging extreme conservatism by making one of its leading faces an unstable lunatic."
And, re neo-Confederacy, she observes:
But even before Bundy's ongoing self-exposure as a racist, he should have been too toxic even for Hannity and Fox. How does a guy who declared early on “I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing” become a folk hero in the first place? The extremism of that statement should have been warning enough that Bundy was not only crazy but dangerous (and probably racist to boot, since not believing in the federal government tends to go along with not believing in the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment, as [Stephen] Colbert noted.)" [my emphasis]She also cites this article from the conservative Weekly Standard, which had the foresight even before Massa Cliven offered us his views on The Negro to be cautious about the freeloader's seditious talk, Uncivil Disobedience. (The article is actually dated 04/28/2014, but Joan mentions that it appeared earlier, and the Weekly Standard's Michael Warren references it in Is Bundy's Protest Tarnishing the Tea Party? of 04/22/2014.) " Far from acting in an arbitrary or capricious manner, the federal government has shown patience and forbearance in the face of lawlessness that customarily lands people in jail. It is worth noting that Bundy’s rancher-neighbors and the Nevada Cattlemen’s Association, who contend with the same federal policies, offer him little support," the "Uncivil Disobedience" article says.
For actual news and analysis of Massa Cliven and other aspects of the militia movement, you can't do better than David Neiwert, who has been writing for it on the SPLC Hatewatch blog. Dave's latest piece on it there as of this writing is Mainstream Supporters Scatter after Cliven Bundy Muses on ‘the Negro’ in the New York Times 04/24/2014. As he reports, CNN conservative Dana Loesch is still defending Massa Cliven, saying: "I hope no one is surprised that an old man rancher isn't media trained to express himself perfectly. He seems to be decrying what big government has done to the black family — which big government has negatively affected not just the black family, but all families regardless of ethnicity — so perhaps he included that in his remarks against big government?"
This should give Bob Somerby weeks of material with which to scold the mean, mean libruls for their mean meanness to pore ole Massa Cliven!
Tags: cliven bundy, confederate heritage month 2014, white racism
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