Today In The Annals of Stupid Backlash Tricks

Flash: Aggrieved Daily Caller Ex-College Republican thumbsucker (is there any other kind?) has a megasad cuz his bike was stolen (if stats hold true, by a blackity-blackblack black kid!), causing him to boldly and ham-fistedly declare:

“I am Derbyshire! (Burp.)”

Roy Edroso:

Judge must be over 30 by now, but apparently he’s never been robbed before, because this has caused him to turn against all black people, and to relinquish the “white guilt” that once made him watch Norman Jewison movies.

Perhaps sensing that even ordinary racists would be disgusted with his whining, Judge invents wimpy liberal friends beside whom he can look butchly Politically Incorrect. Unfortunately, this is how the gentleman essays to roll:

Hearing the kumbaya song from my liberal friend, I immediately thought of a phrase Piers Morgan had recently used…

I think Jesus just carried his Smirnoff Ice into the next room.

Also: Trigger-happy Bernie Goetz wannabe George Zimmerman decides the only way to set the record straight!!!1 (and help pay mounting legal bills) is to resurrect teh Geocities, express his sincere gratitude to the proud supporters who vandalized a black cultural centre on his behalf, & implicitly (if perhaps inadvertently) give the side-nod to Koran-burning Fla Islamaphobe icon Terry Jones.

(Oh, and, as per a Zimmerman family proxy, apparently Holder totally <3s the NEW BLACK PANTHERS, because he’s, well, not Derbyshire, if ya catch my meaning).

Sheesh.

If white people were black people (and vice versa) we’d have a deluge this AM of self-righteous black folks tut-tutting on teh cablez (‘this is why you can’t have nice things’, etc).

Thankfully (for white folks), structural racism isn’t a zero sum game.

Not at all.

Update: Gosh, Judge sure didn’t display all that much ‘guilt’ prior to his recent purported epiphany:

Now, if you read Judge’s past writings, his white guilt does not seem to have exerted an especially strong pull:

no one would have the guts to tell the truth. It was not Asians or whites or Indians who were wilding in Georgetown. It was black teenagers. Illegitimacy and fatherlessness in black urban areas like Washington, D.C. has created an entire class of youth who have been weaned on gangster culture and have absolutely no impulse control. …

That was the old, encumbered-by-white-guilt Judge writing. I’m a little frightened of the new version.

Also, this previous  ZOMG EPIPHANY from Judge, re: why it’s ok — nay, absolutely vital — for decent Christian cycling enthusiasts to passionately hate pro-choice women (shorter: babiez > bitchez).

h/t Steve M.

“Oh, you know, we’re heading into nut country today.”

by matttbastard

Glenn Greenwald sees something all-too-familiar in the vicious, reality-averse wingnut invective directed towards President Obama:

In 1994, Jesse Helms, then-Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, claimed that “just about every military man” believes Clinton is unqualified to be Commander-in-Chief and then warned/threatened him not to venture onto military bases in the South:  “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He better have a bodyguard.”  The Wall St. Journal called for a Special Prosecutor to investigate the possible “murder” of Vince Foster.  Clinton was relentlessly accused by leading right-wing voices of being a murderer, a serial rapist, and a drug trafficker.  Tens of millions of dollars and barrels of media ink were expended investigating “Whitewater,” a “scandal” which, to this day, virtually nobody can even define.  When Clinton tried to kill Osama bin Laden, they accused him of “wagging the dog” — trying to distract the country from the truly important matters at hand (his sex scandal).  And, of course, the GOP ultimately impeached him over that sex scandal — in the process issuing a lengthy legal brief with footnotes detailing his sex acts (cigars and sex talk), publicly speculating about (and demanding examinations of) the unique “distinguishing” spots on his penis, and using leading right-wing organs to disseminate innuendo that he had an abandoned, out-of-wedlock child.  More intense and constant attacks on a President’s “legitimacy” are difficult to imagine.This is why I have very mixed feelings about the protests of conservatives such as David Frum or Andrew Sullivan that the conservative movement has been supposedly “hijacked” by extremists and crazies.  On the one hand, this is true.  But when was it different?  Rush Limbaugh didn’t just magically appear in the last twelve months.  He — along with people like James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Bill Kristol and Jesse Helms — have been leaders of that party for decades.  Republicans spent the 1990s wallowing in Ken Starr’s sex report, “Angry White Male” militias, black U.N. helicopters, Vince Foster’s murder, Clinton’s Mena drug runway, Monica’s semen-stained dress, Hillary’s lesbianism, “wag the dog” theories, and all sorts of efforts to personally humiliate Clinton and destroy the legitimacy of his presidency using the most paranoid, reality-detached, and scurrilous attacks.  And the crazed conspiracy-mongers in that movement became even more prominent during the Bush years.  Frum himself — now parading around as the Serious Adult conservative — wrote, along with uber-extremist Richard Perle, one of the most deranged and reality-detached books of the last two decades, and before that, celebrated George W. Bush, his former boss, as “The Right Man.”

Ah, the ’90s — good times. But I would look even further back for historical antecedants than Greenwald does, to a far darker period in US politics. Sam Kashner, from a profile of William Manchester, author of Death of a President:

“In that third year of the Kennedy presidency,” Manchester wrote, “a kind of fever lay over Dallas country. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed, ‘Impeach Earl Warren.’ Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas.…Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; corporate junior executives were required to attend radical seminars.” A retired major general ran the American flag upside down, deriding it as “the Democrat flag.” A wanted poster with J.F.K.’s face on it was circulated, announcing “this man is Wanted” for—among other things—“turning the sovereignty of the US over to the Communist controlled United Nations” and appointing “anti-Christians … aliens and known Communists” to federal offices. And a full-page advertisement had appeared the day of the assassination in The Dallas Morning News accusing Kennedy of making a secret deal with the Communist Party; when it was shown to the president, he was appalled. He turned to Jacqueline, who was visibly upset, and said, “Oh, you know, we’re heading into nut country today.”

This past weekend’s 9/12 rally — and the unremittingly paranoid iconography of right-wing backlash politics on display once more — should give pause to any student of American history, whether academic or lay. Hofstadter would certainly recognize the (lily-white) kid wearing a t-shirt pining for a “new era of McCarthyism.” I don’t pray (because I don’t believe there’s anyone up there to receive any spiritual SOS), but I truly hope (hope) the historical parallels ultimately turn out to be limited in scope and scale.

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Backlash to the Future

by matttbastard

In which right-wing propaganda merchants double down on the ZOMG POTUS = SCARY NEGRO!!!1 strategy:

Yep, as far as the wingnuts are concerned, it’s 1968 to infinity, kids — the permanent campaign perverted in a manner designed to shatter post-racial dreams that would make Tricky Dick proud.

Let’s just hope the consequences of this cynical ploy don’t prove deadly.

h/t Campus Progress, video courtesy Media Matters for America

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Birdwatching.

by matttbastard

(Photo: Joeff Davis, Creative Loafing)

Jonathan Stein, responding to a disturbing AP report on the hundreds of hate crimes that have reportedly occurred since Obama’s election victory, seems genuinely perplexed by the racist sentiment being expressed in some quarters towards the president-elect:

I know no one actually believed that America would transform into a post-racial paradise because of Obama’s victory, but did anyone think we’d see a wave of hate crimes?

Yeah, whoda thunk it? I mean, it’s not like McCain-Palin ran a Wallace-lite backlash campaign, (deliberately) stirring up white working class animus towards an uppity socialist/terrorist Muslim who “just isn’t like ‘us'” (ie, not a ‘real American’) and is now POTUS.

Well, regardless, everything changed the morning of November 5th, right?

Cough.

Mark Potek of the SPLC, as quoted by David Neiwert:

I think there’s something remarkable happening out there. I think we really are beginning to see a white backlash that may grow fairly large. The situation’s worrying.

Not only do we have continuing nonwhite immigration, not only is the economy in the tank and very likely to get worse, but we have a black man in the White House. That is driving a kind of rage in a certain sector of the white population that is very, very worrying to me.

We are seeing literally hundreds of incidents around the country — from cross-burnings to death threats to effigies hanging to confrontations in schoolyards, and it’s quite remarkable.

I think that there are political leaders out there who are saying incredibly irresponsible things that could have the effect of undamming a real flood of hate. That includes media figures. On immigration, they have been some of the worst.

There’s a lot going on, and it’s very likely to lead to scapegoating. And in the end, scapegoating leaves corpses in the street.

Like I’ve said before, the next four years are going to be a wild fucking ride. And nobody with any sense should be surprised that a number of resentful white folk didn’t get the post-racial birdwatching memo.

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Insider Baseball: The Sequel

by matttbastard

Shorter CBA establishment: “Lighten up and let teh menz have their little circle jerk!” [update 12.19: links corrected–nice try.]

Yes, damn wimminz and darkies, always having to ruin the fun of teh poor, put-out white menz. Newsflash: no one is holding anyone hostage; no one is holding a gun to anyone’s head; no one is calling for Armageddon. With respect, this also isn’t akin to asking for a constitutional rewrite (yeah, like fucking Charlottetown all over again–“You feminists are ruining everything!”)

Here, let me spell it out: what compelled myself and others to suggest a boycott of the 2007 Canadian Blog Awards was the utterly asinine attempt to lump feminists into the LGBT category (provoked, I might add, by HER trollish whinging, not the request for a Best Feminist category that Berlynn, JJ, Prole, myself, etc made). Speaking as both a feminist and a person who identifies as non-heterosexual, that was an ignorant, cruel, dismissive slap in the face to both feminist and queer bloggers. Are y’all so clueless that you can’t recognize this?

Please, cut the martyr-posing and check your goddamned privilege. If the matter is so trivial, the gesture of a boycott so meaningless, why the sizable negative outcry from both dedicated Right Wingers and (apparently clueless) small-‘L’ liberals?

A nerve has been exposed.

“And “Best Feminist Blog” cannot be done, as it is unacceptable to some.”

“Feminists jump up and down about “male dominance” but there is a truth about ” equality” that does not get represented in media. I am so sick of men being blamed and bashed for all the illness of the world, when there is more at stake, more to factor into the equation about the state the world is in.”

“Maybe we should instead call it the most “feminine” blog award. That would be more inclusive. Being feminine is part of the definition of being a feminist.”

This entire discussion seems to have been time-displaced from the Suffragist era. Scandalous women who actually want the vote?! PREPOSTEROUS!

*rolls eyes*

So, to recap: some knuckle-dragging misogynists stuck in the 19th century, in tandem with RABID pro-life absolutists who seem hell-bent on confirming the worst stereotypes about the baby-lobby, are acting like knuckle-dragging misogynists stuck the 19th century and RABID pro-life absolutists who seem hell-bent on confirming the worst stereotypes about the baby-lobby; as a result, the organizers are refusing to use the word “feminist”.

Apparently there’s a new ‘F’ word that you never say, m’kay.

You know, if NBCD is speaking on behalf of the organization (and not out of a cavernous nether region where his cranium apparently resides) we (as in the bastard.logic crew) might not wait until Friday. I’ve been speaking with my cobloggers, and they (being nasty, man-hating, baby-eating F-worders) really don’t appreciate being associated with the regressive (if initially well-intentioned) endeavour this is turning out to be. And no, that’s not meant as a “threat”, merely a fact. [Update: by unanimous consent, we are out. Try not to celebrate too loudly.]

White liberals and Right Wing reactionaries team up to roll back the Progressive Era; I want another category: “Biggest Farce of 2007″.

Related: Voluntary homework, courtesy Mandolin and Roxanne.

Portions of this post appeared in different form at Bread and Roses and the 2007 CBA site.

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