Tit for tat
For Kevin:
Of course, the obvious is that current Senator Robert Byrd was a Kleagle in the KKK. Not just a member, he was management.
Dick Gephardt sought endorsement from white rights groups.
Chicago Alderman Dorothy Tillman, formerly of Pensacola, said the law will “lead to open war on black males.”
And the opening salvo of this speaks for itself.
See how easy that is? 10 whole minutes of Googling. Yet, it doesn’t prove that there’s any sort of institutionalized racism in the Democrat party just that there are instances of it.
June 16th, 2005 at 10:10 am
I knew I could count on you for that uncle.
And I knew that you would prove my point for me. First, notice my list. Modern events that took place in the last few years involving high ranking officials or the Party apparatus acting as the party apparatus.
Notice your list? One man who has repudiated his past (unlike Trent Lott, who I didn’t even put on my list.), for example and who has a stellar record on civil rights since then.
One inexcusable event that doesn’t represent what newsmax says it does (the group disbaneded and some of its memebrs formed the CCC — that makes it a precurser to the group only in their minds) but since I am feeling generous, I will grant you that: twenty years ago Gephardt dirtied himself with trying to get racists to vote for him and then apologized for it.
One Chicago alderperson.
And an actor!!!! A has been actor at that!
And you really and honestly think that is the same as, for example, the House of representative refusing to allow a vote on condeming the CCC by name to take place — or the House GOP refusing to strike blatently racist comments from the record as inappropriate for the House? Really? You think harry belafonte is the same as tom Delay? Really?
Are the racists in the Democratic party? Hell yes, unfortunately. But you have to tie yourself in knots to pretend that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are equivalent in terms of racism, at least since the beggining of the Civil Rights era. And its people like you — decent people who want to believe political parties are all the same, people who try to claim that a Chicago alderman saying something racist is the same as the House GOP refusing to strike racist comments from the record as innappropriate, that allow such travesties to continue.
June 16th, 2005 at 10:26 am
So, how is Byrd’s past excused as ‘so long ago and he’s made amends’ not comparable with the Rs welcoming dixiecrats?
Also, the point of the belafonte link was to note that blacks think being an R makes you sell out (which is what the author concurred with and does sort of note institutionalized racism in reverse). I don’t care about harry.
As for the condemnation, it ranks up there with lame, staged apologies on my give-a-shit-ometer. And regarding striking racist comments from the record, I oppose that. If a congresscritter says something dumb, let the record show they’re dumb.
June 16th, 2005 at 11:08 am
*sigh*
Kevin, you just don’t get it. Twenty years ago, Dick Gephardt (D) did something racist. Two years ago, Haley Barbour (R) did something racist. It doesn’t matter what year the “tits” and “tats” were, or even the relative quality of the “tits” and “tats,” as long as you can come up with the same number.
Because the GOP has never renounced their Dixiecrat past. And in their words and deeds, the GOP continue to welcome the Dixiecrat sort even today.
We were asked to provide recent examples of prominent national GOP politicians appealing to racists and/or saying/doing racist things, and we have provided several such examples. If this list is the best you can do by way of Democratic counterexample, I think we’ve made our point quite nicely.
June 16th, 2005 at 11:12 am
“We were asked to provide recent examples of prominent national GOP politicians appealing to racists and/or saying/doing racist things”
No, you were asked to prove your contention that there is institutionalized kowtowing to racism in the GOP not point out specific incidents of stupid people doing stupid things. And I still want my list of codewords 🙂
June 16th, 2005 at 11:15 am
“So, how is Byrd’s past excused as ’so long ago and he’s made amends’ not comparable with the Rs welcoming dixiecrats?”
What, aside from the fact that they where welcomed before they had made amends and that most of them never made amends at all?
And PLEASE stay on topic: note that I explicitely left that stuff out of my original list. I dealt with MODERN events — events that had happened no longer than seven years ago.
“And regarding striking racist comments from the record, I oppose that. If a congresscritter says something dumb, let the record show they’re dumb. ”
Maybe this was my wording, but the point was that the comments were going to be marked as innapppropriate House conduct and the GOP leadership refused to let that happen In other words, it wasn’t a matter of embarresing a congressperson, it was a matter of marking racist comments innappropriate for the House. And the GOP refused to do so. Two years ago.
June 16th, 2005 at 11:37 am
To clarify further what Kevin is saying, the “stupid” comments wouldn’t be stricken from the record at all; instead, they would be officially acknowledged as being stupid.
And I know you can’t possibly be that dense on the code words issue. When a prominent GOP politician tells a racist/separatist magazine that they’re “doing a good job of setting the record straight,” and you think that there’s nothing about this that even remotely appeals to racist, you’re just daft. When prominent GOP politicians schmooze with white supremacist groups and refuse to apologize for it, and you think that’s somehow equivalent to decades-old incidents that have been apologized for in both words and deeds, now you’re just being disingenuous. Apparently, in Uncle-land, there are only two kinds of racism: explicit, and nonexistent. If a politician doesn’t come right out publicly and say “I hate spics and ni–ers,” he’s not trying to appeal to racists at all.
I have to say, your insistence on seeing absolutely everything (except maybe guns) in nothing but black and white, with no gray area whatsoever, is tiresome.
June 16th, 2005 at 12:22 pm
“No, you were asked to prove your contention that there is institutionalized kowtowing to racism in the GOP ”
Like, for example the House GOP leadership refusing to allow a vote condmening a racist group with ties to GOP member sby name? And the House GOP refusing to label racist comments as innappropriate? And the current president nominating a man who told a segregationist/racist organization that they were setting the record strisght about the civil war to be Attorney General? Like those examples of institutionalized kowtowing to racists?
June 16th, 2005 at 12:44 pm
There you go, kev. Now you’re playing the game. And without reference to codewords and the VRWC keeping folks down.
Having read more about aschcroft’s statement, i do find it disturbing but i doubt the intent of the admin was to nominate him based on that.
And now that you’ve clarified the house thing, the thing to have done would be to condemn the comments. Coincidentally, indvidual reps can do that without filing a motion.
As for the gesture of condemning a hate group, still doesn’t rank high on the give-a-shit-ometer.
These instances still do not prove institutional racism throughout the party.
June 16th, 2005 at 1:09 pm
Kevin, tgirsch … the actions of some GOP representatives and senators doesn’t make the entire party rascist, even if they are the actions of those people at the top. When you elect someone as the leader of your party, you don’t necessarily know all of their viewpoints and even if you do, there are many factors that people use to decide whom they vote for.
Let me give you an example..in Canada, the Liberal Party is embroiled in a scandal where they essentially gave contracts to their campaign contributers, where the contracts were basically to do nothing. However, if an election were called I’d still vote Liberal, because they are the best of a bad lot.
June 16th, 2005 at 2:00 pm
Uncle:
It’s not really about whether the administration nominated him solely because of that. It’s more that it didn’t seem to bother the administration, and that Ashcroft himself wasn’t terribly apologetic about it, and that Ashcroft probably owed a good portion of his support to stuff like that.
Nobody is here arguing that GOP leadership gathers around a table and says “what racist candidates can we find?” What we’re saying is that members of the GOP often engage in that sort of pandering to racists, and that the GOP leadership tolerates that sort of pandering. It shouldn’t.
Are Democrats blameless in this regard? No, but then we never claimed they were. We simply claimed that the GOP is far worse about it (and I think that the evidence shows that they are).
And again, there are varying definitions and degrees of “institutional racism.” Does the GOP as a party actively discriminate? I doubt it. Does the GOP as a party tolerate borderline-racist activity? Yeah, I think they do. Kevin’s examples (and mine) are good ones not because they are necessarily exemplary of what’s typical in the GOP, but because of the GOP’s refusal to explicitly condemn them. The GOP may not have a wide-open door for racists, but they have repeatedly refused to completely shut that door, given many opportunities to do so.
The lynching measure is just the latest example in a broader pattern.
Manish:
I don’t think anyone here ever argued that the entire GOP was racist. What we have argued is that the GOP as a party is far more welcoming to racists than the Democratic party is, and that this isn’t entirely unintentional. It’s a big difference.
June 16th, 2005 at 2:07 pm
Uncle, my repsonse is pretty much what Tom said: the GOP could shut down racist pandering, but its leadership refuses to do so on many public occasions.
What wa simportant about the vote to condemn the CCC was the fact that many people in the GOP have appeared at CCC events, written for CCC publications, or appeared with CCC leaders. Refusing to allow a vote condmening the CCC was giving tacit permission for such activities to continue — as the case of Huckabee in MS demonstrated.
June 16th, 2005 at 3:46 pm
And, for the record, Byrd was calling people niggers on TV as recently as 2001. I don’t think his past is entirely forgiven or forgotten.
June 16th, 2005 at 6:44 pm
In Byrd’s case, not entirely, no. And I don’t purport to make excuses for the 2001 incident. But suppose we let Byrd and Lott cancel each other out. We’re still left with numerous other recent GOP examples.
June 17th, 2005 at 7:21 pm
What we have argued is that the GOP as a party is far more welcoming to racists than the Democratic party is, and that this isn’t entirely unintentional.
I think that you can claim that there are more incidents that have seen the light of day where something a GOP person did was borderline or full on rascist vs. incidents involving Democrats, but thats about it. However, claiming that the GOP is actively encouraging this kind of thing is a stretch.
June 18th, 2005 at 6:10 pm
I don’t think I ever claimed they were actively encouraging this kind of thing, depedning on how you define that. What I have claimed is that the GOP has had several opportunities to slam the door on that type of thing — to make it clear that the party takes an official stance against such things — and they’ve declined to do so. That sends almost as much of a message to those seedy types of folks as anything more overt would.