Month: July 2010

What if he got evangelical support for immigration reform by throwing gay couples (yet again) under the bus? Would anything make him happier?

Linguist Mark Liberman looks into the history of "refudiate" and finds some interesting stuff.

Hitch is slack-jawed at those who continue to downplay Gibson's long record of hatred:

And now, in the wake of a Niagara of cloacal abuse directed at the mother of his youngest child, in which we were spared nothing by way of obscenity and menace and nothing by way of paranoid and sexualized racism, there have been those who diagnose Gibson's problem as a lack of anger management skills, combined perhaps with a touch of narcissistic personality disorder.

This is extraordinary. We live in a culture where the terms fascist and racist are thrown about, if anything, too easily and too frequently. Yet here is a man whose every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: He is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church.

Today's update here.

TNC is bone-tired of reporting that blames blacks for the passage of Prop 8. His larger point:

Why is the "black vote" on this issue anymore important than the youth vote, or the Catholic vote, or the labor vote, or the Latino vote, or the Baptist vote? …There is a deeper dislogic haunting this country on race. It can't be beaten with facts, stats and arguments. The notion that black people are a problem is super-religious. It is bone-deep. It haunts everything and we can't, in this time, get loose. There needs to some fundamental root-work done here. I feel like I've spent the past few years playing with a hedge-trimmer, when what I need is a chainsaw. A diamond-grit chainsaw.

One aspect of this: a majority black city, the nation's capital, just legalized marriage equality, because of long-standing close work and dialogue between the black and gay communities, stretching back decades. And yet, media analysis of this remarkable achievement remains almost nil. I don't think we should ignore black homophobia, especially in the churches. But I agree with TNC: this is much more salient with respect to HIV transmission than marriage equality.

A reader writes:

Your childhood picture reminded me of a similar one of Palin that appeared in a quickie, one-off "magazine" from earlier this year.  Of course, I had to make a mashup.  I call it, "When Sarah Met Sully".

A reader writes:

In the rush to laugh at Palin's language gaffe, aren't we missing the real story here?  I'm watching MSNBC and reading the blogs and all everyone seems to be tittering about is that Palin made a "Bushism".  Why is no one pointing out that she's a stone-cold bigot?  What would the reaction be if she had referred to "peaceful Jews"?

Is it possible that dumb Sarah actually knew that the stupid press would fail to see the forest of bigotry for the trees of malapropism in her remarks?

Lexington, a fan of Palin's neologism, finds the rest of the tweet "grotesque":

She says that building a mosque near the site of the twin towers will "stab hearts". Some New Yorkers are indeed pained by the idea. But what about the hearts, and for that matter rights, of Muslim Americans? Even George W. Bush, for all his verbal infelicities and one unhappy choice of the word "crusade", understood the importance of drawing the sharpest possible distinction between Islam and a murderous terrorist organisation that claims, but has no right or mandate, to speak in its name.

Where there's a will, there's a way.

The quotes that former USDA worker Shirley Sherrod gave on the edited tapes disseminated by Andrew Breitbart are indeed indefensible, but is it not fair to provide some kind of context? To wit:

Sherrod said the short video clip excluded the breadth of the story about how she eventually worked with the man over a two-year period to help ward off foreclosure of his farm, and how she eventually became friends with him and his wife.

"And I went on to work with many more white farmers," she said. "The story helped me realize that race is not the issue, it's about the people who have and the people who don't. When I speak to groups, I try to speak about getting beyond the issue of race."

And:

ROBERTS: Miss Sherrod, let’s make it clear though, that this happened 24 years ago. You eventually worked with this white farmer. You eventually became friends, you say, with the farmer and his wife.

SHERROD: Yes.

ROBERTS: So, the question I have is, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture came to you and said you have to step down, why didn’t you just say, wait a minute, you don’t know the full story. Here’s the full story, why should I step down?

SHERROD: I did say that, but they, for some reason, the stuff that Fox and the Tea Party does is scaring the administration. I told them get the whole tape and look at the whole tape and look at how I tell people we have to get beyond race and start working together.

ROBERTS: Many people at home might be thinking if you’re recounting an old story, why did you succumb to pressure to step down, why didn’t you fight this?

SHERROD: If I tried to fight it and didn’t have any support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, what would I do?

This reminds me of the Octavia Nasr case. The virulence of the far right and the cowardice of the elites is creating a chilled atmosphere.