CSotD: As one mask goes on, the other comes off
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Mike Luckovich on the rodeo clown incident. Everyone is officially horrified, and then a (Republican) Texas politician invites the man who insulted the President of the United States down to Texas to do it again.
There is a way of responding that quells this stuff, and a way that winks, and either the GOP has some kind of a tic or they are not, as a whole, particularly horrified or particularly eager to draw any lines.
They've been hiding behind a fiction of free speech, based on the idea that, as long as nobody uses the N-word, they're not racist, and, if they do use the N-word, it's probably because they grew up in a time it was acceptable or perhaps because they heard it on a rap song.
This is the Age of Weeping Whitey, the poor, picked-on caucasian victim.
In Weeping Whitey's worldview, everyone gets upset because a white vigilante stalks and kills an unarmed black kid and the officials decline to press charges, but nobody gets upset when black people kill white people except the police who arrest them and the prosecuters who prosecute them.
It's racism.
Or it could be that, when the police promptly investigate a crime and make arrests, and the criminals are then charged and tried, it's not national news.
As I've said before, it's not clear that the Trayvon Martin shooting was motivated by racism, and Zimmerman might have stalked and shot any kid in similar clothing. But the racist subtext emerged pretty swiftly thereafter.
The rodeo clown incident is a little more overt: It may be, as apologists insist, that presidents are routinely mocked at rodeos. The ones I've been to have been not just "family-friendly" but have featured prayers and not just the Star-Spangled Banner but God Bless America and swirling spotlights and tributes to veterans and the whole patriotic shebang.
Saw a clown drop his drawers and reveal some polka-dot boxers. Never saw one encouraging people to disrespect the president.
Not saying it's never happened; there are some real shit-hole rodeos out there and I guess I've missed seeing those rodeos because I generally try to avoid shit-holes of any sort.
Which is kind of the point: You lie down with the dogs, you get up with the fleas.
And, in this context, if you don't immediately jump on the racist comments, you might as well start making them yourself. It's shameful that the time John McCain corrected a woman who claimed Obama was Muslim stands out.
If Republicans cared, there'd be more than one clip like that. There would be hundreds, and they'd have squelched the birthers and the bigots from the beginning.
However, they not only didn't jump on it when it came from their fringe supporters, but they didn't jump on it in their own candidates, and Luckovich's cartoon is spot-on: They've made celebrities of people they should have distanced themselves from.
And, yes, Donald Trump has more influence on the right than Al Sharpton does on the left. As does Glenn Beck. And we remember when the GOP fell at Rush Limbaugh's feet and begged forgiveness.
The watermelon jokes that emerge from the emails of local politicians are bad enough, and the "sorry if anyone was offended" non-apology-apologies are insulting not just to African-Americans but to anyone with an IQ in three digits.
But it's the polite button-down racism that digs the deeper hole in our sense of decency. It's when Pat Buchanan charges that Obama only got into college through affirmative action and that, if we saw his grades, they would show that he's not that bright.
And then the fraudulent claims that he ordered the records suppressed, when the privacy of student information has been protected by federal law for decades.
And the Teleprompter meme, the most insidiously innocent racist attack of all.
President Eisenhower used one for convenience.
Kennedy used one for convenience.
As did LBJ.
Can't find pics of Nixon or Ford, but here's St. Ronald of Reagan.
And Bush I
And Clinton
And W.
So what makes this person …
and this person
and this person
Different from this person?
Hmmmmm?
Note to Cartoonists: Never mind the rodeo clown. Forget George and Tayvon. We can argue those into exhaustion without coming to an agreement.
But if you use the Teleprompter meme in connection with a man who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law and was editor of the Review, you are feeding into the notion that black people are less intelligent than white people.
And if you choose to lie down with those dogs, you are fully to blame for the fleas with which you rise, and if that choice causes someone to miss the greater point you were trying to make, you have only yourself to blame.
True then, Keef, and true now.
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