WATCH: Strategist Behind Proposed Reverend Wright Attack Ad Has Long History Of Race-Baiting

GOP Strategist Fred Davis

Think Progress

By Annie-Rose Strasser  on May 17, 2012 at 11:35 am

A group of GOP strategists is planning to pull out all the stops — including racism — in its campaign strategy to defeat President Obama, the New York Times reported today.

The Times obtained a proposal, crafted by race-baiting GOP media consultant Fred Davis, that says the group will go after Obama for his relationship to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s former pastor who has come under fire for controversial race-related comments.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) steered clear of these attacks during the 2008 election — even suspending a staffer who tweeted out a Wright video — much to the chagrin of Davis and his associates, who include Chicago Cubs owner/ TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts.

Davis’s proposal makes clear that no holds will be barred this time around, and that Rev. Wright will be prominently featured. According to the article, the group is seeking as “a spokesman an ‘extremely literate conservative African-American’ who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a ‘metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.’”

Davis, it turns out, has a long history of making ads that evoke racism, xenophobia, or general aversions to anything “other” or “different.” Here are his top three ads in that vein:

Alabama’s English-Only Governor: Fred Davis helped with Tim James’s gubernatorial bid, during which he ran this dog-whistle xenophobic, racist ad.

VIDEOS AND MORE HERE

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Donald Trump Has Revealed the Truth About the Republican Party

Donald Trump Has Revealed the Truth About the Republican Party

Johann Hari
Columnist, the London Independent via: HuffPost

Posted: 04/28/11 11:04 PM ET

Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. They have long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals — and it turns out they were onto something. Every six months, the Republican Party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.

Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: “We’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way!” — but that wasn’t enough. So they found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an “interesting coincidence” that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is “I’m better at what I do because I’m gay,” and argues “there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”

That wasn’t enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn’t anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. A survey suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It’s not hard to see why.

Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past thirty-five years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.

The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: “I would go in and take the oil… I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff.” On Iraq, he says: “We stay there, and we take the oil… In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation’s yours.” It is a view that the world is essentially America’s property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to “stop what’s going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength.” The U.S. must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W. Bush.

The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice — pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest Obama wasn’t born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally) — even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody “ever comes forward” to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea they could remember that far back. Then he said he’d “heard” the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: “I’m very proud of myself.”

The Republican primary voters heard the message right — the black guy is foreign. He’s not one of us. Trump responded to these charges by saying: “I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks.”

MORE HERE

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Rush Limbaugh says there will never be equality because:”some people are just born to be slaves”

Rush Limbaugh says there will never be equality because:”some people are just born to be slaves”

Crooks & Liars- By John Amato

October 09, 2010 07:00 AM

How dare you say there’s racism in the Teabircher movement? I’m so offended by that notion. Isn’t what Rush Limbaugh just soooooo true?

LIMBAUGH: This is a tough thing to say, because a lot of people don’t want to hear this, because it goes against everybody’s desire that we all be the same, that there be no pain in life and that there be no suffering and that everybody do well and that everybody have what they want and so forth.

But there is no equality. You cannot guarantee that any two people will end up the same. And you can’t legislate it, and you can’t make it happen. You can try, under the guise of fairness and so forth, but some people are self-starters, and some people are born lazy. Some people are born victims. Some people are just born to be slaves. Some people are born to put up with somebody else making every decision for them.

Some people, on the other hand, are born and they’re not going to take anything from anybody. They’re going to be totally in charge of their lives. They’re not going to sit around and wait for something. They’re going to make it happen. You can see this throughout the American strata — population.

Even in — well, born and raised. I think both. I think born and raised.

But you can — even in down economic times, there are people getting wealthy. In recessions and depressions, there are still people who are profiting from it. Most people are not self-starters. Most people, if you ask them as adults — think back. Who was the best teacher you ever had? They’ll tell you — it almost, without fail — that there was somebody in their life that showed them that they were capable of much more than they thought they were capable of themselves. Because most people are not self-starters. Most people don’t push themselves. They have to be pushed. To be shown

He’s absolutely correct because there were many people that were born slaves in America. They were actually slaves. My time-line may be off, but it was somewhere between the years 1619-1865. It’s fine that he got mixed up a little bit. After all he has to fill three hours a day of air time and mistakes will be made. Oh Rush, you’re so right on man. It’s so beautiful how you tell it like it is.

Combining the Tea parties, with the Tough as Nails Christians along with RushBo talkism has been an awesome combination since President Obama took office and is benefiting mankind tenfold. Heck, who needs projects like this to kick start America?

Vodpod videos no longer available.

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Will Arizona Give Neo-Nazi Border Vigilantes An Official Blessing?

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Crooks & Liars- By David Neiwert

September 13, 2010 04:00 PM

Those armed neo-Nazis out running vigilante border patrols apparently now want to obtain official status for their group:

J.T. Ready, a neo-Nazi who recently began conducting heavily armed desert patrols in search of “narco-terrorists” and illegal immigrants in Pinal County, told The Kansas City Star that he was working on a proposal seeking state approval for his group, the U.S. Border Guard.

“I’m putting together a package and presenting it to the Arizona Legislature and saying, ‘Why don’t we go ahead and make the border rangers official, or completely reactivate the Arizona Rangers and we’ll work together,’ ” he said.

The Arizona Rangers were created in 1901 to protect the territory from outlaws and rustlers. The group was re-established in 1957.

But watchdog groups say Ready’s patrol illustrates why states should not sanction defense forces.

“We know that the neo-Nazis carry guns, but here’s an example of neo-Nazis with guns trying to position themselves to become an instrument of state policy,” said Leonard Zeskind, the president of the Kansas City-based Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights.

They’re also reaching the level of being a private army:

Ready, a neo-Nazi, says his border guard includes heavily armed militias that search for “narco-terrorists” and illegal immigrants in Pinal County.

“We have fully automatic weapons — legally registered — grenade launchers, night vision, body armor,” he said. “We’re definitely going out there fully armed and equipped. When you’re going up against people with AK-47s and grenade launchers, you don’t want to go out there with a slingshot.”

In most states, you’d assume that Ready’s campaign to obtain official status would naturally die a-borning. But in Arizona — which has a predilection for inverting reality when it comes to border violence, not to mention an ongoing white supremacist problem — there’s always a chance.

Especially when you consider that Ready has friends in high places — including State Sen. Russell Pearce, author of SB1070, and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Indeed, Ready has been working tirelessly at making himself a familiar presence on the Arizona landscape.

Of course, it’s always amusing when conservatives write op-eds for the Washington Post complaining that liberals outside of Arizona perceive a lot of racism in the state’s anti-immigration hysteria — as though somehow that perception is mistaken.

You’ll also note that none other than the Instapundit approves of these groups:

But Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and an expert on militias, said he saw no problem with such groups being involved with state defense forces.

“It’s not some crazy idea that someone has come up with out of the blue,” Reynolds said. “Historically, that’s how militias were organized. It’s sort of back to the future.” Reynolds, the author of the widely read political blog Instapundit, said the state defense force has operated in Tennessee for many years.

Back to the future indeed.

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Glenn Beck Regrets Calling Obama Racist: ‘I Have A Big, Fat Mouth’ (VIDEO)

Glenn Beck Regrets Calling Obama Racist: ‘I Have A Big, Fat Mouth’ (VIDEO)

Huff Post- First Posted: 08-30-10 12:30 AM   |   Updated: 08-30-10 12:33 AM

Speaking on “Fox News Sunday” with Chris Wallace, Glenn Beck gave his first interview after Saturday’s Restoring Honor rally in Washington, DC. While much of the conversation focused on the rally and religion, there were some answers that are bound to drive more water-cooler conversation on Monday.

Starting at the 10:40 mark in the interview, Wallace asked Beck if his claim that Obama is a racist destroyed Beck’s credibility in talking about “reclaiming the civil rights movement.”

Toward the end of a lengthy response, Beck said that he “miscast” Obama’s liberation theology as racism. Then things got more interesting. Vote on a selection of Becks’ comments and watch the full 25-minute interview below.

Wallace: “Do you regret having called [Obama] a racist and saying he had a deep seated hatred for white people?”

Beck: “Of course I do. I don’t want to retract the, um … I want to amend that I think it is much more of a theological question, that he is a guy who understands the world through liberation theology, which is oppressor-and-victim. ‘Racist,’ first of all, it shouldn’t have been said. It was poorly said. I have a big fat mouth sometimes and I say things. That’s just not the way people should behave. And it was not accurate. It is liberation theology that has shaped his world view.”

VIDEO AND MORE HERE


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Summer of Republican Race-Baiting

Earlier this year, Republican Party chairman Michael Steele admitted that the GOP has engaged in Southern Strategy politics: employing racial, anti-minority code language and fear-mongering as a means of energizing the party’s white Christian base.

This is a fact. The Southern Strategy is real, though it’s no longer exclusively “southern.”

There’s no disputing its widespread use. Come to think of it, for Steele to “confess” to the the GOP’s use of the Strategy makes it seems as though it was previously a secret. It wasn’t. Fact: the Republican Party routinely tweaks white fear, paranoia, prejudice and resentment in order to win votes and score political points at the expense of demonized minority groups. They engage in stereotyping and misinformation and they rarely, if ever, use the “n-word” these days, though they might as well. After all, as the Strategy goes, blacks and minorities aren’t voting Republican anyway, so… let fly.

And it works. So well, in fact, that it’s still actively used on AM talk radio and on Fox News Channel as a ratings-grabber, not to mention as a recruitment tool for the various tea party groups. If you can effectively convince the majority race that they’re being somehow victimized by the significantly smaller minority, you have a seriously powerful (and clearly immoral) psycho-weapon in your arsenal.

This year has to be some kind of high water mark for white antagonism against minorities, and evidence that the Republicans, along with the array of far-right apparatchiks, don’t really have a serious agenda for governing to sell or, for that matter, anything of value to say. And so they do this. They continue to tap into a mother lode of white majority self-pity and inchoate rage as a form of spackle over the gaping holes in their ridiculous policy arguments.

Take a good look at the big stories of the last several months — the stories that have been driven by the far-right machine, injected into the mainstream and subsequently debated by the rest of the country — partly as a result of the far-right’s money, loudness and tenacity, and partly because these arguments are too obnoxious and outrageous, and therefore too irresistible, to avoid. I’ve been hearing a lot about August being “crazy month,” but the crazy topics have spanned the entire summer and beyond.

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Fooled Again By Breitbart And The Wingnut Right

There’s nothing shocking or surprising about the latest Andrew Breitbart scam in which he released selectively-edited video of an African American USDA worker, Shirley Sherrod, and accused her of racism against a white farmer couple, the Spooners. That’s not to suggest we shouldn’t be vigorously talking about it. We absolutely should be. But the most outrageous aspects of the story are fairly typical of everyone involved: Breitbart, the so-called “liberal” news media, Democrats, Fox News Channel and all points in between.

For background purposes, it’s important to note that Andrew Breitbart is an attention-whore who is desperate to emulate his mentor, Matt Drudge, and this isn’t the first time he’s released misleading videotape “evidence” of African Americans behaving badly (or so he claims) in order to drive traffic to his various websites while augmenting his status as a player in the modern conservative movement. He previously engaged in the same chicanery when he released heavily edited and ultimately phony Jackass-style videos in which, he alleges, ACORN workers had given inappropriate advice to a (fake) pimp and a (fake) prostitute who were, among other things, seeking to engage in human trafficking. The videos turned out to be misleading at best, and the fake pimp character went on to plead guilty to charges of entering federal property under false pretense.

Breitbart scammed nearly everyone on the ACORN videos including people who should have known better, like, for example, Jon Stewart.

Breitbart has done it again. This time, he’s flimflammed the White House, the NAACP and the traditional news media.

None of this is a particularly big shocker, of course. This is what Breitbart does. He’s another Karl Rove type in that his entire modus operandi is to tangle the debate — to be an instigator. To kerfuffle everyone he engages until the discourse has become so confused, skewed and tangential that he’s able to walk away more or less unscathed while the targets of his regularly scheduled crusades are often damaged beyond repair. ACORN is a national pariah. And this week, a decent woman is out of a job.

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Southern Strategist Sarah Palin Denies the Southern Strategy

During her honeymoon speech at the Republican National Convention in 2008, Sarah Palin echoed a jab at Barack Obama that had been lurking around in Republican circles for most of that year. Earlier at the convention, Rudy Giuliani famously brought it up through his gigantically-toothy grin and childish giggling. But it was Sarah Palin who would get most of the credit for it.

I’m referring here to the emphasis on President Obama’s service as an urban community organizer. Clearly, this was a Southern Strategy-style racial dog whistle — a way of underscoring the president’s ethnicity, his race and his association with scary inner-city black people.

It’s worth mentioning again the Lee Atwater quote regarding the functional language of the Southern Strategy. Suffice to say, Atwater made it perfectly clear that Republican political tactics included (and still do) exploiting race — winning white votes by demonizing blacks. And the way to play this game in the modern age was to use code language. Dog whistles, because overt racial language would too easily “back fire.”

At the time, Atwater suggested the exploitation of issues like tax cuts or states rights with the implication that the Republican Party supported the preservation of white dominance. (Not surprisingly, tax cuts and states rights dominate the 2010 political discourse.) And the demagoguing of issues like welfare, affirmative action or Medicaid would underscore, to predisposed white voters, the fallacious notion of lazy black freeloaders horking white jobs and white tax dollars and not contributing anything to society other than crime.

And there was Sarah Palin in her prime time debut mocking the president’s early career as a community organizer — the implication being that the president was a product of black culture and not “real Americans.” Combine this with the ongoing emphasis on the president’s “spread the wealth around” remark to Joe the Plummer — the Republicans very obviously playing the “welfare queen” dog whistle here. And we all remember how Sarah Palin went “rogue” and fueled the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim-terrorist myth (part of early Birther lore) by repeatedly telling her rabid white audiences that the president “palled around with terrorists.”

Sarah Palin is and was a Southern Strategist.

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Move Over, Sarah Palin, There’s A Bigger Idiot In Town

I never thought I’d write this, but I think we’ve discovered a new level of stupid below the heretofore impenetrable Sarah Palin floor.

It’s not unlike the discovery of a previously unknown species of protohuman deep within a cave somewhere, revealing some new twist in the constantly expanding canon of human evolution. There is, in fact, a Republican of national prominence who makes Sarah Palin seem brighter and less contradictory by comparison. That’s not to say Palin has miraculously become smarter or better spoken, it’s just that the idiot curve is now redrawn in her favor.

Yes, Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi is arguably the new king of all Republican stupids. Palin must now relinquish her Twitter feed, her fork cork and her trident. For Haley Barbour has arrived.

What is it about Republican governors? They’re either appearing in interviews with a blood-soaked cletus geeking turkeys in the background, or they’re lying about hiking the Appalachian Trail, or they’re honoring the Confederate States of America while ignoring slavery, or they’re entertaining the treasonous option of state secession, or they’re bitching about government stimulus money one minute, then posing with giant stimulus checks the next minute.

And now there’s Haley Barbour, who said this week about the $20 billion escrow fund to compensate victims of the oil spill:

“It bothers me to talk about causing an escrow to be made, uh, which will, which makes it less likely that they’ll make the income that they need to pay us.”

Let’s ignore the Palin-ish phrase “causing an escrow fund to be made” and focus on the substance. Paraphrasing Jon Stewart’s analysis: Governor Barbour appears to be suggesting here that if BP sets aside $20 billion to be paid to victims of the oil spill, it won’t have enough money to… pay out to victims of the oil spill. In other words, Barbour is against compensating victims because he supports compensating victims.

Perhaps next time, Barbour should consult with his smarter sidekicks Roscoe and Enos before speaking about complicated topics like “causing an escrow fund.” (Jon Chait gets full credit for the Boss Hogg comparison.)

Of course, this isn’t the first and it surely won’t be last blast of stupid from Barbour during the ongoing oil spill disaster. He’s a study in colloquial southern language and exaggerated accents — a real life character from an unproduced Coen Brothers movie, and it seems that whenever Barbour opens his mouth for something other than pie, stupid things gush out.

For many weeks, Barbour has been downplaying the toxicity and danger of the oil. Back in mid-May, Barbour said the oil spill will have “minimal impact,” rivaling Tony Hayward’s infamous remarks about how environmental damage will be “very, very modest.”

He’s also coined some of the finest “the oil is just like delicious food and therefore harmless” metaphors during the whole disaster.

Who can forget the classic description of the oil as “weathered, emulsified, caramel-colored mousse, like the food mousse.” Yum. The food mousse. If you’re like me, you can’t wait to sample some delightful Gulf seafood that’s been marinating in the food mousse.

And the good news is, according to Barbour, “Once it gets to this stage, it’s not poisonous.” Oh boy!

Seriously, if that’s the case, I’d like to see Barbour strap on a pair of inflatable arm floaties and dive into a big old slick of the food mousse and flail around in it for a while. See if he can eat his way out. Maybe the Mississippi tourist bureau could videotape it for their next advertising campaign. You know, because the food mousse is both delicious and not poisonous.

Yet, at the same time, Barbour said, “But if a small animal got coated enough with it, it could smother it. But if you got enough toothpaste on you, you couldn’t breathe.” This made me wonder if Barbour has had one or two mishaps with a gigantic tube of toothpaste. “Dagnabbit! I’ve accidentally caused toothpaste to be made all over myself again! Can’t… breathe! Glug! Glug!” Aides rush into Barbour’s bathroom to find the governor coated from head to toe in toothpaste like a real life version of the Shmoo.

But, as with many Republicans carved from the George W. Bush cloth, the doofish behavior tends to overshadow Barbour’s more sinister underbelly.

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EJI Study: Racism Still Blights Southern US Juries

Racism still blights southern US juries: study

Raw Story- By Agence France-Presse
Monday, June 7th, 2010 — 11:00 am

Having an “out of wedlock child” was enough to remove a black juror from a 1998 Mississippi murder trial involving an African-American and a white victim. Since then, nothing much has changed in the old south, a newly released study has said.

When it was all over, Alvin Robinson was found guilty by a jury of 10 whites and two blacks, and sentenced to 20 years behind bars for a murder he claimed was in self defense.

Two years later, an appeals court annulled the sentence arguing that prosecutors used seven of ten allowed peremptory strikes on prospective jurors who were black.

One of the candidates stared too long at a prosecutor, another had failed to mention she was divorced, and yet a third was declared an outsider after living in the same county for 10 years.

The appeals court found the prosecutor’s reasons far fetched, exaggerated and improbable, labeling them as racist.

MORE HERE

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