The GOP-Fox 2010 Race Baiting Campaign Rolls on: Beck Puts Up Graphic, ‘Coons in Africa’

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Over at News Hounds, where they watch Fox so we don’t have to, dear readers — for which I am, and you should be, eternally grateful — they caught one of the subtlest attempts at race baiting on the Republicans’ in-house network this year. During a bizarre peroration by Glenn Beck in which he tried his damnedest to help the campaign of Delaware Christian tea bagger Christine O’Donnell get up out of its defensive crouch, he flashed a header on the screen behind that said “Coons in Africa.”

The headline officially referred to O’Donnell’s opponent, Chris Coons, the Democratic nominee who is a county official in Delaware. But come on.

Granted, getting O’Donnell off defense is going to be a gargantuan task. Introduced to voters as Sarah Palin’s Mini-Me — she has even copied Palin’s hair style and attire — O’Donnell arrived on the scene with an incredible amount of baggage: charges of embezzlement and tax fraud, a history of bigoted remarks about gays and Pres. Obama and apparently hours of old video from her former guise as an anti-sex pundit, including most famously now a clip in which she said she once dabbled in witchcraft that has put GOP establishment types in the awkward position of defending witchcraft after months of bashing Islam.

In a frail attempt to counter all that, Beck dug up a 25-year-old article written by Coons when he was a 21 year old college student. In the article, Coons described how his year abroad as a junior in college transformed him from a Reagan Republican — he’d founded the College Republicans branch at Amherst — into a Democrat.

According to right-leaning Politico.com, the article ran with the tongue-in-cheek title, “Chris Coons: The Making of a Bearded Marxist”:

The source of his conversion, Coons wrote, was a trip to Kenya he took during the spring semester of his junior year — a time away from America, he wrote, that served as a “catalyst” in altering a conservative political outlook that he was growing increasingly uncomfortable with.

“My friends now joke that something about Kenya, maybe the strange diet, or the tropical sun, changed my personality; Africa to them seems a catalytic converter that takes in clean-shaven, clear-thinking Americans and sends back bearded Marxists,” Coons wrote, noting that at one time he had been a “proud founding member of the Amherst College Republicans.”

“[I]t is only too easy to return from Africa glad to be American and smugly thankful for our wealth and freedom,” added Coons. “Instead, Amherst had taught me to question, so in turn I questioned Amherst, and America.”

Dave Hoffman, a Coons campaign spokesman, said the title of the article was designed as a humorous take-off on a joke Coons’s college friends had made about how his time outside the country had affected his outlook.

Hoffman said the trip to Kenya helped lead to Coons’s decision to become a Democrat.

Talk about Beck-bait: Kenya? Marxism? Social justice? Beck could not resist giving the article his patented paranoid, disinformational spin. It’s hard to see how this non-controversy would convert a single Coons’ voter into an O’Donnell supporter, but, hey, you play the hand you’re dealt.

But then, as Ellen Brodsky at News Hounds reported, in a juvenile move that smacked of desperation, Beck went too far and flashed the “Coons in Africa” header on the screen behind him. Brodsky said, “Don’t tell me Glenn Beck and his Fox News producers didn’t know what they were doing…”

Cue Beavis and Butthead snickering, “Heh-heh. Heh-heh-heh.”

Of course, this is just the latest incident in the GOP-Fox channel’s 2010 race-baiting campaign. Granted, it hit a small bump in the road last week when former Sen. Al D’Amato (R-N.Y.) actually called out Jack Burkman, the Christian lobbyist who was disgraced when his name appeared on the DC Madam’s client list, for unleashing a racist rant on Fox Business Channel.

Just a week or so earlier, Fox “analyst” Newt Gingrich, the ousted former House speaker, serial adulterer and smartest guy in the Idiocracy, described Pres. Obama as an “anti-colonial Kenyan,” whatever that it is.

Over the last year or so, there has been a steady onslaught of stories designed to inflame racial resentment among the GOP-Fox audience, including “new media” mogul Andrew Breitbart’s fake pimp videos attacking ACORN, the poverty advocacy group; the New Black Panther’s voter intimidation incident from 2008 (even though it had been 86’ed by the Bush DOJ because no voters had complained about being intimidated); the fake Shirley Sherrod reverse-racism scandal, which was also contrived by Breitbart. And Beck has been the subject of an advertising boycott since July 2009, when, in a moment of pure projection, he called Pres. Obama a racist.

And now, “Coons in Africa.” Disgusting. And you can just hear Eddie Haskell trying to slough it off — “What? His name is Coons. He went to Africa. What’s the big deal?” Even Ward and June wouldn’t fall for that one.

Are there no grown-ups left at Fox or the GOP?

Update: News Hounds have video of the Beck “Coons in Africa” segment here.

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4 thoughts on “The GOP-Fox 2010 Race Baiting Campaign Rolls on: Beck Puts Up Graphic, ‘Coons in Africa’”

  1. The amazing thing in all of these attempts at pushing racism on the right is that they have the stones to say that President Obama, who usually doesn’t weigh in on any of this unless he’s asked by a member of the press, as being THE source of the divisiveness in the country. Pox and the rw is the source of the divisiveness. They’re the ones who are using racism to garner support for the GOP.

    As I’ve stated previously on Pensito Review, I spent the first 18 years of my life living in a segregated America. Just like Ms. Sherrod, I grew up in GA and was taught by my parents to look at people as individuals. Certain words were prohibited from use in my parents’ home, the same words that I’ve seen some on the right use online more frequently since January 20, 2009. If one were more inclined to be racist, it would appear that it would be people like Ms. Sherrod and myself who have some justification for doing it. It is not people of color who are using racism as a wedge issue, it’s those who are members of the shrinking tent known as the GOP.

    It makes no sense for me to be racist since I’ve had biracial cousins since the early 1970s, and my daughter has a white fiancé. None/few of those who are using racism to divide this country can make the claims that I just made, and imho, that is the problem. Beck admitted that he doesn’t have any African American friends because he’d be afraid he’d “say something that offends them.” These people have little/no contact with those who differ from themselves, so they tend to paint them as “outsiders” and “threats to their way of life.” Nothing could be further from the truth as most African Americans tend to be more accepting of whites. They always seem to forget that the history of this country is a major reason for the higher tolerance level that most African Americans have for other groups. Even though they continue to use racism as a battering ram against people of color in this country, I still refuse to hate them because, unlike many on the right, I not only say I’m a Christian, I live like one.

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