Tag: GOP Racism

GOP Grand Wizard Limbaugh: NASCAR Racists Booed First Lady Because She Is ‘Uppity’

Jon Ponder

The NASCAR crowd doesn’t quite understand why, when the husband and the wife are going the same place, the first lady has to take her own Boeing 757 with family and kids and hangers-on four hours earlier than her husband, who will be on his 747. NASCAR people understand that’s a little bit of a waste. They understand it is a little bit of uppity-ism.

– Rush Limbaugh, thought leader of the white supremacist Republican Party, applauding the actions of racist NASCAR fans who booed the First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama at veterans’ event at a race last weekend because she is African-American.

In 1981 Interview, ‘Rove’s Brain’ Lee Atwater Connects the Dots Between Jim Crow Racist Policies and GOP’s Push for Budget Cuts

Jon Ponder

Lee Atwater
Lee Atwater
In 1981, the late Lee Atwater, political mentor to Karl Rove and George W. Bush and one of the originators of today’s Republican propaganda attack machine, was interviewed anonymously by political scientist Alexander P. Lamis for his book, Two-Party South. In the interview, Atwater explained how the GOP, in its appeal to Southern voters starting with Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy, reconfigured overtly racist policies from the Jim Crow era into Reagan-era economic policies, including particularly budget cuts targeting the poor:

LEE ATWATER: As to the whole Southern strategy that [Nixon political strategist] Harry S. Dent, Sr. and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he’s campaigned on since 1964 and that’s fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

QUESTIONER: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

ATWATER: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

(Sources: Hullaballoo, New York Times)

Christian Racist on Huckabee Cruise: ‘We Didn’t Like Seeing [Obama] Get Elected Because of His Race’

Jon Ponder

Mike Huckabee, the Baptist preacher, Fox News host and former governor of Arkansas, hosted 250 true believers on a cruise to Alaska. Adam Haslett, a writer for Prospect, went along to report on the trip. His report includes this encounter with two of Huckabee’s Christianist followers:

Maggie Benedict and Jinx Drda from suburban St Louis were also greatly disappointed to hear Huckabee had bowed out of the presidential race. They’ve always voted but it wasn’t until Obama’s victory that they became more active in politics.

“It’s the first time I’ve felt the president wasn’t a true American,” Maggie says. “And that he wants to become a dictator. We didn’t like seeing him get elected because of his race.”

GOP Racism Rears Its Ugly Head – Newt Says Obama Is an Anti-Colonial Kenyan Conman

Jon Ponder
Gingrich and third wife, Calista
Gingrich and third wife, Calista

Is a person’s behavior determined by his or her race?

Take the case of a theoretical mixed-race American boy — let’s call him Barack Obama — whose mother is a Caucasian American and whose father is an African native of Kenya. Let’s say the father leaves the boy and his mother when the boy is two years old and moves back to Kenya, 10,000 miles away, never to be heard from again, except for one visit when the boy was 10 years old. How will the father influence the boy when he grows up?

A) Is the boy predestined by his genetic connection to his father to grow up and emulate his African-ness (whatever that is) — even going so far as to hold the same political beliefs rooted in Kenyan culture as his father?

Or B) is the boy more likely to identify with the culture and politics of the United States, the country where he spent most of his formative years and that he considers to be his home?

If you answered A, you are a racist, just like Newt Gingrich, the smartest guy in the Idiocracy — who is floating a possible run for president in 2012 — who made one of the most outrageously racist statements by a national politician since the Jim Crow era:

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