September 07, 2008

LIBERAL BIGOTRY AND THE 'RED NECK' REBELLION

        Now that George Bush is departing the Presidency, contemporary Liberalism requires a new devil to represent the unenlightened masses outside the Ivy League precincts. Sarah Palin has stirred the faithful to an ardor of bigoted hatred that begins to measure up to earlier Bushitler rants. Friend of Horsefeathers, Arnold Roth, had the following exchange with one of these empathic, caring liberals.

Some days ago, Rush Limbaugh predicted that the liberals, having been unsuccessful in trying to destroy Sarah Palin with their shameless criticism of her family situation, would now just as shamelessly seek to paint her and her family as white trash. His prescience was confirmed to me by the copy of an “emotional” e-mail sent to me on September 4, which was written by one “Jackie S.” to her Bryn Mawr classmates, and which, in a candid outpouring of her innate liberal prejudice against the great unwashed, calls on them to oppose Palin because she and her supporters are nothing but a bunch of “red necks”. Here is the e-mail:

Date: Tuesday, September 2, 2008, 3:26 PM
Below is a copy of an e-mail sent by someone who lives in Allaska
Dear classmates -(she is writing to her Bryn Mawr classmates)

As an Alaskan, I am writing to give all of you some information on Sarah Palin . . . As an Alaska voter, I know more than most of you about her an[d] frankly, I am horrified that [McCain] picked her.

The most accurate description of her is red neck. Her husband works i[n] the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay and races snow mobiles. She is a life[t]ime member of the NRA and has worked tirelessly to allow indiscriminate hunting of wildlife in Alaska, particularly wolves and bears. She has spent millions of Alaska state dollars on aerial hunting of these predators from helicopters and airplanes, dollars that should have been spent, for example, on Alaska's failing school system. We have the lowest rate of high school graduation in the country. Not all of you may think aerial predator hunting is so bad, but how anyone (other than Alaska wolf-haters, of which there are many, most without teeth), could think this use of funds is appropriate is beyond me . . .

She has been a strong supporter of increased use of fossil fuels, yet the McCain campaign has the nerve to say she has "green" policies. The only thing green about Sarah Palin is her lack of [e]xperience. She has consistently supported drilling in ANWR, use of coal-burning power plants (as I write this, a new coal plant being built in her hom[e]town of Wasilla), strip mining, and almost anything else that will unnecessarily exploit the diminishing resource of Alaska and destroy its environment.

Prior to her one year as governor of Alaska, she was mayor of Wasilla, a small red neck town outside Anchorage. The average maximum education level of parents of junior high school kids in Wasilla is 10th grade. Unfortunately, I have to go to Wasilla every week to get groceries and other supplies, so I have continual contact with the people who put Palin in office in the first place. I know what I'm talking about. These people don't have a concept of the world around them or of the serious issues facing the US. Furthermore, they don't care. So long as they can go out and hunt their moose every fall, kill wolves and bears and drive their snow mobiles and ATVs through every corner of the wilderness, they're happy. I wish I were exaggerating.

Sarah Palin is currently involved in a political corruption scandal. She fired an individual in law enforcement here because she didn't like how he treated one of her relatives during a divorce. The man's performance and ability weren't considered; it was a totally personal firing and is currently under investigation. While the issue isn't close to the scandal of Ted Steven's corruption, it shows that Palin isn't "squeaky clean" and causes me to think there may be more issues that could come to light. Clearly McCain doesn't care.

When you line Palin up with Biden, the comparison would be laughable if it weren't so serious. Sarah Palin knows nothing of economics (admittedly a weak area for McCain), or of international affairs, knows nothing of national government, Social Security, unemployment, health care systems - you name it. The idea of her meeting with heads of foreign governments around the world truly frightens me.

In an increasingly dangerous world, with the economy in shambles in the US, Sarah Palin is uniquely UNqualified to be vice president. John McCain is not a young man. Should something happen to him such that the vice president had to step in, it would destroy our country and possibly the world to have someone as inexperienced and inappropriate as Sarah Palin. The choice of Palin is a cheap shot by McCain to try to get Hillary supporters to vote for him. [W]hen McCain introduced her today, Palin had the nerve to compare herself with Hillary and Geraldine Ferraro. Sarah Palin, you are no Hillary Clinton.

To those of you who, like me, supported Hillary and were upset that she did not get the nomination, please don't think that Sarah Palin is a worthy substitute. If you supported Hillary, regardless of what you think the media and the Democratic party may have done to undermine her campaign, the person to support now is Obama, not Sarah Palin. To those of you who are independent or undecided, don't let the choice of Palin sway you in favor of McCain. Choosing her shows how unqualified McCain is to be president. To those of you who are conservative, I guess you have no choice for president. But please try to see how the poor choice of Palin tells us a great deal about McCain's judgment. While the political posturing inherent in the choice of Palin is obvious, the more serious issue is the fact that the VP is, literally, a heartbeat away from the presidency. Sarah Palin is totally and unequivocally unqualified to be vice president, let alone president.

I know this is a lengthy and emotional email, but the stakes are high. I thought it might help for all of you, regardless of political affiliation, to know something about Palin from someone who has to live with her administration in Alaska on a daily basis.

Jackie S

As a Horsefeathers disciple, I felt that I had to set straight my correspondent (a committed liberal who must have thought that I, having grown up in red-neck country, would be receptive to Jackie S.’s bigoted foolishness). Accordingly, I sent her the following response, which is complete except for the deletion of some personal references:

I assume that you sent me the copy of Jackie S.’s letter, for which I thank you, to get my comments on it. So here are a few, which I hope you pass on to her and her classmates.

To put it bluntly, the letter is best described as despicable and beneath contempt. I think it – like the liberal media’s shameful personal attacks on Palin and her children – reflects the real liberal panic that Obama’s once sure-thing election is, with the galvanizing and uniting effect of Palin’s nomination on Republicans, and with her obvious attractiveness to the population at large, is now headed down the same toilet that was the repository of Hilary’s previous sure-thing nomination and election.

I am sure that, in their panic, Ms. Jackie and her Bryn Mawr babes (like a lot of other “sophisticated” and “intellectual” liberal girlies and girly-men) are having hot flashes of their constant, but normally hidden under their fake veneer of equality for all, antipathy for “red necks” (sometimes called “white trash”). I (being just a country-boy myself) don’t know whether their antipathy is the result of something simple like “red necks aren’t as rich and clean and educated as I am”, or “red necks do dirty kinds of work”, or “red necks aren’t professionals like lawyers and accountants”, or “red necks aren’t the kind of people I would invite to my house”, or (as Jackie so compassionately puts it) they are “most[ly] without teeth”; or whether their antipathy is something more psychologically complicated, like “they threaten us in a Deliverance way”. In any event, Ms. Jackie’s opposition to Palin because she is a “red neck”, and because “red necks” voted for her, is as narrow-minded and bigoted as opposing a “black” candidate because a lot of illiterate and poor “blacks” voted for him or her, or a “jew” candidate because a lot of grasping, sneaky and money-grubbing jews” voted for him or her, or a West Virginia “coal-miner” candidate because a lot of working-class, poorly-educated “coal miners” voted for him or her, or any other candidate because he or she, and his or her supporters, aren’t as cosmopolitan and educated and rich, and don’t engage in as up-lifting and intellectual pursuits and entertainment, as a bunch of Bryn Mawr babes.

One also wonders if Bryn Mawr babes are bigoted against all “red neck” and “white trash” candidates, or whether they only get “emotional” if the “red neck” candidate is a Republican. My personal guess – and, of course, I don’t know anything – is that Ms. Jackie and her Bryn Mawr gang didn’t get all “emotional” about liar and draft-dodger Bill Clinton’s candidacy, and didn’t regard it as doom for the country, even though he came from a classic “red neck” family, even though his home town of Hope was filled with “red necks”, and even though he was governor of the quintessentially “red neck” state of Arkansas (which, you might inform Ms. Jackie, had a “failing school system” during Clinton’s governorship). I also guess that Ms. Jackie didn’t care about his alleged “red neck” background so nauseatingly touted by the lying adulterer John Edwards in his own run for the vice-presidency.

My own conjecture is that Ms. Jackie’s antipathy to “red necks” is hidden when liberals are trying to manipulate “red neck” voters into voting for liberals, despite the liberal loathing for them (compare Palin’s irrefutable point that liberal Obama says one thing about working class voters in Scranton and quite another thing in San Francisco), and comes into the open only when a “red neck” Republican is seeking “red neck” votes. My bet is that the antipathy does not run only to “red necks”, and that, if Obama were a Republican, Ms. Jackie would be issuing an “emotional” warning to her elite Bryn Mawr babes not to vote for an unqualified “n----r”.

Ms. Jackie is apparently one of the few Alaskans who disapprove of Palin, who is said to have an 80-90% approval rating in Alaska. It makes one wonder whether Ms. Jackie, or her husband, or her children, or her good friends, are somehow connected to the corrupt Alaskan politicians and businesses that Palin was so successful in driving out of power, and whether it is that success that has driven Ms. Jackie to launch her ”emotional” and bigoted screed.

I refrain from correcting Ms. Jackie’s many misrepresentations about Palin, since there obviously is no point in trying rational argument with a bigot. But there are three points she ought to be aware of. First, we agree that Palin is “no Hilary Clinton” – Hilary is a loser who found that even liberals would not buy her constant efforts to reinvent herself, whereas Palin knows who she is and is a winner. Second, while Ms. Jackie seems to think highly of the plagiarist-liar Biden, I think she should be very worried (as Obama and Biden surely are) that Palin will clean his clock in their debate. And third, Republicans and conservatives don’t need any advice about whom or how to choose their candidates, not from the silly liberal media or from an “emotional” bigot like Jackie.

* * *
. . . For whatever it is worth, it now appears that such reprehensible personal attacks on Palin by the liberal media and liberal blogs have resulted in a significant backlash favoring Palin. Having seen Palin in action, my own opinion is that she has had a transformative effect on the campaign, and that – barring some totally unexpected event – the election is essentially over. The situation a couple of weeks ago was different, but Palin’s emergence is the unexpected event that changed everything.
--Arnold Roth

September 02, 2008

OBAMA'S SOFT CORE RACISM

“It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved –such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.” Barack Obama

Is any of what you see of Barack Obama what you get? Is it all good manners and show? What does he really believe? If you read his first book, the memoir “Dreams from My Father: a Story of Race and Inheritance,” would you recognize today’s confident charmer, the Jedi Knight, the post-racial candidate for the Presidency of the United States? Probably not.

Does it matter? Doesn’t everyone have a public face and a private one? Isn’t hypocrisy ubiquitous, especially in politicians? Sure enough, but….the politics of the last three or four decades have shocked and disillusioned the electorate—Watergate, leading to Nixon’s resignation; Clinton’s naughtiness and impeachment; and, more recently, Governor McGreevey’s revelation and resignation and Elliot Spitzer’s petty criminal behavior—all these make us suspicious of appearances and wanting some kind of authentication of our candidates’ hearts and minds.

Obama is a man of curious paradoxes. He was raised for the most part by white grandparents and a white mother who protected him from the experiences of humiliation, segregation, and prejudice that many black boys encounter in America. He lived in environments in Hawaii and Djakarta where his own skin color did not stand out. Despite this escape from racial insult and injury he became “traumatized” by reading a magazine article when he was about eight or nine about a black man who tried to lighten his skin. Obama became obsessed by variations in skin color. This preoccupation continued and became a powerful focus for his youthful identification as a “black man.” Thus his memoir describes his development as a black man struggling to define his place in the black community.

Currently his “blackness” has been bleached away like that of the man in the “traumatic” magazine article that excited him as a child. Pastor Wright has been put on ice, Michelle has been put back in the kitchen for a while, and no one dares to talk about race, racism, and Obama’s history as a black activist. That would be fine if he were Colin Powell and did not have such a history—a history and commitment lasting ten or fifteen years—as a community organizer, voting organizer, and state legislator for a largely black constituency. But the history exists and the question is whether there has been a real transformation from being a black leader to being a post-racial president or whether the charmer in the Brooks Brothers suit is a clever political imposture like the high moral tone of Elliot Spitzer, Richard Nixon, and William Jefferson Clinton, or the heterosexuality of Jim McGreevey.

From start to finish, Obama’s memoir is a racial tract. Every page recounts events and opinions seen through “black” racial lenses. And in that sense he is a racist—a soft, sophisticated racist to be sure, but a racist nonetheless. “The stories that I had been hearing…hadn’t simply arisen from struggles with pestilence, or drought, or even mere poverty. They had arisen out of a very particular experience with hate. That hate hadn’t gone away; it formed a counter-narrative buried deep within each person and at a center of which stood white people—some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.”

The journey of Obama from a middle-class child with a privileged education to a black activist had another peculiar twist. If one reads his life carefully one can see that he has a very special definition of “black.” No matter what your skin color, you can only be a member of the brotherhood or sisterhood if you are poor and oppressed. Middle-class, suburban, professional blacks are not “black.” These are people who have sold out and who deserve his soft contempt.

Not even love could penetrate Obama’s racial armor. During the several years he lived in New York City he fell in love with a white woman from a wealthy, New England WASP family. One weekend she invited him to meet her family at their country house. The parents were “very nice and gracious,” and the weekend was lovely. “The house was very old, her grandfather’s house….The library was filled with old books and pictures of the grandfather with famous people he had known—presidents, diplomats, industrialists….Standing in that room, I realized that our two worlds…were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers.”

So what happened? “I pushed her away. We started to fight. We started thinking about the future, and it pressed in on our warm little world. One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny…The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why the Jews remember the Holocaust…and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said anger was a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.” Evidently it wasn’t.

Barack Obama wrote his softly racist memoir in 1995 as a young man of 34. When he re-issued it in 2004, he wrote, “I cannot honestly say … that the voice in this book is not mine—that I would tell the story much differently today than I did ten years ago….”

The problem is that Obama wants it both ways—like his ambivalence about Pastor Wright. He never really allowed himself to be questioned deeply about his relationship with Wright and Wright’s church. After all there is a very wide theological spectrum of black churches—some more religious, some more Black-activist—to choose from. Why did he choose Wright’s racist theology?

His memoir is characterized by a refined, even literary racism which is often followed by what appears to be remorse and self-criticism. But after many such ambivalent expressions one begins to get the idea that Obama is enjoying both the racism and the self condemnation a little too much.

The American people need to know who Obama really is and what he stands for.