Tag: politics

After yet another of my facebook friends posted this, I thought I’d just let all you Real Americans know what we anti-American city-living immigrant-loving pro-crime socialist fascists communists are up to. (But please don’t tell The Party that I’m the one that let the cat out of the bag or else Obama’s minions will send me to one of those “health care” re-education camps.)

Tim Wise’s “Imagine if the Tea Party Was Black.”

Imagine that some of these protesters–the black protesters–spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic?
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Would the protesters be seen as merely patriotic Americans voicing their opinions, or as an angry, potentially violent, and even insurrectionary mob?
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And this, my friends, is what white privilege is all about. The ability to threaten others, to engage in violent and incendiary rhetoric without consequence, to be viewed as patriotic and normal no matter what you do, and never to be feared and despised as people of color would be, if they tried to get away with half the shit we do, on a daily basis.

Wise’s piece reminds me of a funny old Boondocks comic from years ago when Huey learns that black people aren’t excluding by the 2nd Amendment. (What a shame the later TV show wasn’t so brilliant–and Huey was voiced by and sounded like a girl.)

[The teacher in me cannot help but ask: shouldn’t it be “Imagine if the Tea Party *WERE* black”? Hmmm, maybe Wise, like me, must have gone to one of them public “schools.” I was never too good with the conditional case either. I guess it’s hard to teach grammar when you spend all that time indoctrinating kids with multiculturalism, Ebonics, gay sex, and new math. And speaking of Ebonics, among conservatives it’s long been a symbol of everything screwed up about liberal ideas. But of course–like most conservative hysteria–that idea is a lie. No school district ever actually proposed to teach Ebonics. The idea by the Oakland school board was to get more state funding to teach English. By labeling Ebonics as a foreign language, the schools could get funding designated for foreign languages… and then going to other school districts with larger Spanish-speaking populations. That was the gambit. It wasn’t such a bad idea.]

I like his Moxie. Seriously:

“If he were a white kid from an upper middle class family he would have gotten a lawyer and some counseling,” Huckabee said. “But because he was a young black kid he got 108 years.”

Huckabee said the sentence was “far disproportionate from any other punishment in Arkansas at the time for a similar crime.”

Tom Tomorrow’s “This Modern World” is my favorite political comic. He’s liberal. And it’s better for me to read his comic and laugh smugly than bash my head into a wall over conservative hypocrisy. Here’s his latest winner over at Salon.com.

Not that you asked, but my other favorite comics are Doonesbury, Pearls Before Swine, Monte, and Get Fuzzy. Hard to imagine starting the day without them. Well, them and a frappé.

In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers — these are “either” the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president — too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters’ signs — too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don’t understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can’t understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

In the early 1950s, Republicans referred to the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman as “20 years of treason” and accused the men who led the fight against fascism of deliberately surrendering the free world to communism. Mainline Protestants published a new translation of the Bible in the 1950s that properly rendered the Greek as connoting a more ambiguous theological status for the Virgin Mary; right-wingers attributed that to, yes, the hand of Soviet agents. And Vice President Richard Nixon claimed that the new Republicans arriving in the White House “found in the files a blueprint for socializing America.”
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The instigation is always the familiar litany: expansion of the commonweal to empower new communities, accommodation to internationalism, the heightened influence of cosmopolitans and the persecution complex of conservatives who can’t stand losing an argument. My personal favorite? The federal government expanded mental health services in the Kennedy era, and one bill provided for a new facility in Alaska. One of the most widely listened-to right-wing radio programs in the country, hosted by a former FBI agent, had millions of Americans believing it was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.

Read the rest of Rick Perlstein’s article in the Washington Post.

Is this what they really think about us?

From one of my favorite comics, “Get Fuzzy,” by Darby Conley:Now go subscribe to your local paper that carries it.

[And greetings from Villahermosa]