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Republican Part: A Party of Closetted Racists?
The Reports about a Tennessee Republican staffer who is said to have e-mailed racist Obama "spook" photos, as well as the former South Carolina Republican official Rusty de Pass's reference to a gorilla as Michelle Obama's ancestor are not anything new coming from Republicans. This once great party of Abraham Lincoln has evolved into something Lincoln would not recognize were he to come back from the dead. The party has deteriorated over the years into a social group where a bunch of bigots and racist like David Duke,as well as racially insenstive people like Rush Limbaugh find a spiritual home. So these recent incidents of racial smears by Republican office-holders are without a shadow of doubt sadly a tale of a party immersed in a cesspool of racism and hate. The unfortunate thing is that the so-called GOP is a mainstream party, not a fringe one.
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Closeted? More like overt.
Old Abe is likely doing about 600 RPM right now.
June 16, 2009 3:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't believe that all people in the republican party are racists.
However, I do think that many in the republican party are being revealed to have no substance and they are floundering.And when they've got nothing they sink to the bottom and we get the worst of them.
Maybe we need to find a new way for them to contribute so that they can reintegrate into society when they find themselves so lost at sea.
(I know it's silly but it made me think of the Rudolph the Rednose Reindeer show I saw several times as a kid when everyone was afriad of the Abominable Snow Monster and he was like a 'terrorist' until somebody figured out he justed needed a way to contribute and they taught him to put stars on the tops of christmas trees. If you ever saw this, hopefully you'll understand what I am getting at).
June 16, 2009 4:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Synch, I agree. Not all republicans are racist, just like not all democrats are pacifist. I do wish the republicans would get their act together and get rid of the riff raff that has control of the GOP microphone. I continue to be amazed at the absolute ignorance of the remarks coming out the those members of the GOP. Where have they been the last 40 years? Where do they hang out that talk like that is acceptable?
June 17, 2009 2:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
If you are a declared Republican, one or all of the following apply to you: Racist, sexist, homophobe and xenophobe
June 16, 2009 4:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Really? Guess you don't know too many republicans outside of what you see on the media or in your own imagination.
June 17, 2009 1:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
I do not believe everybody who is a member of the GOP are racists. However, the ones who are not need to speak up whenever one of theirs make statements like the foresaid ones. It makes them all look bad.
The Dems are not saints. They have racists in their party too, but they usually do not dare speak publicly,it seems.
June 16, 2009 4:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Closeted? No....
New? No! The GOP has been a party of racists since RMN created the "southern strategy" in 1967.
And, Candide is correct: GOP means racist, sexist, homophobe, & xenophone.
June 16, 2009 5:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Republican Party won the Civil War. The Democratic Party lost it, and was left in disarray -- to appeal only to the "detritus".
In time, the Republican Party, in its ascendancy, became the party of the wealthy and powerful -- and thus exclusionary and pro-status quo. One of the means of maintaining that status quo is to use racism as a tool to keep poor factions fighting with each other, instead of organizaing together against the source of the fracist divisiveness.
Are those who use racism as a tool themselves racist? You have to ask?
While the Democratic Party was becoming the party of the disenfranchised, the Republican Party consistently opposed civil rights protections for minorities, and -- prominently -- anti-lynching laws. That began not long after the Civil War.
Nixon's "Southern Strategy" was based -- accurately -- upon the assumption that LBJ's prediction that his signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, would lose the Democratic Party the South.
So the Republican Party has been the party of racists for much longer than you indicate.
June 16, 2009 7:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Closeted"!? Oh how you kid!
June 16, 2009 7:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
Where's Senator Byrd when you need him?
June 16, 2009 8:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Conservatives are always living in the past,like Limbaugh and he Black quarterback thing. in 1968, Sen Robert Byrd wrote an autobiography that detailed his transformation from a Klan Kleagle (recruiter) to the person h is today. the death of a grandson left him in despair. In his path towards healing, he came to realize that African-Americans loved their children as much as Byrd loved his.
Senator Byrd has an 85% approval rating on Civil rights issues from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Byrd lobbied for an additional $10 million dollars for the MLK Memorial. Byrd evolved. Conservatives have not.
We are left with 1) Rush "Barack the Magic Negro" Limbaugh, 2) An RNC candidate who thought that sending out the magic Negro tune on a CD was OK, 3) An RNC candidate who belongs to an All-white country club, 4) A SC GOP representative who equated a gorilla with an ancestor of Michelle Obama, 5) Pat Buchanan who writes a column for Human events praising slavery and the Jim Crow era, etc.
The demographics are working against the innate racism within the GOP.
June 17, 2009 12:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
And democrats are always falling back on stuff they did generations ago as well.
Neither party has done anything for anyone lately, yet somehow it is all "republicans" fault? Negative. Not anymore than it is "democrats" fault that Bill Clinton destroyed the middle class or locked up a whole new generation of inner city
youth to look tough on crime.
Democrats are in danger of becoming that which they profess to hate. Sad and ironic.
June 17, 2009 1:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let's see, the post addresses racism coming from the GOP. MiddleClassBill brings up Robert Byrd. I addressed Byrd's full record on issues of race. The issue at hand was internal GOP racial bias. That is the care being made against the GOP. the silence given to the issue by the GOP hierarchy does make it the GOP's fault.
You say that both parties have not done anything in reference to some issues that you have in your head. You also that that Bill Clinton destroyed the Middle Class, which I guess means that MCBill really doesn't exist.
Could you please either address the racial bias noted in the original post, or or clarify what you feel the political parties have not done. Thanks.
June 17, 2009 2:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
The once thriving middle class in American manufacturing is gone, largely because of Bill Clinton and the DLC democrats who continued Reagan's disastrous policy of corporate-centric governance and fiercely partisan politics. Just like one can't simply dismiss the omnibus crime bill from 1994 that drastically escalated the War on Drugs as being irrelevant to a whole generation of inner city youth, most of them young, black and male.
Many of the democratic programs from the 90s were terribly racist and mostly detrimental consequences for the least in our society, but at least the didn't use the N word huh?
The republican party is no more racist, as a group, than any other group in America. You confuse the idiots you see on television with the roughly half of the American electorate that identifies as conservative or moderate in some way. You use prejudice and stereotype and minority thinking as a bludgeon to label an entire party of at least 46 million Americans as inherently racist.
Forgetting, of course, the roots of the democratic party and Andrew Jackson and the ignoble pursuits of a number of democratic presidents. Killing a million Vietnamese was probably a bit racist as a response to "stopping" the spread of communism. There is historical context to American politics that one-dimensional catch phrases like the GOP are a bunch of racists fails to capture.
June 18, 2009 11:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Racism, like all forms of bigotry, entails negative stereotyping - the effort to seize on a characterization that applies to some members of a group and generalize it to the entire group.
The opposite principle is to judge each person on his or her own merits.
June 16, 2009 9:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Very well said.
I would add that any time we use words like 'all' 'every' and 'always' and 'never' we are probably making broak sweeping generalizations or in other words we are full of it.
June 17, 2009 4:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, synch, but it IS hard to hold back when we hear the outrageous stuff coming from the GOP. I am glad there are many different posters here on TPM that help to keep me balanced, even when I don't want to be!
June 17, 2009 2:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Haaretz:
What I find most funny is when such people call other racist. Say, when Tancredo says that someone would fit well in KKK, is it an expression of admiration? it puzzled me immensely: since when Tancredo deprecates KKK?
I expect that one day someone will complain that some liberal figure is not a "true femi-nazi".
June 16, 2009 10:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
As a party, the Republicans are a racist party even while some individuals are not so. The Republican ascendancy of the past 40 years is directly attributable to the racist appeal of the the party to disaffected former Democrats who were/are racist and continue to be angry about the end of segregation, etc... Racism has been and remains the typically unspoken hallmark of the Republican Party in the modern era. The party tolerates a certain amount of open racism so long as it is relatively subtle, but it enoucrages and nurtures much unspoken racism and behind closed doors sanctions it. This does not mean the Democrats don't also have racists because they do. Let's not kid ourselves. The difference is that the Democratic Party as an organization is strictly opposed to racism and thus while individuals in the party are racist they cannot express that position without overwhelming rejection in the party and so there is no real outlet for their racism allowed. This is an important and significant difference between the two organizations.
June 17, 2009 10:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
A friend of mine is always bringing up the Dixiecrats as being the ones that did all the lynching, etc., back in the day.
Next time he brings it up, I'll ask him about Ronald Reagan, the 1980 speech in the town where Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were murdered ("I am with you" indeed), and exactly WHO he thinks the Dixiecrats have been voting for all these years.
June 17, 2009 1:40 PM | Reply | Permalink