Via Ta-Nehisi Coates,
David White picks up on the (Rapper) Common piece and expounds a bit:
You know, normally something this stupid wouldn’t bother me, but this story really gets under my skin. If they can try to paint Common as a ‘dangerous black man,’ what black man is immune? If they think Common is vile, then I know they have no use for my black ass. Common is beyond the pale, Michelle Obama hates whitey, Eric Holder is protecting the New Black Panther Party, Shirley Sherrod is discriminating against white farmers, Barack Obama is giving reparations to black people? Conservatives, do you realize how stupid this sounds to black people? (and I know that black people aren’t the audience for that kind of talk, there’s no need to point that out to me.) Seriously, you can’t find less-threatening black people.
And fundamentally, I doubt if they even think Common’s that bad. He’s a convenient target for a bit of demagoguing, which is even more repugnant. At least when Lee Atwater used the “Let’s dredge up the ‘dangerous black man’ feelings for a cheap political hit” ploy, he’d choose an actually dangerous black man.
I mean, look, politically, I’m pretty liberal, so it’s not like I’d ever be a regular Republican voter anyway. But shit like this is what prevents me from even getting to the point where I’d give their policies a fair hearing. And I know there are some Republicans and conservatives here, and I say that you have no chance of getting any kind of support from black voters as long as the leaders of your party are pulling these kinds of stunts.
I think that first paragraph captures a lot of what I meant when I asked “Who will they accept? This is different from \”Who will they agree with?” I think Liz Cheney’s attacks on Eric Holder were disgusting and erroneous, but they were also pretty run of the mill for American politics.
As usual there is also the blatant hypocrisy. Before Fox News decided Commons was a dangerous black man they thought he was great. Then there is the general right-wing conservative acceptance of Ted Nugent who said this about prominent Democrats,
While holding two machine guns and pacing the stage, The Nuge spit his venom encouraging violence against the two candidates….
I was in Chicago, I said, ‘Hey Obama, you might wanna suck on one of these you punk.’ … Obama, he’s a piece of shit, I told him to suck on my machine gun. Lets hear it! [crowd cheers] I was in New York, I said, ‘Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch.’ … She might want to suck on my machine gun.
The Nuge ended his speech by holding up two machine guns and yelling, “Freeeeedom!,” William Wallace-style….
Nugent – who has admitted “has urinated on a nun, soiled his trousers for a week in order to avoid the draft, and been detained on a charge of indecent exposure.” Has also been invited to events by George W. Bush and current Texas Governor Rick Perry(R).
This brings up the whole subject of song lyrics and what is and is not offensive. I don’t think most people pay that much attention to any lyrics. They get the tag line, a repeated chorus, it sounds like something they can maybe relate to, but generally are just into the overall sensation of the song. I would say there is an exception perhaps for those into old standard pop songs. Then again if people really paid attention to lyrics wouldn’t they be knocking down the store managers door every year when they heard Doris Day and Dean Martin belt out this salaciousness over the store sound system,
“Baby It’s Cold Outside” – Dean Martin & Doris Day
Her: but maybe just a half a drink more
Him: (put some records on while I pour)
Her: the neighbors might faint
Him: (baby it’s bad out there)
Her: say what’s in this drink
Him: (no cabs to be had out there)
Sounds like the celebration of date rape to me. Get her drunk, make her believe the weather is too bad to leave. Then its a real holiday celebration. When G.W. Bush was governor of Texas he made the great Bob Dylan an honorary Texan. Dylan wrote these lyrics, Bob Dylan, ‘Lay Lady Lay’ – “Lay lady lay, lay across my big brass bed/Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile”. Glee did an episode this year that had Jayma Mays character sing what she thought was a very sweet innocent song by the Starland Vocal Band, ‘Afternoon Delight’ – “Rubbin’ sticks and stones together makes the sparks ignite/And the thought of rubbin’ you is getting so exciting”. The song is a little nauseating to my tastes, but I know plenty of greying conservative southerners who also think it’s perfectly innocent.
black and white metropolitan bridge wallpaper
Economic Downturn and Conservative Supply-Side Policies Continue to Drive Large Projected Deficits
The events and policies that pushed deficits to these high levels in the near term were, for the most part, not of President Obama’s making. If not for the Bush tax cuts, the deficit-financed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the effects of the worst recession since the Great Depression (including the cost of policymakers’ actions to combat it), we would not be facing these huge deficits in the near term. By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019. The stimulus law and financial rescues will account for less than 10 percent of the debt at that time.
Part of the growth of the so-called tea baggers movement was mostly conservatives who wanted to distant themselves from blame for Bush’s version of supply-side economics. The problem with that is that House Leader John Boehner(R-OH) and Senate conservative leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have not only embraced the same underlying supply-side cut taxes and cut social safety net programs to pay for the cuts philosophy, they have added 20 percent more crazy. In their own way the conservative movement is a bunch of bomb makers, public policy bomb makers. Those bombs keep blowing up and hurting Americans that are most vulnerable. Conservatives, having learned nothing or glad they inflected considerable damage but not enough, just go back to making bigger and meaner public policy bombs.
inkbluesky 