Truth in Comics

By Creature


If it's Sunday, it's Truth in Comics.

Why don't we send the Teabaggers back under the rock whence they came?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Oh, those teabaggers. They're just civic-minded patriots, aren't they? Good, wholesome, well-intentioned Americans. Real Americans who have risen up against the evils of American democracy...

Just take that rally in Greenville, South Carolina over the weekend. You know, the one at which former GOP Rep. and nativist extraordinaire Tom Tancredo asked,

If his wife says Kenya is his homeland, why don't we just send him back?

And at which a Baptist pastor said that he was prepared to

suit up, get my gun, go to Washington, and do what they trained me to do.

And at which the head of Florida's right-wing Constitution Party said that

we're going to be fighting in the streets

if Teabaggers don't get to work.

And at which another speaker, convinced that GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham is gay, said,

I'm a tolerant person. I don't care about your private life, Lindsey, but as our U.S. Senator I need to figure out why you're trying to sell out your own countrymen, and I need to make sure you being gay isn't it,

implying that being gay makes you a traitor.

See? Good, wholesome Americans. Bigotry? Where? I don't see any. Those goddamn fucking liberals are just making that shit up.

Civilization and it's Discontents

By Capt. Fogg

I've had enough of American TEA to be able to say with confidence that it has noting to do with any tax burden, real or imagined. What it seems to be is a collection of people searching for some rationalization for angers they don't full understand: anger about the demands of civilization, anger about the need for tolerance, being forced to live in a heterogeneous culture, a changing culture, a culture demanding more understanding and more education and more responsibility than they feel capable of. Not all of them are stupid or ignorant, but without the stupid and ignorant, they'd hardly make enough noise to be heard, even with the complicity and amplification provided by Fox News. They're much like the discontents Freud discussed, like the bomb bearing discontents abroad we tell ourselves hate us for "our freedoms."

Tom Tancredo has latched on to the Tea Party movement after being ousted from office by his constituents, in part because he needs to believe he wasn't rejected by his real constituents, but by an undesirable element who shouldn't be allowed to vote. That this disjointed movement contains many people who believe this is a Protestant white man's country and that others should feel grateful just to be allowed here -- and should not vote or be otherwise uppity is obvious. Hence when Tancredo told the Tea Party Thursday that President Obama was elected only because

"we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country,"

it fell on grateful ears.

Mr. Obama's educational and intellectual capabilities and achievements are an obvious irritation to the sort of people Tancredo hopes to ingratiate himself with and when Tancredo allows them to feel warmly supported in their belief that the Harvard Scholar is stupid (he's black after all) and his success due to the stupidity of voters, their inhibitions melt away. They can tell themselves that they've been right all along for opposing civil rights for anyone but true (WASP) Americans and that the success of the civil rights movement has meant disaster for America. Not of course, the disaster of insidious economic policy, corruption, contrived and unnecessary wars and upside down tax structure, but the disaster of having a black president.

Ironically, so far only the darkness of Mr. Obama's complexion and the ability to speak clearly make him stand out among the presidents of the last century, but it's progress -- the idea of progress itself that motivates the snarling in the street. The golden era of laissez faire, white man's paradise they long for exists only in that nebulous Disneyland of the Conservative mind, where we didn't have wild, whipsaw boom-bust cycles, 40% poverty levels, massive social injustice, violence and all the rest of the real world long since buried under snowdrifts of revisionist rhetoric. In that world, black men don't vote, black people can't be trusted to vote, because they're stupider than the crackers and red-necks and bigots and reactionaries who carry signs and dream about a world that is friendly to their sociopathology and acknowledges their privilege and entitlement.

Does it say anything important about Tancredo's argument that the election was swayed by a host of illiterates if in the real world, Obama was heavily favored by educated people? Does it say anything about the real agenda of the Tancredo conservatives if he isn't hooted off the stage for wanting to bring back a shameful era? Sure it does, and that's why one should be forced to flunk a civics and literacy examination if not an IQ test in order to join the party.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

Nativist Republicanism (in action)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Washington Independent: "Tom Tancredo Staffer Pleads Guilty to Karate-Chopping Black Woman."

That would be one Marcus Epstein, who, in addition to striking the woman, called her a "nigger." (He pled guilty but hasn't exactly accepted responsibility for the incident. Plus, he's still heading up Tancredo's PAC.)

Rarely are we privileged to witness ugly nativism in action like this. Well, no, that's not true. There's ugly nativism everywhere. Let me rephrase: Rarely are we privileged to witness ugly nativism in action by a Washington-based leader of the ugly nativist movement (or at least by a guy who works for maybe the leader of the movement in its Republican expression.)

Thanks for showing us what you guys are really like, Marcus Epstein. You're a fine, fine Republican.

And so the vicious right-wing smear campaign against Sotomayor is in full swing

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The invaluable Media Matters is right: "Conservatives react to historic Supreme Court nominee by smearing Sotomayor as 'racist,' 'bigot'."

It's Dear Leader Rush (spewing venom with every last ounce of his being); it's Glenn Beck (full, as usual, of mind-boggling glennbeckery); it's John Yoo (taking time off from defending torture to torture the truth about Sotomayor); it's Mark Levin (one of the more reprehensible voices in right-wing talk radio, which is saying something); it's Ramesh Ponnuru (a somewhat smarter conservative than the norm, but hardly immune from conservative nonsense); it's Newt Gingrich (who, like Limbaugh and others, is playing the racist card, calling Sotomayor herself a racist, presumably for being Hispanic); it's Tom Tancredo (in his usual nativist mode; he probably thinks Sotomayor should be detained and deported); it's Karl Rove (asserting without any evidence whatsoever that Sotomayor is "not necessarily" smart); and it's so many more (like National Review's Mark Krikorian (complaining, in true nativist fashion, about the Spanish pronunciation of her name).

As I put it yesterday, the opponents of Sotomayor's nomination are going with a kitchen sink approach here, vomiting up any and every smear it can make up and hoping something sticks. (And why wouldn't something stick, what with an all-too-eager media establishment making sure these lies get equal time and lapping up all the right-wing smears it can get its hands on with enthusiastic glee (if there's a "liberal media," as conservatives claim, it's only liberal to the extent that it liberally fertilizes the "news" with conservative manure).

Let me go back to Newt for a moment. The media love him (why else would they give him such an extraordinary amount of airtime?). And, with Limbaugh, he's leading the charge against Sotomayor. Consider what has led him to call her a racist:

• In a 2001 speech, Sotomayor said this to a Hispanic group in Berkeley: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."
  
• In response, Newt tweeted this: "Imagine a judicial nominee said 'my experience as a white man makes me better than a latina woman.' new racism is no better than old racism."

How is this racism? What Sotomayor was saying was that her experiences matter, that they contribute to a fuller appreciation and understanding of what might come before her as a judge. As Greg Sargent explains (via Sullivan): "Read in context, it's clear that Sotomayor was merely saying that it’s inevitable that a judge's personal race-based and gender-based experiences will impact judging, particularly in race and sex discrimination cases." (The White House has already "hit back" at Newt.)

It's too much to expect right-wing partisans like Newt and Rush to take context into account, and so it comes as no surprise that their smears depend heavily on taking everything out of context. And there will certainly be more of this to come.

Thankfully, though, it seems that Republicans in Congress -- those who have their political survival to consider, who must answer to the American people, and who must at least be somewhat responsible -- likely will not go all-out against Sotomayor. (That is, Senate Republicans won't -- and they're the ones that matter. The generally more extremist House Republicans likely agree with Rush and Newt and the rest of the smearers.) As Politico is reporting, "the GOP plans no scorched-earth opposition to her confirmation as a Supreme Court justice." Which is good and promising news, if true.

Ultimately, it looks like the smear campaign will prove ineffectual and fizzle out. Sotomayor is a smart, qualified nominee -- she's no Harriet Miers (another line of attack against her) -- and there just isn't a reasonable case to be made against her.

But conservatives will continue to try -- and will continue to take things out of context, to make things up, and to hurl the kitchen sink at her. As long as she and her supporters stand firm, which they (we) are, there shouldn't be much problem repelling the right's ugly smear campaign and guiding her towards a relatively easy (and deserved) confirmation.