July 9, 2015: WH Press Secretary Josh Earnest began today’s presser with a sweeping denunciation of Republicans as RAAAAAAACISTS. Just listen to the first minute of this and keep in mind this is the WHITE HOUSE.
Donald Trump is the individual Earnest cites as the “leading presidential candidate” (huh?) who is a known race-baiter. I googled “Donald Trump race baiter” and got a bunch of hits, all in left-wing rags like HuffPo. The actual quotes that are slammed as “racist” appear to be terrible, horrible, no-good statements of facts about black crime rates and the like. OMG … those RAAAACIST facts! And those RAAACISTS who say them out loud!
Rep. Steve Scalise is the individual Earnest quotes as having said he was “like David Duke without the baggage.” By this, he meant that he supported the same policy ideas as David Duke, but that he didn’t have the same negative feelings about minorities as the former Ku Klux Klan leader. But Josh … really! Don’t let a little thing like CONTEXT get in the way of your slandering the entire GOP … cuz, you know, TOLERANCE.
Lyndon Baines Johnson allegedly said, “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference… I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years”.
This quote is attributed to LBJ in Ronald Kessler’s book, and was supposedly said to two southern governors. Kessler has been cited as the chief Washington correspondent for the far-right-wing Newsmax. IOW, he comes to the table with his own biases. In the absence of a reliable objective record of that quotation, the best source to answer this question may be the presidential recordings made during the Johnson administration.
Several hundred conversations were recorded dealing with issues of racial politics and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A quote like the one in question is not found in any of these recordings, nor do they contain the oft-cited statement to Bill Moyers that LBJ had “lost to the South to the GOP for a generation.” But they do provide excellent insight into how LBJ talked about these issues in private. For example, it is simply undisputed that LBJ did use the prevailing southern racial slurs of the time, including the word “n—–r,” as this actual recording demonstrates. This is hardly the only example.
While his nomenclature leaves something to be desired, the collected recordings show that LBJ had some astonishingly progressive views on race for a rural-born white Texan in the late 1960s. It should also be noted that LBJ knew his audience, and would speak differently to a Georgia state legislator than, say, a Connecticut governor. It’s very difficult to tell when LBJ is putting on an act for audience or when he’s speaking with his “true” voice.
I think the best we can say is that the quote is not inconsistent with LBJ’s style and is either genuine or a fair paraphrase. It’s the kind of thing LBJ might say to a Dixiecrat to convince them not to oppose the CRA. IOW, the quote might be genuine, but the sentiment was not. I think it does a disservice when these kinds of quotes are used to suggest that LBJ was duplicitous and uncaring about black America. Personally, I have no doubt over the bona fides of LBJ’s empathy and humanity after listening to the conversations in June of 1963 during the Freedom Summer disappearances, where LBJ was positively distraught.
I won’t begin to deny that LBJ was a ruthless political operator, and indeed, an unrepentant liar. But I cringe that this single quote, robbed of its context, would be used by some to imply that LBJ was a heartless racist manipulator. That’s one notion that I think the historical record soundly disproves.
Or so it would seem. In 1971, Bernie Sanders launched his first bid for Senate. In 1972, he published this essay about how, at heart, men and women really hate each other. Read the first few lines.
Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) styles himself a 2016 presidential contender. If a Republican candidate had ever written an essay like the one Sanders wrote, it would be leading every news show, every talk show, and every social media Top Hits. But he’s a Democrat, so the Left is giving him a pass.
In 2008, Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin mentioned that you can see Russia from Alaska (which is true). Palin look-alike Tina Fey of SNL spun it into the comedy gold line, “I can see Russia from my house.” The Left put Fey’s words into Palin’s mouth so often that multitudes of voters thought Palin was a moron.
In 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney talked about how much care he had put into hiring females for his Massachusetts gubernatorial administration. He instructed his staff to headhunt qualified women and was proud of the fact that they had given him multiple binders filled with women’s resumes to consider. The Left turned the phrase “binders full of women” into a symptom of the GOP’s alleged war on women.
It’s a handy shortcut for arguing facts with Leftists who like to give Clinton credit for Republican accomplishments and blame Bush for Democrat atrocities. Laws have to be passed by THREE bodies — the House, the Senate, and the President. Whichever party dominates TWO (or three) of these is responsible for policy and its consequences.
House Democrats voted unanimously in favor of allowing illegals to join our military.
Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) supported the proposal, saying that citizenship shouldn’t matter. “I know that what really matters on the battlefield isn’t whether you have the right papers, it’s whether you have the heart to fight, patriotism for your country, and the right character,” he said.
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh … no. If you’re an illegal alien, then it’s not YOUR country, now is it? Our military has ALWAYS allowed LEGAL immigrants to serve. Many, many immigrants have used military service to fast-track their way to naturalization. But ILLEGALS? Unh-unh. Get your green card first. Then, we can talk.
Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) opposed the proposal, saying it legitimized Obama’s DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), which has been challenged in court as an unconstitutional overreach.
Fortunately, our Republican majority was able to kill the proposal 221-202.
These are not good times for the Republic (and if you laughed or scratched your head at me calling America a republic, I rest my case).
But they are amusing times, at least for those of us capable of extracting some measure of mirth and schadenfreude from the president’s predicament.
With the sand running out on the Obama presidency, it’s finally dawning on the president’s friends and fans that he can be a real jerk.
Consider the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank. For the last six years, he’s spent much of his time rolling his eyes and sneering at Republicans. His subspecialty is heaping ridicule on conservative complaints about, well, everything and anything. If it bothers conservatives, it must be irrational, partisan, churchy, fake, hypocritical — or all of the above. Meanwhile, poor Barack Obama, while not always without fault in Milbank’s eyes, is the grown-up, the good guy trying to do good things amidst a mob of malcontents and ideologues.
That is, until this month. President Obama wants to get a trade deal passed. He needs Democrats to do it. But, Milbank laments, Obama’s blowing it.
“Let’s suppose you are trying to bring a friend around to your point of view,” Milbank writes. “Would you tell her she’s emotional, illogical, outdated, and not very smart? Would you complain that he’s being dishonest, fabricating falsehoods and denying reality with his knee-jerk response?”
“Such a method of a persuasion is likelier to get you a black eye than a convert,” Milbank notes. “Yet this is how President Obama treats his fellow Democrats on trade . . .”
Yes, well, true enough. But lost on Milbank is the fact that this is precisely how Obama treats everyone who disagrees with him. When Obama — who ran for office touting his ability to work with Republicans and vowing to cure the partisan dysfunction in Washington — treated Republicans in a far ruder and shabbier way, Milbank celebrated.
Of course, he was hardly alone.
Republicans, in Obama’s view, are always dishonest, fabricating falsehoods and denying reality with their knee-jerk responses.
To pick just one of countless examples, there was a White House summit on health care in 2010. The president invited members of Congress to discuss the issue in good faith. He then proceeded to treat every concern, objection, and argument from Republicans as dumb, dishonest, or emotional. They were, according to a column by Milbank, “stepping into Prof. Obama’s classroom.” Milbank marveled at how the “teacher” treated them all “like his undisciplined pupils.” Whenever someone said anything politically inconvenient, the president replied that those were just partisan “talking points.”
When Senator John McCain, his opponent in the previous election, noted that Obama had broken numerous promises and that the 2,400-page bill was a feeding trough for special interests, Obama eye-rolled. “Let me just make this point, John,” Obama said. “We’re not campaigning anymore. The election’s over.”
He responded to Senator Lamar Alexander — he called him “Lamar” — “this is an example of where we’ve got to get our facts straight.” When it was Representative John Boehner’s turn to speak, Obama reprimanded “John” for trotting out “the standard talking points” and, in the words of a palpably impressed Milbank, forced Boehner to “wear the dunce cap.”
Again, this was all quintessential Obama then, and it’s quintessential Obama now. All that has changed is that he’s doing the exact same thing to Democrats, and it’s making them sad. Specifically, he’s accused Senator Elizabeth Warren of not having her facts straight. He says she’s just a politician following her partisan self-interest.
But here’s the hilarious part: Liberals can’t take it. The president of NOW, Terry O’Neill, accused Obama of being sexist. O’Neill sniped that Obama’s “clear subtext is that the little lady just doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” She added, “I think it was disrespectful.” Both O’Neill and Senator Sherrod Brown also sniff sexism in the fact that Obama referred to Warren as “Elizabeth.”
“I think referring to her as first name, when he might not have done that for a male senator, perhaps?” Brown mused with his typical syntactical ineptness.
Of course, in that White House health-care summit and in nearly every other public meeting with Republican senators and congressmen, he referred to them all by their first names.
The great irony is that when Republicans complain about Obama’s haughtiness and arrogance, liberals accuse them of being racist. I hope I don’t miss that phase of this spat while I’m off making the popcorn.
Senator Barbara Boxer: “Don’t Call Me Ma’am” – General Michael Walsh
The House of Representatives approved a bill that bans abortions after 20-weeks of pregnancy.
A poll done by the uber liberal Huffington Post found that Americans support the pain-capable ban by an almost 2-1 margin. If the Senate approves the bill, President Obama has said he will veto it. Clearly, he does not care what Americans want.
Before the vote, Dr. Maureen Condic, who is Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, testified that the unborn child is capable of reacting to pain as early as 8-10 weeks.This is when most abortions in America take place.
“Two years ago today, Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell was convicted of murder, conspiracy to kill and involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to life imprisonment. Even though the news of Gosnell’s child slaughter was largely suppressed by the mainstream media, many of my colleagues may remember that Dr. Gosnell operated a large Philadelphia abortion clinic where women died and countless babies were dismembered or chemically destroyed often by having their spinal cords snipped—all gruesome procedures causing excruciating pain to the victim. The Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act is needed now more than ever because there are Gosnells all over America, dismembering and decapitating pain-capable babies for profit.” -Congressman Chris Smith
“If you stand with the defenseless, with the voiceless, you have to stand with little babies. Don’t talk to me about cruelty in our bill — when you look at little babies being dismembered, feeling excruciating pain, if we can’t stand to defend these children, what do we stand for in this institution?” –Congressman Sean Duffy
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