The radio host who stirred up the controversy over the Prescott, Arizona mural was fired yesterday. Here’s what he has to say in an interview (at about 5:30):
Some guy calls me and says “Doesn’t that look like a big old black guy in the middle of that picture” and I says, “It does, maybe it has something to do with the guy who’s in the White House. Whether you like it or not, he’s our President and he is black.” There’s nothing racism [sic] about what I just said. It’s a statement and it’s a fact.
Yes, there’s nothing racism about thinking that a kid who attends a local school has no right to be depicted on a mural. We have a black president, and that filled our country’s quota of blackness for the next couple of years.
donnah
Good riddance. He’s still on the city council, however. That should be the next step in excising this cancerous tumor.
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he resurfaced on the FOX network as a commentator, though. He’s just their kind of “spokesman”.
Laertes
I expect he’ll run for higher office and win in a landslide.
Halteclere
Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
Cacti
The mask is dropping from the far right.
This guy got his panties in a twist over the mere sight of a brown face on a mural (and one who attends the school in question at that).
kid bitzer
” There’s nothing racism about what I just said.”
now explain away the stupidism.
El Cid
This guy is right. We got a black President already but I already had to see another black guy in my neighborhood! What, next, they let them and the brown things into schools?
KCinDC
Another martyr to liberal intolerance ready to start cashing in on the wingnut talk circuit. He’ll have a book out by the end of the year, and be running for higher office (House at least).
Cat Lady
These fleshy faced old white clueless bubbas are the face of the Republican party. This Blair guy, Haley Barbour, the “raghead” cracker from SC, Dick Cheney, Rush, Weepy Glenn Beck, etc. etc. Get these dinosaurs on camera and let them talk. I say the more light that shines on them, the better, because they’re really repulsive both inside and out.
Cacti
@KCinDC:
No, it will be worse.
Future Arizona gubernatorial candidate.
PaulW
The kid in the mural isn’t even Black. He’s Mexican. Idiot councilman can’t even get his racism right.
The only good thing to come out of all this open racial hostility on the Far Right? …actually, not a damn thing. Obama’s being in office *has* brought all of this racist anger to the forefront, but all it’s showing is just how nasty a good-sized portion of our nation still is 40 years after the high points of the Civil Rights movement. Shining City on a Hill? My ass…
cmorenc
@KCinDC
I could be wrong, but my hunch is that for all the frothy insanity of Hannity and Beck, they have enough sense of self-preservation to keep their distance from embracing this particular controversy and Mr. Blair. In fact, they may even try to make constructive use of making at least a mild show of disapproval against Mr. Blair and the movement to alter this particular mural – in order to create a “record” for themselves as opponents of racism, the better to try to distinguish their aggressive anti-immigration frothing as based on considerations quite apart from racism. Rush Limbaugh, as usual, will probably wind up talking out of both sides of his mouth on this issue, whichever way the wind most promisingly seems to blow a given day or week. Actually, Hannity and Beck will probably talk out of both sides of their mouth as well on this at different times, but they probably won’t have walked quite so far out on a plank to have to walk back or try to convince anyone they were never out there in the first place. Except of course for all the other stuff they’ve said and done quite aside from the Prescott controversy.
RareSanity
Talk about bad timing…
If he would have freaked out about this (or something like it) several months ago, the teabaggers would have had their challenger to gramps McCain.
He could have gone from nutty city councilman to US Senator in less than a year.
God Bless America…
KCinDC
@cmorenc, maybe, but I think there’s a way for them to play it. Just say that no one ever complained about ethnicity — that conservatives were rightly objecting to the fact that the mural was propaganda for the anti-human “green” movement, which doesn’t recognize Man’s dominion over Nature, promotes Big Lies like global warming, and wants to turn your kids into vegetarians. Liberals didn’t like those brave conservatives getting in the way of their indoctrination of innocent schoolchildren, so as usual they smeared them as racists, when the real racism is the act of calling people racists.
arguingwithsignposts
@PaulW:
Actually, I’ve just been reading Sarah Vowell’s excellent “The Wordy Shipmates,” and it’s interesting the etymology of the “Shining City on a Hill” American ideal, along with the “we’re going over there to help” ideal – yes, it’s from the Bible, but it was transported to the States like a virus via the early English puritans who settled Massachusetts.
I highly recommend the book.
JWeidner
@kid bitzer: He fail English? That’s unpossible!
QuaintIrene
What he’s saying makes no sense. Was he protesting because he thought it was Obama in the mural? That’s not what he was quoted saying on the radio. Or is it that cause we have a black prez that lets all the others come in through the front door now?
QuaintIrene
Tho it would help if he was a blonde ex-beauty contestant.
demo woman
He was protesting because the black student was larger than the white students…black superiority and all. I did not listen to the interview yet but AP reported that the size of the student bothered him.
Doctor Science
I clicked over to the story about the interview — it’s at the local newspaper’s site — and either they’re moderating the sh*t out of the comments, or humanity is better off than I thought.
Mr Furious
Who fucking cares about radio guy, the trophy I want on the wall is the head of the principal.
Right-wing assholes on the radio aren’t doing their jobs if they’re not offending everyone with their bullshit.
For an elementary school principal to knuckle under and harm the well-being and self-image of HIS VERY FUCKING STUDENTS PICTURED IN THE GODDAMN MURAL is beyond the pale.
Pun intended.
jon
Prescott is a beautiful melting pot of a place: there are white bikers, white hippies, white econuts, white libertarians, white Christians, white survivalists, white ranchers, white alcoholics, white liberals, white woo-folk, some brown guys, and some Indians (of both the non-foreign and non-Sikh kinds, under the new South Carolina Classification System.)
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@arguingwithsignposts:
In his book The Cousins’ War Kevin Phillips quotes a 17th Cen. English puritan as having said “Our God is a god of Warr”.
Reading that cuts through a lot of the clutter, doesn’t it? The rest of our subsequent history has a sort of fleshing-out-the-details quality to it, after you’ve read that.
Michael
Mr Furious:
Good point. The principal turned out to be a real pillar of jello in the face of teh stoopid.
Ironically, Billy Jack was set in Prescott. It would be fun to see a modern day Laughlin put a foot on the side of Blair’s face.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qswm7lHp7oY&feature=related@
R. Porrofatto
Blair’s complaint was that the black kid in the mural was bigger than the depiction of white kids. It’s yet another example of an ofay asshole who’s got a complex about the word “bigger” when talking about black people.
Which radio blowhard will be first to spin it so that the principal was only telling them to “lighten up.”
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@demo woman:
Give the wingnut some credit: he knows that size always matters, and once you go black, you can’t go back.
Bad Horse's Filly
Call me Pollyanna, but maybe, just maybe this big ole boil on the butt of our country is getting bigger and bigger because it’s getting ready to pop and then we can clean it out, give it a good dose of antibiotics and get rid of it for good.
Jennifer
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Ignignokt: You have deeply offended us and our god. And our god is a god of vengeance, and horror.
Err: And action!
Ignignokt: Our god is an Indian who turns into a wolf.
Err (quietly): No, that’s Wolfen, man.
Ignignokt: Yes, well, the Wolfen will come for you, with his razor!
Polish the Guillotines
@JWeidner: Win.
@Mr Furious:
I agree, but it’ll never happen. Recall the Cinco De Mayo crap here in the Bay Area where the white kids wore American flag swag to annoy the Latino kids: The vice-principal showed some spine and told them to knock it off, they complained to their parents, who complained to the school board, who hung the vice-principal out to dry. That’s in the “liberal” greater SF Bay Area.
This Prescott, AZ principal ain’t goin’ nowhere.
sukabi
besides firing his ass from the radio, he needs to be recalled from his council seat AND they need to make sure the mural stays as it was first painted…
DBrown
What the “F” are you talking about? A few years!? Hell, Blacks now owe use poor down trodden white troglodytes … I mean white gentleman – from now on; all issues of slavery for three hundred years, and then essential slavery for the last hundred or so is off the table and they owe us now, big time.
Please, when a whitely has a father and son business that is always good business sense or when a white cracker gets his son into med school automatically because he became a doctor there and has lavished some big bucks on the school … well, that is legacy and proper and no doubt his son is supper smart because daddy has money (just ignore that jail time for getting drunk and assaulting a cop – money and lawyers took care of that, and the drugs … that was just some fun and he wasn’t really selling them for a profit. He’ll make a great MD. See how fair that is? Those that already have the money and power through years of privilage get to keep all special money making paths and slots in special schools!)
We no longer need to use reverse discrimination any more; because, hell, blacks make up about 15% of the population and comprise zero % CEO’s and under a few percent MD’s, and lawyers and engineers and scientist and bankers and upper middle class and … wait, they make up 100% of the US Presidents now.
We are off the hook! Free at last!
maya
Uh, oh. South Carolina and Az are going to really freak out. Some parts of Ohio may join in.
mapaghimagsik
Wonkette might just be right about how disenfranchised whites are going to strike out at some point, and white collar whites will cheer them on.
jon
@Michael: Don’t look up “Billyjack” on this site unless you really want to know too much.
trollhattan
In related (really) news, Steve Poizner lands the critical Joe Arpaio endorsement to prove to Republican voters that he and he alone is best qualified to make California more like Arizona.
http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2010/06/poizner-pulls-o.html
Randy P
@Doctor Science: Looks there’s some sort of troll-rating system that’s hiding all the wingnutty comments. I see a lot of this:
Low-rated comment [Show]
Calouste
It says something about the level of public discourse in the US that this councilman and the state Senator in South Carolina think they can get away with making statements like that in public, statements of a level that even right-extremists parties in Europe like the British National Party and Le Front National feel won’t go down well with the general public.
handy
@trollhattan:
Yippee for him! This Repub primary has been one big freak fest and I’ll be glad when it’s over and I don’t have to endure any more of these “I hate brown people more than my opponent” ads.
allium
@Jennifer: I wonder if the QUAD DAMAGE CANNON can be loaded with Holy Hand Grenades?
Mnemosyne
@arguingwithsignposts:
I second the recommendation – G and I listened to it as an audiobook and it was terrific. Vowell reads it herself with some help from friends like John Hodgman, Aidann Quinn, John Oliver and Peter Dinklage.
Tmac
@KCinDC:
There’s still idiots out there that doubt global warming???
Why would you think all scientists in the world are wrong?
Boy are your kids going to be pissed at this and past generations!