My new favorite conservative pundit, Tunku Varadarajan:
Here we have the Tea Party, one of the nation’s most organic, Athenian, democratic movements, being attacked by a political organization—the NAACP—that is among the most sclerotic, dinosaurian, and cadaverous of America’s political groupings.
Remember when FreedomWorks bused those crowds into heckle Pericles?
Unfortunately, this is only the second dumbest thing ever written regarding teatards and civil rights groups. Megan McArdle a few months ago:
I’m especially sensitive–perhaps oversensitive–to the way that anything I proceed to say about conservative people outside the Northeast runs the risk of sounding a lot like that fifties moderate whose work one occasionally comes across: “Of course, I just love negroes–they’re all so musical and I don’t know how I’d get my house cleaned without our Bessie. But why can’t they be a little more patient about this civil rights mess?”
JGabriel
I love it when conservatives insult all the non-white people. It’s like free advertising for Democrats.
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Kryptik
Because the NAACP are the real racists after all, doncha know.
bob h
This rubbish does raise an interesting question about the politics of Indian Americans. We have Jindal, Nikki Whatshername in SC, pundits like Tunku and Rannesh P on the right. Do Indian Americans trend to the right politically as a rule?
cleek
Athenian ? so they select officeholders by lottery ?
i guess that explains their candidates.
New Yorker
@bob h:
It does seem like there’s a good number of fundamentalist Catholics among Indian-Americans.
vtr
@cleek: I’m not clear on this. Wasn’t the democratic process in Athens restricted to the relatively aristocratic. How many TeaBaggers would have been allowed to vote during the Pericles Golden Age?
JGabriel
bob h:
I don’t know about Indian Americans in general, but the Brahmin caste tend to be pretty conservative and trend to the right in India. And they’re probably the ones who can most easily afford to migrate to the US, so they may be overrepresented here.
But, honestly, I haven’t seen any overall trend here in NYC. There are male Indians from high caste backgrounds, who tend to be conservative, just like upper class white guys. Most other Indians seem to be Dems.
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JGabriel
@vtr:
Define teabagger.
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Emma
One does notice how much these people worship Athenian democracy…. a society in which a small group of men controlled all political activity while most of the work was done by the 30% of the population who were chattel slaves, and where “free” women were damn near chattel themselves.
TR
Well, first of all, the organization was founded in 1909 and that was the name they took. It’s what they’re known by, pumpkin. Why don’t you go pout to the United Negro College Fund while you’re at it.
And, no, people today don’t call it the “N-double-A-C-P” because they’re ashamed of that word. They always called it that. Thurgood Marshall called it that. Roy Wilkins called it that. W.E.B. DuBois was too elitist to call it that, but I’m damn sure he heard plenty of people who did.
“What’s with the Colored thing?” is about one step removed from “Hey, what’s the deal with airplane food?”
vtr
@vtr: I’l briefly answer my own question. According to Wikipedia,”Only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training as ephebes had the right to vote in Athens. This excluded a majority of the population.”
IM
Oh yes Athenians. Led by Cleon.
The results will be similar.
I always understood that about a third of the athenian population were slaves, one third foreigners and only one third citizens.
But tht franchise among the (male) citizens was quite broad, because it included not only hoplites, but also others serving in the military, especially the fleet. The lowest class of ctizens only had the active vote, though.
In other greek states only hoplites could votes, so that only the middle class who could afford the armor could participate. On the other hand they had few foreigners and less slaves, so that ctitizens were large share of the population
TR
Got it? She was there to talk about childhood obesity, but because the audience later moved on to condemn the tea party’s racism, Americans — Real Americans, presumably — are justified in thinking she’s “a black militant in a mufti.”
And maybe those middle-of-the-road Americans will see Tea Party signs of Obama as a witch doctor and decide the N-double-A-C-P is right.
Ash Can
The most charitable approach I can take here is to assume that Mr. Varadarajan is not very familiar with American history and culture, and is working very, very hard at perfecting his already-extensive knowledge of English usage and syntax. This, however, casts the Daily Beast in the role of mean kids — shame on them for holding him up to public ridicule like this.
IM
So a speech of Michelle Obama about obesity could prove toxic to democrats.
not small things like unemployment.
On the other hand there are a lot of obese americans and if Michelle snubbed them…
gnomedad
Maybe McMegan is on the verge of self-awareness. We can hope.
arguingwithsignposts
You should have heard the Tea Partier this morning on NPR talking about the NAACP as just another racist organization. Here’s the key quote:
emphasis added.
It’s as if they don’t ever want African-Americans to vote for their candidates.
kay
@TR:
It’s an article of faith among conservatives (and mainstream media, actually) that Americans loathe Michelle Obama. They yammered about it constantly during the campaign. They all blindly followed the FOX theme.
They don’t like her, so it must be true, right?
But, they’re still convinced Americans love Sarah Palin, despite all available evidence, so consider the source.
grumpy realist
I especially love the self-descriptions by the Tea Partiers. Anyone interested in digging up self-descriptions by slaveowners in the South before the Civil War?
When 99% of your self-selected population is rural older white people with huge chips on their shoulders free-basing rage, that’s the population you’ll be remembered for. And no, having to pay taxes is not the Holocaust round II, no matter how you much you pout about it, buttercup.
(Could someone please take all the anti-tax idiots and dump them in countries that don’t have such? I’m sure they’ll love the daily life in places like Somalia, Ivory Coast, Congo…..)
kommrade reproductive vigor
Yeah. Suggesting that they might want to compare their rhetoric to the rhetoric of other groups that people loathe and warning them that they could become Klan bait, is an attack.
And would exclude a majority of the chickenshits in the TP Movement.
These assholes don’t know what they’re talking about. They just see something that other people admire and think that if they shout “That’s us, we’re just like that!” anyone will give a fuck. See also, Patriot Drag.
Woodrowfan
@bob h:
According to an Indian-American friend they do tend to be Republican, one of the few non-white immigrant groups that do. According to my friend’s account, many of the Indian immigrants to the US came from the more conservative castes and kept that conservative outlook once they reached the US.
Wilson Heath
Athenian maybe but not democratic — the anti-17th Amendment furor puts the lie to that. So how are they Athenian? 411 B.C. Athenian, like the oligarchic coup of the four hundred.
The murmurs from the right about putting property or wealth requirements on voting is one of the signs that I’m right. It’s one of the things I always notice B-O-B spouting off about and which I keep pointing out is drivel.
schrodinger's cat
@bob h:First of all I wouldn’t want to generalize about an entire community based on a sample size of 3. Most Indians (mostly academics) I know have been Democrats, probably business types are Republican.
Although brahmins have been traditionally quite powerful in India, they are minuscule in number to change the outcome of electoral politics in India, in almost all of the states and several other castes are politically more powerful.
@JGabriel: I don’t know about Jindal but Vardarajan is not a Tamil Brahmin name and Haley’s parents are Sikh, Sikhs don’t follow the caste system.
matoko_chan
@schrodinger’s cat: Tunku, Jindal, and Haley are actually what real hindus and sikhs call “cobos” or colonized browns. They are pretty rare, because the brown of skin don’t rise easily through the ranks of the old white guys in the Murrican business caste. Haley’s looks likely greased her path, ditto Jindals IQ which is extremely high for a republican.
I dunno about Tunku.
He’s prolly just a gunga.
Wile E. Quixote
Weren’t the Athenians all a bunch of homos? Makes sense for an organization that keeps talking about teabagging.
Wile E. Quixote
@bob h:
I don’t think so, I mean look at Kal Penn who is more famous (and way cooler) than all of the people you mention and who is a Democrat. I think that what you have with “Bobby” Jindal, Tunku “Why are negroes so goddamned uppity” Varadarajan and the rest is a combination of “I’ve got mine, fuck-you”-ism plus the fact that if you’re an opportunistic shit of color you can make good bucks being a token for the conservatives and telling everyone how they’re really not racists. cf. Michael Steele, Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Juan Williams, etc.
teejay
Doug: Sail “into” the Mystic but : bus in [so that they could]
heckle Pericles.
Wile E. Quixote
@matoko_chan:
Is this just more of your racist bullshit? I ask because when I do a Google search with the terms “cobo”, “colonized brown”, “hindu” and “sikh” the only hits I get that even mention this are from Balloon Juice posts made by you.
schrodinger's cat
Have to agree with both of WEQ’s posts, it also seems to me that changing your religion gets you bonus points with the GOP (Haley, Ponnuru and Jindal).
Mike
Tunku Varadarajan
Clinical Professor of Business
Joined Stern: 2007
Leonard N. Stern School of Business
Kaufman Management Center
44 West 4th Street, Room 10-85
New York, NY 10012
Email: [email protected]
Mayur
Matoko_chan is, as usual, making up a bunch of stuff to sound like an ethnic insider.
My sample size for Indian-Americans is fairly large and they are, generally speaking, NOT social conservatives or neocons. A fair number of IGMFY cons, but even that’s changed with W’s parade of disasters.
It was my understanding that Korean-Americans are the only significant demo that polls strongly Republican these days, but I don’t have the data to hand.
And no, Piyush, Dinesh D’Souza, Tunku, and Ponnuru are all Xtians, and not Brahmins. My family may be somewhat (er, baldly) anti-Muslim and small-c conservative about behavioral mores (drinking, dress, who to marry, etc), but they ain’t right-wingers.
matoko_chan
@Wile E. Quixote: “cobo” came originally from Aziz Poonwalla at TalkIslam…i think he invented it.
gunga is from my brit friend.
do you want to know the reference?
its from Kipling.
gunga din was the “regimental beastie” ie waterboy for a brit regiment.
he carried water for the british soldiers killing other brown people.
thus Tunku.
matoko_chan
@Mayur: umm no….i just comment at Sepoy and im a frontpager at TalkIslam.
im a white grrl revert though.
matoko_chan
@Mayur: you forgot Salam.
hes a muslim i think, even tho he can’t officially say that.
schrodinger's cat
@matoko_chan: Wow, that’s pretty obnoxious. I think one can criticize Jindal, Tunku et al without resorting to such racially charged language. What’s next are you going to call someone a coolie?
matoko_chan
@schrodinger’s cat: you think gunga is obnoxious or cobo?
i ekshually think Jindal is a decent guy who is trying to do his best. Tunku IS a gunga IMHO. He’s like what jews would call a kapo, or blacks an Uncle Tom.
matoko_chan
@schrodinger’s cat:
well, no that is a crude racial epithet, like slant or beaner or nigger.
cobo and gunga are ideological insults, like kapo or uncle tom or maftoon.
Dr. Psycho
@kay: Much as they presumed that Bill Clinton — or any Clinton — would be a drag on the Obama campaign, and the man was a fool to let the former First Family have any visibility. They were so convinced that real Americans hated the Clintons as much as they did, not realizing that he’s actually by far the most popular living former President.
Wile E. Quixote
@matoko_chan:
When you’re not spouting racist bullshit you’re absolutely fantastic at stating the obvious. Yeah, I got the Gunga Din reference, oh, and if you’d ever read the poem, and knew what you were talking about, and weren’t just making shit up you’d know that Din was the regimental bhisti or water carrier, not the regimental “beastie”.
Bella Q
@Wile E. Quixote: Merci for that. Having read the poem, aIong with other Kipling, was cackling as the faux insider outed itself. But, alas, I’m a frontpager nowhere. Sigh.
matoko_chan
@Wile E. Quixote: whatevah.
i think heard a nun read it out loud in grade school.
im not a Kipling fan…..now there WAS a classic racist. ;)
WEQ, you said exactly the same thing i did.
a cobo.
what is the difference?
linkage.
why does it bother you that im an insider on other blogs? That i want to learn other cultures and languages?
are you a western culture chauvinst or something?
matoko_chan
@Bella Q: lawl, like im going to take chong from a twilight fan.
ive never read the poem.
i did like Just So Stories though.
are you team jacob or team edward?