Jeffrey Lord, who thinks that Shirley Sherrod’s relative — who was beaten to death in 1945 by 3 men while handcuffed — wasn’t lynched because there was no hanging, three isn’t a mob and the Supreme Court said the men were “acting under color of law,” tops all that in this interview:
Lord says he doesn’t want Sherrod to lose her job, and urges his fellow conservatives to work toward winning over black voters. “Get out there and engage on race,” Lord said. “There’s no reason in the world that we can’t be getting the black vote. But it’s our job to separate black from left and talk about left and right.”
I hope all conservatives will heed his call to engage on race, using his subtle yet effective tactics.
NobodySpecial
I still wanna know if there’s a Jack Lord connection.
Mojotron
brother, you ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie…..
Zifnab25
That is some can-do spirit right there. Never fault Lord for failing to aim high while shooting himself in the foot.
dmsilev
Impressive. I’ve never seen anyone use the “when in a hole, deploy a second shovel” debating style.
dms
Emma
You know, there are easier ways to ge to Beijing…
El Cid
Funny enough, a lot of slavery and lynching and segregation were “under color of law”.
If you think there’s something wrong with that, you’re insulting our nation’s Confederate heritage.
Punchy
No reason, eh? Maybe the fact that you hate the President b/c he’s black, hate the Justice Department (Blackity Black Panthers, blackie!) cuz it’s run by a Black, and currently employ the most cartoonish RNC head ever, simply b/c he’s Black.
And no, no Black person can see thru any of this. None at all.
Napoleon
Lets call this guy for what he is, a cold stone racist.
PeakVT
There’s no reason in the world that we can’t be getting the black vote.
Except that racism disguised as Hooverism is the Republicans main message. Other than that, yeah, no reason.
valdivia
Wow. I mean. Seriously?
El Cid
@Napoleon:
Why, just because he’s defending the honor of several white people who beat a handcuffed man to death from the slur of lynching?
And that they did so under “color of law”?
What the hell is racist about that?
danimal
The DNC needs to pay him to keep him in the spotlight and conduct GOP minority outreach. Perhaps buy him some airtime on BET or something. This guy’s a goldmine.
steviez314
He might be defining “black vote” as tanned white people.
joe from Lowell
Yeah, get out there and engage on race! Go for it! Woo-hoo!
I’ve often commented that when a conservative tries to play a race card, it’s like a monkey has gotten hold of a field researcher’s cell phone, and is trying to mimic her gestures. Boop boop boop, why no magic voice come out?!?
Since the NAACP’s mild statement about the Tea Party, we’ve been treated to the sight of the monkeys beating themselves unconscious with the cell phone.
First the Tea Party Express director, then Breitbart, and now this Lord fellow.
Hee hee hee. Keep it up, clowns. Get out there and engage!
valdivia
@steviez314:
you mean Boehner or the crew from Jersey Shore?
Asshole
I call spoof.
Loneoak
It’s all fine and dandy if he was executed extra-judiciously in a racially motivated dispute over property by a group of armed white men … just as long as he wasn’t hanged publicly? I’m baffled why the definition of ‘lynch’ is even a matter of discussion here.
I’m increasingly convinced that conservative pundits come exclusively from the ranks of failed high school debaters. They seize upon the most irrelevant, inconsequential counterarguments they can find and hang on for dear life, yelling at you quickly until you just want to leave to room and let them win ‘the argument.’ “Nuh-huh, you used the word ‘lynch’ imprecisely, therefore all leftists are racist and Shirley Sherrod’s father was murdered by Barack Obama’s birth certificate and John Lewis’ future lies about being spit on by Teabaggers. Now all black people must vote for us.”
joe from Lowell
What’s happening here is this: a prominent white conservative male picked a public fight over race with an obscure black liberal female, and got his ass kicked. She has been elevated to the status of a national hero and role model, while he has been disgraced and denounced, even by most of his own side.
People like Jeffrey Lord cannnot live in a world where something like this happens, so they’re thrashing around, desperate to get her and to defend something like Breitbart’s point. They’ve gotten quite irrational, and lost all perspective, because what just happened is scaring the fertilizer out of them.
asdf
from the article – “For Lord, the key inconsistency is that Democratic southerners were to blame both for Hall’s murder, and for ultimately overturning the conviction of his killers, and yet, decades later, Sherrod sympathizes with the Democratic party.”
How did it come to pass that the “Democratic southerners” became Republicans in the interim?
It’s possible, I suppose, that Mr. Lord is just as ignorant and stupid as he appears to be but it may be that he is just trying to mislead people. We will be a better nation when those who make such silly arrangements are laughed out of the room.
nevsky42
@Napoleon: But remember, pointing out racists are racist makes us the racists.
Omnes Omnibus
@joe from Lowell:
Are you sure you want to go with prominent? Otherwise, I agree entirely.
Sheila
Lord is right, there is no “reason” why they can’t be getting the black vote. There are at least a thousand “reasons” why they can’t get the black vote.
MattF
“Get out there and engage on race.”
I’d never have come up with this myself. Reality is just… soooo weird.
Crashman
I love this simile. The image is just perfect.
El Cid
I like the way Lord depends on his head and his recollection to argue that “in my mind” lynching must have a rope and Southern white anti-Civil Rights Democrats didn’t become Republicans via the Southern Strategy because he “was there”.
So, fuck you all you people wif yer damn ‘faks’.
Nimm
And really, he’s going about it so well. There is a group of people in this country whose ancestors were, not too long ago, literally enslaved. When they were finally freed, they were not only penniless, but continued to suffer both overt and conspicuous, as well as institutional and tacit discrimination, violence (economic and physical), and bigotry.
The effects of that horror still reverberate and cause effects today, never minding the fact that we still haven’t purged the country of either institutional or overt discrimination – not by a long shot. So Mr. Lord clearly understands that the best way to make the GOP appealing to black voters is to lecture them on how they are just as racist, qualitatively and quantitatively.
Keep up the awesome work, Mr. Lord. You really get it!
Breezeblock
One wonders how many black people he’s ever interacted with? And I mean, besides the wait staff at the all-white country club he surely belongs to.
jayjaybear
Republicans always seem to want to ignore the last 40-odd years of race relations. You know, the years in which the relationship between the major political parties and blacks completely inverted as the Democrats began to champion civil rights and the old-school Southern Dems like Strom Thurmond fled the party for the Republicans. They like to forget about Reagan’s racism-tinged screeds against welfare queens (which were understood to be black). They desperately want to bury things like voter caging and the purging of voter rolls that inordinately targeted black voters.
As with all things Republican in the last 20 years or so, their major weapon in political rhetoric is projection. You’re pretty much guaranteed to get to the bottom of any nonsensical-sounding Republican argument by assuming that they’re guilty of whatever it is they’re accusing Democrat of.
joe from Lowell
@Omnes Omnibus:
Breitbart is prominent to them.
@Crashman:
Remember when the noise machine spent a week proclaiming that Ted Kennedy and Pat Leahy hated Catholics, to explain why they opposed some of Bush’s judicial nominees?
UR not doin it rite!
El Cid
Today’s liberal Democrats only focus on the negatives of slavery and segregation. They won’t even admit the positives.
Nimm
Also, Jeffrey Lord has an aol.com email address. In 2010.
So…you know.
Ash Can
@danimal:
Is he ever.
The guy’s completely clueless. He can’t help himself.
Bella Q
Astounding. I really don’t have enough adjectives to describe his comments. Just as I didn’t to describe his ridiculous and disgusting posts.
It seems he is actually delusional. Though I must note, there is no mention in any bio of a law degree. I looked because of his inversive misunderstanding of the term of art “under color of law” – I know plenty of really stupid attorneys, but I can’t think of any who’d stubbornly continue to get that quite so wrong.
joe from Lowell
Lord’s thesis is that the Democrats today are just like the white-supremacist Democrats of the Civil War era, and that they’ve just flip-flopped the races they pander to in their efforts to get votes.
Let’s set aside for a moment that fact that white people were a massive majority of the population of this country back then, while black people are now about 12%.
What Lord is saying is that everything the modern, civil-rights Democrats have done – the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the demolition of the old Jim Crow culture and laws, is just a bunch of racist pandering, no different than the overt racism and segregationism of the Democrats in the bad old days.
This is disgusting, zero-sum, racialist thinking.
demo woman
Enquiring minds want to know what Jeffy thinks about the tanning bed tax.
If the site were as savvy as Red State, there would be a link to little plastic shovels to send American Spectator.
Omnes Omnibus
@joe from Lowell:
If that doesn’t just encapsulate how skewed their world view is, I don’t know what does.
rachel
@Zifnab25:
He has to aim high for that ’cause he’s lower than a snake’s belly.
Admiral_Komack
Lord:
What a stupid motherfucker
Omnes Omnibus
@Bella Q:
Sadly, I do. I worked with a couple of them. Of course, one of them defined his existence by his status within the local chapter of the Federalist Society. The other believed that global warming was a conspiracy to impose International Soshulism. I was not unhappy to leave that job.
donquijoterocket
The main thing twits like this guy forget is that there once were entities like extremely conservative democrats, and liberal Republicans.The Liberal republicans have been hunted to extinction by their own party and the conservative Democrats became dixiecrats and eventually morphed into republicans still conservative often extremely so.
joe from Lowell
I don’t think it’s possible to be more delusional than Lord is in this interview.
After everything we’ve seen, this guy claims that it is people like Shirley Sherrod who are trying to scare people into thinking that people of another race are coming to get them.
Kryptik
This depresses me, if only because it’s another cog in the continued re-mainstreaming of naked racism, under the guise of the ‘good fight against reverse racism’.
I still haven’t seen any concrete proof that Breitbart has been truly blackballed and shunned fully for his continued stunts. I can’t see Mr. Lord paying any price here either sadly.
Bubblegum Tate
So I guess the trend now is for any wingnut blogs that actually apologized to Shirley Sherrod to take back said apology (and maybe even demand that Sherrod apologize to Breitbart).
I too stand mystified at how the GOP struggles with the black vote. I mean, geez, what possible reason could there be? Fuckin’ idiots.
Indie Tarheel
They just keep getting crazier and crazier. Their brains (as such) are just non-functional. They’re like Pakleds, only less refined.
daveNYC
That wouldf mess up their ‘Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia’ mindset where Democrats have always been racist DFH and Republicans have always been upstanding, patriotic, angels.
Shalimar
I don’t understand why they don’t get that “acting under color of law” when you murder someone makes it even more evil. It isn’t a mitigating factor.
matoko_chan
The title is so true.
conservatives have memetically selected for racists for the last half century. now racism is so ingrained in the GOP that they can’t switch it off, even when they need to…..take Mark Williams…he outed himself as a stone racist….consider Breitbart– evey word out of his mouth alienates more youth and minority voters.
he can’t shut up even when its having the opposite effect of what the TPM needs, to broaden appeal to youth, minority and college-educated voters.
Shalimar
@joe from Lowell:
You have some evidence that any of them ever denounced Breitbart? I don’t read right-wing websites, but everything I have seen linked suggests that there was a little tut-tutting about the editing and then the entire right-wing blogosphere shifted gears to blaming Obama for overreacting. And now they are pretending Breitbart’s part in it never happened.
selskies
If you guys want to feel sick, check out the comments on the story about the NJ immigrant beating on Yahoo. The comments over there have always been sub-Politico insane but the ones on that one are mind blowing. Those cretins and this guy walk hand in hand.
Scott P.
No, I’m sure he believes that all of those laws were passed by Republicans. I know plenty of conservatives who believe that.
Ash Can
It occurs to me that if the right in general is going to continue to milk the Sherrod issue for all the “we’re-not-racist-you are” it can still get out of it, now’s the time for Michael Steele to embezzle the (rest of the) RNC funds, buy himself a one-way ticket to Curacao, don shorts, shades, and a straw hat, and blow town. And for good measure, he should crash a GOP presser on his way to the airport — I can totally see him pantsing Boehner, setting McConnell’s tie on fire, and whizzing on Cantor’s shoes before dropping trou in front of the entire DC press corps. Nobody in the GOP would dare lift a finger in response.
Kryptik
@Shalimar:
Pretty much. Like always, right-wing lie peddling assholes get off scott free, because they protect their own.
I’m still convinced that three months later, Breitbart will still be allowed to converse and influence like he’s a ‘very serious person’ and all that anyone will remember of the story is that ‘Obama fired someone for being a black racist’.
kay
Oh, good, he’s back.
That only works if there’s a pro-extra judicial beating contingent, and Sherrod is firmly in the “anti”camp.
She doesn’t have to be neutral on lynching. That’s absurd. We’re opposed to that, and it’s unlawful.
She was trying to gin up the anti-lynching constituency?
Is there a debate on the Right on lynching?
He’s making this worse and worse.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Seconding everyone who says we need to keep this worm in the spotlight. Maybe if we all act up cranky Faux will give him a spot.
Gosh. I wonder why.
I wonder how more many times they’ll make this argument before they figure out it just pisses people off.
Ha ha ha ha! Asshole.
ellaesther
I hope all conservatives will heed his call to engage on race, using his subtle yet effective tactics.
You and me both, mister.
jibeaux
I’m still surprised he hasn’t talked about his black friend yet.
daveNYC
Um, what’s your point?
ellaesther
This might be a good time to bust out the How To Tell People They Sound Racist clip again:
http://www.illdoctrine.com/2009/06/allow_me_to_reintroduce_myself.html
(But mostly I suspect that Jeffery Lord is an asshole who has lost something vital and deep in his humanity, going FAR beyond being a garden-variety racist).
demo woman
It’s tempting to send Jeffy this
He needs to clean up after himself.
Pangloss
@Loneoak: Yes. I believe the formula for this reads (Distraction + Technicality) * Voter Supression = Mazooma In The Bank.
Tonybrown74
@PeakVT:
Disguised!?!? You give him way too much credit.
wilfred
Has Sherrod been re-instated yet?
kay
@daveNYC:
He’s my new favorite conservative. He loves this example, but it doesn’t make any sense.
He wants to make some broader pulled-out-of-his-ass point that Democrats are race-baiters, but he never should have started with his elaborate lynching analysis.
He can’t get there from here. He can’t bootstrap on lynching to get to race baiting, which is where he wanted to go all along.
Comrade Mary
That’s it. I’m moving all my retirement funds into popcorn futures.
r€nato
You know what works really well when trying to pick up a chick at the bar?
Point and laugh at the way she dresses. Insult her choices of previous boyfriends. Make cracks about her hair and what she likes to eat. Tell stereotyped jokes about women and PMS and how they can’t drive.
Then go home and whine about how you’re not getting any, and become a really misogynistic asshole over it. Lather, rinse, repeat.
asdf
This is so good it should be repeated,
“I don’t understand why they don’t get that ‘acting under color of law’ when you murder someone makes it even more evil. It isn’t a mitigating factor.” Shalimar
kommrade reproductive vigor
No, there’s a debate on what brown people should and should not be allowed to say. And really, Lord is just taking a common argument to the extreme. On Planet fReichtard “racism” can only describe a very limited and completely indefensible set of behaviors committed by whites against non-whites (and even then we’re not supposed to say it’s racism right away) OR non-whites hurting the fee-fees of whites. Lord had decided that if we can play with terms like racism, why not lynching?
Bless his tiny worm-ridden heart.
maya
r€nato
It’s frustrating to try to explain the patently obvious to these cretins…
…yet I hope that they never, ever ‘get it’.
p.a.
I may be naive, but I don’t see Lord as an idiot. I see him as a movement conservative: never back down, never admit error, keep the puke-funnel full and flowing, smearsmearsmear and smear some more. Shift the frame rightward.
jayjaybear
Republicans woo minority voters like kindergarten boys woo kindergarten girls: put frogs in their pockets, threaten to spit on them, and call them “Poopface”.
wilfred
The last time I heard the word used so much was when the Israelis were shreiking that their soldiers were ‘lynched’ by flotilla members. I don’t recall anyone on the right being offended by this completely over the top mangled appropriaion of an already overworked metaphor.
Right wing propaganda works a lot in metaphor and literal meaning, mainly in the sense that they determine who has the right, so to speak, to metaphor and who is condemned to literal meaning.
Culture of Truth
“Black, and to the left!”
“Black, and to the left!”
“Black, and to the left!”
pika
I was in a Ohio hotel this weekend, and a public space was showing CNN’s stupid, ginned-up “IS THE ‘BLACK NATIONAL ANTHEM’ STILL NEEDED” thing–and an elderly white couple were nearby, and their heads almost exploded. “Black national WHAT? THEY ARE DIVIDING THE COUNTRY. IT’S THEM WHO ARE DIVIDING THE COUNTRY!” They were more scared than angry. As TNC has said repeatedly, this black-people-as-problem (hello, W.E.B.) meme is deeply, deeply rooted, and it’s one of the most effective distractions out there.
Tom Hilton
@kay:
I do not think that word ‘flammable’ means what he thinks it means.
MattR
@r€nato:
About the only thing you forgot to add is that you stare at her chest for the entire conversation and then make a comment about how her boyfriend treats her like a sexual object.
@Culture of Truth: I’ve posted it before, but I am convinced that when conservatives see Obama they actually see this.
Tom Hilton
@jayjaybear: FTW.
El Cid
I hope he starts using the phrase “mud people” or “children of Ham”.
Nimm
It must really blow his mind that just 65-70 years ago we were dropping atomic bombs on Japan and now zomg! they’re like our friends. And what’s up with Germany??
Also, Lord must be very surprised when the sun comes up each morning, because didn’t he see it go down just 10 hours earlier??
roshan
This Lord person must have the same personality as the Memento guy, where his brain can’t save any new memories or recall them after certain amount of time. Either that or he has never read this one person, whatshisname, yeah, Jeffrey Lord. He is having a hard time relating to himself.
debbie
@ danimal:
It’s not too late to add him to the Steele/Breitbart traveling road show.
Dan
Wow. When I posted that it was time for another Serious Conservative to tell us how African-Americans keep voting against their interests, I had no idea they’d double-down and have the “not a lynching, just a legal race-motivated deadly beating” guy do it.
Pangloss
Difficult Senate confirmation hearing = lynching
Beaten to death by three White men while handcuffed = unfortunate incident
Svensker
@jayjaybear:
The only problem with that analogy is that kindergarten girls like that stuff — at least from my memories of being a k.g.
flukebucket
LMAO!
Tone in DC
You have to truly work at it to be that full of shit.
GregB
Shorter GOP:
Blacks haven’t earned the right to be politically incorrect.
Scott P.
I just had a long debate with a true wingnut friend who started out his angle by saying:
Do you know who’s responsible for passing the Civil Rights Act that you liberals are always boasting about? Republicans!
I pointed out that it was a bill signed into law by Democratic President Lyndon Johnson and that a larger number of Democrats voted for it.
He didn’t believe me.
When I sent him t he Wiki link, he never responded back.
jibeaux
@pika:
People are weird like that. For example, my first reaction is probably going to be, “I’ve never in my life heard of a black national anthem, and I bet if I asked random black people about it they wouldn’t have heard of it either, so I’m guessing it’s not really a major problem facing the country right now. I am willing to reconsider this position if I am at a ball game and someone busts into what sounds like a black national anthem.” I don’t really understand what makes people assign importance to something just because it was on CNN. They have to cover SOMETHING 24 hours a day and of course anything significant has to be “left there”…..
aimai
@Tone in DC:
So he has a work ethic? How nice.
aimai
Jay in Oregon
@MattR:
Personally, I thought it was this…
Malron
@matoko_chan: I’m pretty sure Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo is pleased as bunch that people are using “TPM” to describe the Tea Party.
I cringe when people describe the Tea Party as a “movement when in actuality its a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican National Convention funded by a Dick Armey. Or would that be an army of dicks? Same difference.
jibeaux
@GregB:
That’s the soft bigotry of low expectations right there. Now we’re at the point where we’ll say Republicans are responsible for passing something if they don’t filibuster it and just let the majority vote. I mean, we would, I guess, if they ever did. It’s one a them hypotheticals just at the moment.
kay
@wilfred:
What was funny here is he went to legal meaning, which as you know is different than literal meaning, and that’s what tripped him up. He started yesterday’s idiocy with “I read the case”. Somber and regretful and judicial. Just the case law, ma’am.
He did that because he needed something “serious and learned” to hang this bullshit on, because he can’t use history, because that doesn’t work. He admits it himself in today’s installment, where he says he has a “mental picture of a lynching”. Of course he does. We all do. That’s because it happened.
So he went to the legal definition of lynching, like an idiot.
Frank L
@ Tom Hilton
Just about everything that comes from the republicans makes me think of the immortal words of Inigo Montoya
Citizen_X
May I Godwin this thread, please?
“Ve did not commit genocide. Everyting ve did vas under color uf German law.”
Jay in Oregon
@Malron:
They did their job well, it seems…
Catsy
@Nimm:
Alright, that’s it. It’s one thing to be a racist assclown whose foot is so far down his throat that he wipes his ass with a shoehorn. But there’s just no excuse for having an aol.com email address unless you’re 80 years old or still need your kids to explain the difference between your left and right mouse buttons.
Culture of Truth
you sure that’s nor lol.com?
rachel
What, “You killed my father; prepare to die”?
jetan
“Viddy well, my brother. Viddy well.”
BC
How soon we forget the travails of the Democratic Party! The 1964 convention was quite confrontational, with the Freedom Democratic Party from Mississippi going to the credentials committee with the claim that since their delegates were chosen in accordance with the party’s rules, while the regular party’s delegates were chosen using the same segregation rules as had always been used, they should be seated as the Mississippi delegation. Remember Fanny Lou Hamer and her appearance at the credentials committee? That made me a Democrat (I wasn’t eligible to vote in 1964, but that convention convinced me I wanted to be with the Freedom Democratic Party!) This is one of the events that J. Lord seems to have let slipped from his memory – white delegates from Mississippi and Alabama would not sign the pledge to support Johnson against Goldwater that year, and left the convention. This was the beginning of the white flight to GOP, particularly to Goldwater who, while possibly not being racist himself, certainly played to the sensibilities and sensitivities of the white southerners of his time. So when he talks of pandering – Goldwater and every GOP nominee since 1964 has been pandering with the understanding that they would not enforce civil liberties. Which is why the 2nd Amendment is the most important to conservatives (except in the case of Bobby Hall, who was beaten to death because he had the audacity to assert his 2nd Amendment right in a court of law in the 1940s),
cmorenc
We can only WISH that the majority of the portion of the electorate that’s not either already irredeemably committed to turn out and vote Gooper/TeaBagger or else progressive/democratic was paying much, if indeed ANY attention to the Lloyds in the Gooper/conservative camp, and the vile craziness of what they’re saying. We’ve had a hard enough time getting the media to give serious attention to the serial deliberate race-baiting deceptions of Breitbart, rather than focusing largely on the mishandling of the Sherrod incident by the Obama administration. True, Ron Paul did momentarily create a national gift by committing several astonishingly tone-deaf gaffes in a short period of time (even for Kentucky) that gained considerable national media play and analysis, but the GOP has been successful afterward in putting a muzzle on him (at least enough to remove him from the national spotlight).
MOST PEOPLE whose vote is “persuadable” (both in terms of who they’d vote for if they turned out, and whether they’ll bother to turn out at all)…are tuned far more closely to the way the national economic situation affects them and those they know personally. They’re not tightly tuned into the “facts” of any matter beyond that, and stuff like Breitbart is background atmospherics, not their central focal point. In fact, a central part of the GOP’s strategy in the 2010 elections will be to attempt to actively depress turnout in any sector of the electorate not committed or strongly leaning their direction, and you can expect them to create plenty of distractions intended NOT to attract any further voters in their direction, but mainly to disgust and turn off as many swing voters as possible.
b-psycho
@Malron:
That would explain the increase in trolls over there…
Tom Levenson
@Bella Q: Also it’s worth noting that he gets the mob stuff wrong. In an email exchange posted in the TPM comment thread, Lord writes, “In the Screws case there were three – three – law officials charged. Three is not defined as a mob, which is a “large crowd.” No mob, no mob action.”
He looked up mob in a dictionary. Not a legal dictionary, just Random House Webster’s College Dictionary.
In law, of course, critical elements of a crime are explicitly defined. I can’t claim I looked up the entire range of state and federal statutes that bear on this — but I did check, and found that in the South Carolina Criminal Code, for example, which specifies lynching as a named crime in first and second degree variants, a mob is defined as ““an assemblage of two or more persons, without color of law, gathered together for the premeditated purpose of committing violence upon another.”
Lord is not just a moral scumbag and race-baiting operative; he’s wrong on the simple details too.
Indie Tarheel
@pika:
I saw that bit of tripe too. Can’t say that question was first and foremost in my mind, hadn’t even heard the song in years; and yet, it was a chryon-worthy segment for Fox-lite?
kommrade reproductive vigor
Anyone remember this little gem?
(Hint: Obama talking about the part his great-uncle played in WWII. You may remember it as the week Holocaust denial was all the rage.)
Lord is doing the same thing, so expect an outbreak of white supremacist types disguised as concern trolls in 5…4…
QuaintIrene
I have no idea what Lord looks like, but when I read those words, I could just see them in a word balloon coming out of Johnny Depp dressed as the Mad Hatter.
ruemara
@El Cid:
What were the positives? A chance to work on your tan while in the fields? Quality time with whatever slave owner found you attractive and then bearing your unacknowledged child who could and often was, sold away from you, never to be seen again? Ah, perhaps the chance to develop a cooking style based on eating whatever parts of animals the master and his family, his employees and every other white person who could call dibs didn’t want. I guess that makes up for everything.
Midnight Marauder
@kay:
I have to say, I’ve been somewhat amazed at how open Republicans are being about this whole “Democrats/black people are the real racists” business. I had a long conversation with a friend from Indiana and it was filled with this kind of (what I am now guessing to be standard) wingnut propaganda:
“Lying about all of us being racists.” Just extraordinary, that someone could dismiss the last 60 years of race relations in this country as a lie being propagated by the Democratic Party. Because black people are just a passive, monolithic entity just waiting for conservatives to give them the green light to “join in the effort.”
I just love how the thing that makes it difficult to attract blacks to the Republican Party is because they are being bribed. Clearly, there is no way that black people could be individual human beings who have memories of seeing actual institutional racism being enforced against family members and loved ones, nor is it possible for them to see through the race-baiting propaganda and understand the modern Republican Party for the hate factory it actually is.
Nope. When black people shoot each other, they blame it on white people.
These people do not exist in the real world any longer.
Comrade Dread
Please, please, black people, let’s not argue and bicker about who lynched who or who burned crosses on whose lawns.
We can all come together and agree that that Barack Obama is a dangerous n- uh, soshalist who wants to take all our money and giving it to minori- ew, uh, he wants to do something something with it. Bad. Thing. Welfare. AHHH!
But, uh, it really is in your best interest to vote Republican, I mean, imagine if you won the lottery and got into the top 1% income bracket. We would totally be on your side.
ellaesther
This conversation reminded me of something I read on The Root awhile back, by Kim McLarin, about our need for a sociological imagination when we talk about race.
So I posted about it: http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/shirley-sherrod-and-our-need-for-a-sociological-imagination/
A sociological imagination — or, in other words, the understanding that the story is not about me.
Ash Can
@ruemara: You know that was snark, right? Just checking.
ellaesther
@QuaintIrene: It’s my impression, however, that I would be more likely to want to spend an evening with the Mad Hatter.
ruemara
@Ash Can:
Absolutely. You do know some nutwingers have actually said things like this? I just wish someone would enumerate the bennies.
Tone in DC
@Catsy: Oh, YES.
Tone in DC
@aimai: Good one.
PurpleGirl
That man is just too dumb to live. He must not have a brain.
rachel
@ruemara: Well… Slavery did help broaden America’s genetic diversity.
You meant the positives for the slaves? Never mind.
Brachiator
@p.a.:
No, I think you’ve pretty much got it nailed. One responder to Lord’s original post insisted that it would be an inexcusable sign of weakness to apologize or to admit a mistake, because the political cost would be too great.
People like Lord will even risk alienating people who otherwise agree with him. He is betting that there is absolutely nothing that he could ever say that would be so revolting that it would make fellow conservatives reconsider their allegiance to the cause.
WereBear
@Comrade Mary: LOL!
Legalize
One of the most effective ways to engage the blacks on issues of race is to lecture an older black woman that the brutal extra-judicial murder of a relative, at the hands of only 3 police officers, was done “under the color of law,” was not conducted by hanging, and was therefore not a “lynching.”
El Cid
@ruemara: Exactly! New cuisines, great styles of music, poetry — who wants to focus on all the negatives of slavery.
I’m not even sure that when libruls use the word “slavery” it is the right word to use, since that only applies to people in the Bible.
MattR
@El Cid: Hey, don’t forget that a fraction of one percent gets paid millions of dollars to play a sport of some sort. So that pretty much evens everything out.
feebog
I’m reading the latest James Lee Burke novel, Glass Rainbow. Some of his comments and observations about race releations in the South (most of the action is in SW Louisiana) are truely educational. I think I have learned more about southern culture and history from these detective novels than any history book I have read.
debbie
And yet no mention of the Republican propensity for class-baiting?
TooManyJens
@kay:
There is. It’s called “everyone who pipes up in favor of the cops in police brutality cases.”
p.a.
Maybe there should be a ‘Godwin’s Law’ or ‘Poe’s Law’ for this. No comment, no matter how racist, can hurt a conservative commentator or conservatism among conservatives.
Corollary: Pointing out racism exposes the racism in the accuser.
I’m sure people her can improve on this original formulation.
PTirebiter
IMHO- TNC has reduced the problem to its essence.
Mary
@r€nato:
Sadly, there’s an entire cottage industry based on this very idea. Apparently it actually works on some women.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=negging
Brachiator
@p.a.:
I like it. I’m not quite sure if it is ready to be elevated to a law. But it certainly qualifies as the Jeffrey Lord Principle, or informally Lord’s Prayer.
asdf
I dunno, p.a., that sounds pretty good.
“Maybe there should be a ‘Godwin’s Law’ or ‘Poe’s Law’ for this. No comment, no matter how racist, can hurt a conservative commentator or conservatism among conservatives.”
Sounds like a go to me.
asdf
p.a.’s law
Tom Hilton
@Malron: For nearly a year now, I’ve been referring to them collectively as the Dick Armey.
PTirebiter
@feebog: I’ve had the same experience with Burke. I’ve found his takes on pride, poverty and the raw bone meanness in some poor southern whites to be equally enlightening.
Svensker
@El Cid:
Also, too, if their ancestors hadn’t been forcibly brought to the New World, they would now be living in Africa wearing bones in their noses and starving and stuff. A number of conservatives have helpfully pointed this out. Just let “Ms.” Sherrod refudiate THAT!
maus
@joe from Lowell:
Especially where he can’t use the word “uppity”.
@Svensker: This is what teabaggers actually believe. We’re better off having meddled in their cultures, and it’s their fault alone that areas of Africa are so terrible.
Jay in Oregon
@Midnight Marauder:
So their argument is “We could get those n*ggers to vote Republican if they weren’t so lazy, greedy, and stupid?”
Words fail me…
xian
@Dan:
re
to be fair, doesn’t our side wring its hands a lot wondering why poor whites keep voting against their interests?