I have a goddamn headache and can’t take much more of today. Fortunately, anibundel flagged this nugget of racist Romney bullshit at ABLC:
Dear Mitt Romney,
I am half British. My father is a first generation immigrant–but that’s ok, because he’s the right kind of immigrant with a public school education. Our family goes across the pond as often as we can afford it.
But when I see this:
I want to fall through the floor.
Do you think they’re stupid over there? No, they hear you, just the same as the rest of us. Do you have any idea how it was to be over their in 2005, and finding oneself in pubs having to explain why in gods name we re-elected Bush? The last thing in the world I want next summer is to find myself over there having to explain YOU.
In short, if you’re going to bait for the benefit of the racist old white people who are scared of the second decade of the 21st century they’ve woken up to, please do here at home, quietly, where the rest of the world can’t hear you. You’re EMBARRASSING me.
Sincerely yours,
anibundel
I just can’t.
Baud
Reminds me of that scene in My Cousin Vinny when the prosecutor is talking to the jury about “our” ancestors in England, and they show the face of the AA women in the jury box.
Good movie.
El Cid
‘No, no more of this ‘ooga booga’ stuff, no no. In a Romney presidency, we’ll help our brothers and sisters across the Atlantic deal with their Mau Mau problem.’
Mr Stagger Lee
Didn’t George Patton nearly get fired from the US Army for suggesting Anglo-American world rule in WWII? But that is OK since by mid-century China rules the world and Brazil the Western Hemisphere.
Litlebritdifrnt
I am 100% British and I am constantly having to explain to my family back in the old country why I would continue to live in a country that would let a bunch its population die due to lack of health insurance while spending a gazillion dollars on the latest bomb. Why someone who was shot indiscriminately at a movie theater is now facing $2 million dollars in medical bills that will totally ruin them, FOR LIFE. They just do not understand it. I really don’t want to have to explain to my family why a country would elect someone such as Mitt Romney. It is more than I can stand.
halteclere
Suck this, french-speaking Normans!
General Stuck
Try not let it get to you ABL. Just stupid white people being stupid. with hateful words from the tory rag Telegraph.
Obama up six in new NBC poll. They are surrounded.
bago
Does this understanding involve the Declaration of Independence or that whole 1812 incident?
BGinCHI
Is “Anglo-Saxon relations” where you do it from behind?
Alec
@halteclere: Not to mention the German family imported to sit on the throne.
jwb
Peak Wingnut is a lie, but it’s now another step closer.
General Stuck
@BGinCHI:
It’s where black Arthur whips out his sword, and the blue eyed hordes scatter like scalded dogs.
Raven
@Litlebritdifrnt: Local wingut Paul Braun brought a british woman to his health care town halls and she railed and railed against the system in UK.
Patricia Kayden
@BGinCHI: Okay, that was funny!
Guess my being born in England doesn’t make my Black behind “Anglo Saxon”. Wonder if Romneybot 2.0 even knows that many parts of England are multicultural.
Brian R.
@BGinCHI:
Is “Anglo-Saxon relations” where you do it from behind?
Missionary, with a stiff upper lip.
BGinCHI
@Raven: Was it Margaret Thatcher?
BGinCHI
@General Stuck: There has to be a Monty Python joke in there somewhere.
BGinCHI
@Brian R.: Right. Lie back and think of pre-conquest England.
Raven
@BGinCHI: I dunno, I deleted the video I shot after a year. That’s the town hall that was at the VFW and some vet in a wheelchair whined that the protesters hadn’t “earned” the right to talk that way to Braun.
bago
Related:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/assassins-creed-3-travels-to-new-york-after-the-great-fire-of-1776/#ooid=ExbW5kNTqhrAWSMRpz2rnAw0a12mJ_g4
Waynski
@Litlebritdifrnt: I imagine it must be like an ex-pat in Germany circa 1937 trying to explain to his countrymen that the Germans will come to their senses.
Anoniminous
What an asshole.
Redshift
And also note the mention of “Winston Churchill’s bust,” a golden oldie that will probably be a nice dog-whistle to the wingnuts, and just cause puzzlement for anyone else. Which is a shame, because if it registered enough for anyone to publish an “explanation” of it, it would be up there with “the Australian foreign minister hopes I win because he thinks America is in decline.” It’s completely nutty, but the one good thing is that the fact that he’s still having to trot out these BS wingnut memes tells me he still feels he’s on shaky ground with them.
Brian R.
@Patricia Kayden:
Wonder if Romneybot 2.0 even knows that many parts of England are multicultural.
Nah, I bet he thinks London looks just like Salt Lake City.
But publicize these comments over there, and I bet he’ll find out quickly how wrong he was upon his arrival.
Baud
@BGinCHI:
The Knights who say Ni-CLANG?
pseudonymous in nc
Mighty white of you, Mittens.
@Raven:
He did a fucking good job of cherry-picking that tree. I’m sure that there are more than a few British expats in Athens because of UGA, and they’ll sing a very different tune. And I can say for sure that there are a few UGA faculty who’ve spent study time in the UK and will agree.
Another Halocene Human
@efgoldman: Unless they’re Irish.
Even after Ted Kennedy created the JFK Memorial Immigration Rulez Exception For Mickeys one of my clan STILL got stopped at the border.
(He crossed illegally, in a blizzard. Nobody seems to be onto the snowback flood t’kin’ er jawrbs, because you know Irish work unpaid overtime for less than union rates!!!!)
jl
IIRC, when the Brit Royals addressed the Commonwealth, they always emphasized Anglo Saxon ‘relations’, amirite? None of this commie garbage about equal rights under law, fair play, solidarity, shared values, democracy. No sir.
Rammed that Anglo Saxon right down their throats (But, I do not suggest is what Mitt means by ‘relations’ in case I be accused of incivility.)
Actually, I remember from old profs who grew up in the Commonwealth, it was the commie stuff that endeared those rich old farts to their quasi subjects. At least some of them. People from South Asia were did not have such fond memories.
handy
Is Anglo-Saxon relations the new Judeo-Christian values?
Raven
@pseudonymous in nc: Yea and Paul’s posse would love to hear from them.
cmorenc
Mitt Romney would restore “Anglo-Saxon relations” between Britain and America because that Ni*CLANG Kenyan in the White House is inherently incapable of doing either the Angle or the Saxon part, any more than Angles or Saxons can passably dance to jungle music.
HOLY CRAP Romney and the GOP aren’t even trying to use dog whistles, they’re using trumpets and trombones to play race baiting songs.
beltane
I don’t have a single drop of Anglo-Saxon blood but I do have family members who died fighting for the United States of America which is more than can be said for Mitt “My great-grandpa moved to Mexico so he could have sex with lots of teenage girls” Romney.
pseudonymous in nc
@Patricia Kayden:
He’s probably going to spend the Olympic part of his visit in the horse-dancing venues, where “multicultural” means “rich” and “very rich”, and don’t look like the bit of East London hosting most of the Games. (I was thumbing magazines the other day, and saw a piece in Town & Country on the young generation of American equestrians, and while it was a somewhat diverse crowd, what they had in common was multi-millionaire parents. One of Loud Obbs’ daughters got featured.)
SiubhanDuinne
@halteclere:
I fart in your general direction.
jl
@Brian R.:
“Nah, I bet he thinks London looks just like Salt Lake City.”
Clearly, Mitt is getting out and meeting the people. You can tell.
General Stuck
It’s all about the commerce, chumming the Tampa Bay with baited hooks to republican fantasy.
valency
From the telegraph article:
In remarks that may prompt accusations of racial insensitivity, one suggested Mr Romney was better placed to understand the ties between the countries than Mr Obama, whose father was from Africa. “We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have.”
Christ, this isn’t even dog-whistling any more. why doesn’t Romney just come right out and say Obama is a big ol’ spearchucking nigger who can’t be expected to understand the white man’s superior ways. Fuck you, Romney, fuck you, anonymous Romney “advisers” — and BTW, why are all press spokesmen now routinely granted anonymity by the press these days? What ever happened to standing by what you said? I know Obama’s people do this too, but it’s particularly sickening when it’s used to spread crap like this.
bemused
Anyone read the related Romney links on the same page as the Anglo-Saxon article? One was about one of Romney boys doing his Mormon door to door in England when he had bad stomach pains. English doc supposedly said his symptoms could be colon cancer but he’d have to wait 6 weeks to get them plus more trashing of the UK health care system. I have a hunch that Romney lying is hereditary.
Another link was to a couple of shady money UK guys who invested in Bain Romney ventures.
cmorenc
I sure hope in the first debate on foreign policy, the moderator directly asks Mitt Romney exactly what part of “Anglo-Saxon” relations between Britain and America have been missing under Obama that he maintains need to be restored? Why was the allegedly missing part “Anglo-Saxon” Gov. Romney?
Anibundel
I thought Children sticking their fingers in Muppet holes would the dirtiest thing I would write about today. Then Romney said “Anglo Saxon Relations.”
True story.
Anibundel
I thought Children sticking their fingers in Muppet holes would the dirtiest thing I would write about today. Then Romney said “Anglo Saxon Relations.”
True story.
handy
Hey at least this Mitt lackey didn’t call Obama French. That would be beyond the pale.
Mnemosyne
@bago:
Fun fact about the War of 1812 — of the American sailors who were forcibly taken from an American ship during the confrontation between the Chesapeake and the Leopard that outraged American public opinion and precipitated the war, two of the three were African-American.
Just one of those hidden parts of early American history that they forget to tell you about.
beltane
@bemused: Uninsured Americans experiencing stomach pains are told to STFU and stop annoying their betters. Maybe if they’re lucky some kind conservative will croon “so sad, too bad” but that’s the best they can hope for.
runt
I’m guessing Romney was for the Norman invasion before he was against it.
Svensker
@valency:
Fixeded that fer ya.
Citizen_X
Jeez, Mittens, why don’t you just go ahead and talk about our proper “Aryan” relations with northern Europeans while you’re at it?
Comrade Mary
@Brian R.:
So that reminds me of an old MAD Magazine movie parody it took me a while to understand when I was a kid.
In “Midnight Wowboy”, our hero is forced to make a living in New York City by, umm, kissing — yeah, KISSING rich older women. But he suddenly has performance issues and can’t pucker up, so one of his clients has to talk him through it, asking him to imagine lemons, REALLY sour lemons, and what it would feel like to bite into them. The cartoonist set up a trio of panels showing the guy’s lips starting to quiver and glisten and throb and grow until he’s able to snog again.
(I think this is the single filthiest thing I’ve ever written here. And that’s saying something.)
Oh, my — I just found the panels! OK, this is the filthiest thing I’ve ever linked to.
pragmatism
special relationship is special?
concern troll is concerned?
department of redundancy department?
El Cid
I’m glad the adviser cleared up that the special relationship was special, as opposed to general. One would have to have a generic special relationship, or an unspecified special relationship, or even an entirely conventional special relationship.
Amir Khalid
I think this was pointed out in a previous thread: by suggesting that Anglo-Saxon descent is the mark of Britishness, Romney has effectively called most of its current citizenry, including the Royal Family, un-British.
Mnemosyne
And speaking of who’s “Anglo-Saxon” and who’s not, I would love to first show these jackholes pictures of my husband’s friend’s blond, blue-eyed little boy, and then ask them to pick the child’s father out of a photo line-up.
I’m guessing the very last one they would choose would be the kid’s mixed-race (AA and white) actual father, and yet that’s how the genes lined up once they finished their square dance.
(The kid really is adorable, and I’m not just saying that because he immediately decided I was his new best friend. I kept calling him “Harpo,” though I’m not sure what his parents think of his new nickname.)
Narcissus
@Anibundel: We haven’t even begun to discuss Winston Churchill’s bust yet.
beltane
@Citizen_X: Give him time, his trip is just getting started. Maybe he will try to pander to Angela Merkel by giving her a Nazi salute, which I’m sure would make her nostalgic for George Bush’s gropings.
Klaus Kinky
@Comrade Mary:
I don’t even have to click the link: “Think of pickles. Think of lemons. Think of pickled lemons.”
KXB
@BGinCHI:
It’s where the woman lays there and thinks about the Queen.
MonkeyBoy
@halteclere:
I’m currently reading American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. One thing that Colin Woodard mentions is that the leaders of Tidewater and the Deep south considered themselves aristocrats descended from the Norman conquerors of 1066. They labeled the Yankees as descendants of the inferior Anglo-Saxon race – people who were near mud-people who needed Normans to rule over them.
Comrade Mary
@efgoldman: Not that sheltered a life. When I was even younger than when I read that parody, I was given free rein to go through my Dad’s stack of Playboy magazines. I was an avid reader — literally nothing in the house was forbidden — and I started reading them because hey, Little Annie Fannie was a comic strip. So yeah, I read Playboy starting around age 6, and not just for the articles.
But that Drucker illustration is a bit shocking given the context, some 30+ years before we saw tv ads for something-that-rhymes-with Niagara.
Klaus Kinky: Well-named and well-done.
AA+ Bonds
LOL
El Cid
@MonkeyBoy: A different way of viewing some of what Woodard points out: Think about British and Dutch and French colonialism in the Caribbean, and Africa, and other parts of the world.
And how they ran things, the mass production of primary products whether crops or mineral wealth, dependent upon imported slaves when geography dictated (i.e., African slaves in the Caribbean and South America) and colonial structures of forced labor when it didn’t (areas under imperial control in Asia or Africa).
We think of Pilgrims et al making their way to America from England to found colonies.
In the Southern part of the US, it’s a lot more sensible to look at it as the Northward extension of British colonialism and imperialism from the Caribbean, such as the extension of Barbados sugar plantation slave lavor systems to, say, South Carolina.
If you think about a large section of this nation as formed by the extension of British Afro-Caribbean imperialist production to these territories rather than some sort of Founding Father myth, even to the degree of it being a thought experiment about themes rather than a socio-historical model, suddenly things look a lot different.
AA+ Bonds
I mean,
I mean,
shit, son
El Cid
Obama’s just always thinking about those African immigrants who ruined everything for so many good Americans who were just minding their business, getting paid well for growing and harvesting their tobacco and cotton and rice crops, what when all these jobless Africans showed up and offered to work for free, taking all their jobs.
Klaus Kinky
@Comrade Mary:
My older brother had a collection of classic MADs from mid-’60s to late ’70s, which my younger self devoured (and apparently memorized).
Can’t quite remember the “punchline” to that particular group of panels, but it was something like, “I’m so grateful, I’m gonna give you a 20% discount!”
You don’t have to tell me how sad it is that I remember this 30+ years later. :-)
Anya
The Queen will not be amused!
AA+ Bonds
The real LOL is that Romney is part of a British Israelite spinoff cult
SiubhanDuinne
I’m getting a lot of ads for Park City Utah real estate, and Liberty University (“Training Champions for Christ”).
Can someone make it stop, please?
NonyNony
I’m beginning to think that Romney and some of his advisors don’t realize that some of these things are dog-whistles.
I mean I believe the man is fully capable of using racism to fuel his campaign, but stepping on his dick like this makes me wonder. The whole “relations cooled between US and UK because of Obama” garbage was never based on any kind of fact – it’s always been a racist joke. That since Obama isn’t a WASP he can’t relate to people in the UK. To think this kind of thing is some kind of real slight to the people in the UK you have to believe that the majority of the UK are actually WASP. And that there aren’t any, you know, folks of Irish or Scottish or Welsh or Jewish or Indian or Pakistani or Afghan or ANY-FUCKING-WHEREVER-THE-FUCKING GODDAMN BRITISH EMPIRE spread to over their couple centuries of conquest. You know – that FUCKING EMPIRE THAT THE SUN NEVER SET ON!
So you really have two choices – I suppose Romney could be over there “scoring points” with the base by talking smack to the feriners the way he did with the folks at the NAACP. Or he doesn’t really actually understand that that whole thing was a racist joke for the Republican base.
I’m really starting to think that Romney is like a College Libertarian Republican who hasn’t yet figured out that “States Rights” doesn’t mean what he thinks it means.
beltane
@El Cid: I agree with much of this comment. Perhaps, in retrospect, it would have been preferable to let the South secede and instead use covert operations (instigation of slave rebellions, etc,) to destabilize the Confederate regime as we have done with other countries to our south.
jl
@El Cid: Wasn’t it indigo and rice, at first? And then, the cochineal boom and bust? And then we ‘Anglo Saxons’ tried out Native American slaves first, but they showed the discourtesy of dying off too quickly to be profitable. And, they were darn good at running off into the woods, for some derned reason.
We were down on our luck and then the Africans suckered us, is what it was.
Edit: In other words, we was swindled.
Edit edit: I am trying to build up my Romnified Anglo Saxon cred here, since many of us are apparently ‘on notice’. Which reminds me, ditch the bagpipe CDs, pronto. (But they will pry the Irish folk music out of my cold dead hands)
gbear
…and I was just getting used to being part of an Afrro-Saxon relationship. I was quite enjoying it.
kay
Just saw a new Obama ad on Romney’s statements on contraception and abortion during the primary; outlaw abortion, end Planned Parenthood, end Title X funding, etc.
I’m pleased what Romney said during that panderfest of a primary is going to come back and bite him in the ass with independent female voters.
It’s an O campaign ad, too, not an outside group.
AA+ Bonds
I’m calling ‘Yes Men’ on this
MonkeyBoy
@El Cid: Have you read Woodard’s book? He explicitly states that while Tidewater was founded by Cavilers from England, the Deep South was founded from the slave owning culture of Barbados. He also mentioned that Hamilton came from Barbados and regarded the US as a cow to be milked – to explain some of the financial scams he was involved in.
AA+ Bonds
Not that Mitt Romney and his people aren’t hideous racists, mind you, because they are hideous racists
beltane
@NonyNony: No, he knows what he is doing. The Mormon church he grew up in was a deeply racist organization which, as AA+ Bonds mentions above, began as a British Israelite spinoff cult. Some people are able to transcend the white supremacist belief system they were raised in; there is no evidence that Mitt Romney is one of those people.
West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.)
What are the odds that this serial liar will actually get elected POTUS? It seems that most polls show Obama with a lead (especially in a number of swing states), but then Romney seems to suddenly be within a point or so again even though he’s not done or said anything especially productive. Are there truly enough uninformed knuckleheads in this country (and enough lazy-ass Dems who will sit on their hands and watch it happen)? Flying Spaghetti Monster on a cracker!
cat48
This article just makes me furious. White Mormons are still racist it appears. He can shove the Churchill Bust up his ass! I could be available to help if need be. “An African father” unlike his children who just have a DICK for a father.
AA+ Bonds
I mean “Anglo-Saxon” and then
come on, this has to be someone HAVING A LAUGH
Baud
@AA+ Bonds:
The way Romney’s going, their response will be Lebensraum.
Ash Can
@beltane:
Yep. I have a feeling that by the time he’s done with this little adventure of his, the entire world will have a very good idea of just who and what Mitt Romney is (and will be fervently praying that not enough Americans are brain-fucking-dead stupid to vote for him).
Randy P
@Klaus Kinky: Would I be doing you a favor if I pointed out that you can now get 50 years of MAD on DVD? I believe it even includes the folding covers, which I always tried to puzzle out before folding but never could.
Randy P
@Ash Can: 45% of the public is paying no attention and will make their decision the morning of election day based on the last-minute ad blitz.
Linda Featheringill
Is a special relationship one that you have with a special friend?
[Very old phrase. Still used?]
Amir Khalid
About the bust of Churchill: I seem to recall that it was a loaner, and was due to be returned anyway. Do I have that right?
beltane
@Ash Can: Lets just hope he doesn’t start a war while visiting Israel.
bk
@MonkeyBoy: Actually, he was born in Nevis, and later spent part of his childhood in St. Croix.
El Cid
@MonkeyBoy: I haven’t read the book yet, but I’ve read some of his essays, and the colonial background of Southern plantation economies isn’t a new topic — hell, people entranced with Charleston culture will point out to you where all the Barbadian elite founded houses are.
Trust me, there aren’t too many people who have a world-oriented view of, say, British imperial conquest who get confused when they look at the South and its expansion of Caribbean and Latin American production.
We get confused, they don’t.
However, next time somebody gets all excited about the astoundng nobility of the British campaign against the Atlantic slave trade, you should maybe point out that such was no longer in the interest of British big money — what with increasingly colonializing Africa itself, they didn’t have to fetch African slaves across the Atlantic; they had them all right there.
NonyNony
@beltane:
I get that Romney might actually be racist (I’m not going to get into the religious aspects of this – I’ve known plenty of Mormons inside and outside of Utah and they tend to be no more or less racist on average than a cross-section of other white folk of other religions. Remember that the bulk of conservative Christianity hasn’t been a sterling paragon of racial egalitarianism for the most part either, especially in the US).
No, I get that he could very well be an unrepentant and ugly racist. But this is just nonsensical. He looks like a moron to the folks in the UK – best case they think he’s another Bush, worst case he gets a bunch of Scottish/Irish/Welsh/Pakistani/Indian/etc. MPs appearing on TV and angrily pointing out that the UK isn’t just an “Anglo-Saxon” nation and that Mitt Romney is an idiot.
There’s no point to it. Even as a way to wave his freak flag for the folks back at home it’s so pointless. It isn’t like sticking a thumb in the eye of the NAACP (which his base considers “standing up to The Man” if you can believe it), it’s just idiotic.
Which is why I wonder if he doesn’t actually believe that Obama has somehow harmed relations with the UK, instead of understanding that that whole narrative is just a racist joke.
Linda Featheringill
@Amir Khalid:
Short answer: Yes.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/4623148/Barack-Obama-sends-bust-of-Winston-Churchill-on-its-way-back-to-Britain.html
AA+ Bonds
Churchill was an odious genocidal racist and busts of his likeness should be smashed in the streets by people of all colors
El Cid
EEEEEEEK!
AA+ Bonds
Seriously, fuck Winston Churchill
beltane
@NonyNony: Romney, like most of the Beltway media, thinks that the average American is an unwashed, semi-illiterate yokel and he feels that idiotic jingoism will appeal to them. It will certainly appeal to some of them, but the obvious contempt Romney has for the very people who will be voting for him is truly amazing and not something we’ve ever seen before.
YAFB
Even better, Ann Romney’s Welsh, and Mitt’s campaign’s been playing that link up for all it’s worth (not a lot, I’d guess).
Try going into a pub in Porthcawl and calling a Welshman “Anglo-Saxon” …
El Cid
These ungrateful Negroes never would have had all their savage jazz “music” had they not been able to use the Saxon-phones they had been given by the Anglo-Saxes of the Tenor and Alto regions of England.
jl
@bk: And Hamilton came to the US at 15 or 16, a bastard lad sponsored by some rich mentors. So, yeah, I suppose he saw the US as a cow to be milked, or as an escape from an obscure hellhole. Not sure when Hamilton became fanatically anti slavery, but I remember reading his memories of life in the Caribbean, and I sensed some disenchantment. If you call disgusted descriptions of the injustice and cruelty of the slavery and class hierarchy ‘disenchantment’.
I give him a pass on miking the US for all it was worth.
Hamilton was half mad Dane ship captain, I think, and other half low class Englishwoman. Not sure if any Anglo Saxon pedigree.
karen marie
@Patricia Kayden: One in six people in the UK is not what Mitt would consider Anglo-Saxon.
NonyNony
@Randy P:
That would be surprising consider that only about 62% of the voting-eligible population bothered to turn out to vote in 2008, the largest turnout we’ve had in decades, I might add. Of that I’d guess that roughly 45% are committed Republican votes and about the same are committed Democratic votes.
So in truth about 6-7% of the population (if we have an election similar to 2012) will be making their decision the morning of election day based on last-minute ad blitzes. Roughly 56% of the population has already made up their minds about who they’re voting for (and just need to be motivated enough to bother getting to the polls), and somewhere around 40% of the voting eligible population will spend election day not voting.
MikeBoyScout
Excellent!
ABL
@BGinCHI: Hilarious.
Klaus Kinky
@Randy P:
I did know that, but thanks. Heard that the scans weren’t as high quality as they might have been, though haven’t checked this out for myself. Besides, I still have a bit of trauma from the time I found out that Mom trashed that collection when I was away at college…
AA+ Bonds
Meanwhile,
AUSTERITY GESTAPO IN GREECE ATTACKS STRIKING STEEL WORKERS WITH TEAR GAS, TRUNCHEONS
jl
@YAFB: I have seen no pics of Ann with leeks in her belt (or do they go in their hat band)? F for fake, I say.
grandpa john
@West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.): stick with the state polls, using an old colloquial term; National polls are” worthless as tits on a boar hog.”
AxelFoley
@General Stuck:
Or black Bart?:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYlDbv7MqE8
AA+ Bonds
“The special relationship is special” = Yes Men
YAFB
@jl:
In for a penny, in for a pound, I say.
Frankensteinbeck
@West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.):
The odds of him becoming POTUS look pretty low right now. The national gap between him and Obama is small, but he’s been unable to close it. Much more importantly, they’re only looking even because Obama is so unpopular in deeply red states. All the swing states – and Romney has to win ALL of them, not just one – are leaning strongly Obama, and they haven’t budged. There are months left for things to change, but it’s looking like an electoral map blowout.
However, every time an outlier poll says anything remotely different the media leaps on it like rabid jackals to further their horse race narrative.
EIGRP
@beltane:
So I should have moved to Mexico when I was a teenager? Just learned that almost 30 years too late.
Eric
4tehlulz
Why would Trump want to remain anonymous?
Brachiator
@MonkeyBoy:
They were all part of the British Empire, and saw themselves as British subjects. New England was an essential component of a triangular trade system. The American Revolution severed that connection to a large degree, but it was still foundational.
JasonF
@Amir Khalid: You are correct that it was on loan and has been returned to Britain, so I’m not sure how Mitt plans to put it back in the Oval Office. I don’t think demanding that we be loaned a piece of art is the best way to kick off the awesome new WASP(+Mormon) Alliance.
But I guess we can add “Winston Churchill’s bust” to the list of weird code words that get right-wingers frothing at the mouth and leave the rest of America scratching their heads.
El Cid
@JasonF: Churchill, when the Bust Fell. Norquist and Jalad, at Tanagra.
kay
Ronzoni Rigatoni
@YAFB: “Try going into a pub in Porthcawl and calling a Welshman “Anglo-Saxon” …” LOL I almost did that. Commenting on the weather while at the Taffs Well Inn near Cardiff, I commented to a local friend that “the weather here in England is great for a change.” “I beg your pardon, Yank,” said a Richard Burton-like voice behind me, “You’re in WALES! England is that way, over the mountains.” Mel, my instructor, was a laid-off miner who hated Margaret Thatcher. We shared many a pint that day, and for years afterward.
Citizen_X
@NonyNony:
I’m gonna go with “upper-class twit.”
El Cid
@Brachiator: There were real, historical, sociological, political, and economic differences between the British Imperial subjects attempting to colonize the Northeastern sections of the Americas directly; for example, the mode of economic production which worked for agricultural products such as sugar (the progenitor of trans-Atlantic slavery) and tobacco and cotton and which depended upon slave labor and in particular imported African slave labor did not apply outside the near Caribbean region of the Deep South.
While it is true that a wealthier British colonial subject in Boston as well as a Gold Coast cocoa plantation administrator would conceive of themselves as part of the British Empire, the differences between the lived experience of what that Empire was was profoundly different. And, of course, was well noted by said subjects.
PurpleGirl
@efgoldman: One day in the 7th grade, my home room teacher caught one of the guys reading a comic book. She took it from him and said “If you are going to waste money on that, at least buy Mad Magazine and read some good satire and humor.” Yes, the teacher really said that. I began buying shortly thereafter and continued buying it into the 1980, I guess. I still have them somewhere.
Brachiator
@El Cid:
I was reading a naval history of England a while back. There are continual references to British North America, which included the islands of the Caribbean. And the expansion was as much from the north downwards as it was from the south upwards. Been that way since the Anglo Dutch wars resulted in England gaining New York and territories in the Caribbean. Throw in wars and treaties with France and Spain as well.
Ash Can
And BTW, anybody who’s ever called me a bitch must have a sixth sense, because I’m about stone fucking deaf from these Republican dogwhistles.
Fax Paladin
I know “White House” is being used as a synonym for “Obama administration,” but I still find this sentence funny given that part of the shared history is the White House being burned by the British in 1814…
Brachiator
BTW, is Romney still including Israel among the stops on this trip? I look forward to his explaining that Anglo Saxon thing to Bibi. Also, too, I wonder if Sheldon Adelson still thinks he is getting his money’s worth by supporting Mittens?
Comrade Mary
Ann loves leeks.
PurpleGirl
@El Cid: Very clever. LOL.
YAFB
@Ronzoni Rigatoni:
Heh. With an American accent, you’d usually get away with an honest mistake like that, especially if you’re buying the rounds and aren’t running for president.
BTW, the Telegraph‘s readers aren’t too impressed with Mitt either, judging by the comments to that article.
Heliopause
What about the Romans, French, Norse, and Celts? And what about the Queen who “bears lineage from, amongst others, Armenian, Arab, British, Chinese, Cuman, Danish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Monégasque, Norwegian, Old Prussian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Yugoslavian ethnicities.”
divF
119 comments into the thread and no one has mentioned that Kenya used to be a British colony, and then (briefly) a member of the Commonwealth. Queen Elizabeth was visiting Kenya when her father died, thus becoming the Queen while in Kenya.
Obama’s father’s ties to the UK or no less intimate (or complicated) than those of any DAR member.
The former name for Kenya was British East Africa, a reference that always brings to mind “Beat the Devil”.
jake the snake
I have a few choice Anglo-Saxonisms for Lord Romney.
Rmoney is just a haute borgie and any decent billionair could buy and sell him with spare change. As they have done.
My theory is that he is actually a “Manchurian candidate” from the Ferengi Alliance.
El Cid
@Brachiator: You’re doing that thing again where you think you’re riding in with the important anal corrections from the vast plains of Wiki-Fu, and once again you’re missing the point.
The argument — and there is indeed argument among contemporaries then and modern scholars now, anthropologists, sociologists, political economists, historians — as to the effects of the origins of varying political and economic regimes in regional concentrations of the (one day to be) United States.
Your mention of the fact that individuals working with the British Navy as being quite aware of the extensiveness of British influence throughout North America and the Caribbean is quite cutely self-referential — given that we were in part discussing a distinction in awareness about the plantation-slavery-primary crop production crop colonialism in generating North American political and economic cultures, you cite the people most likely to be aware of such things. That was a really, really stupid point to try and bring up as a corrective.
Was the expansion “as much from the north downwards as it was from the south upwards”? Which expansion? What would this mean in this context?
Were there a lot of New England established higher class colonists who left to administer colonialist plantations in the Caribbean? And then returned to govern in North America and run local economies as they had run them there?
If so, that would be a key part of the historical argument. What would be the analogy of a Caribbean sugar plantation and its mode of production in the northeastern British colonies? If there aren’t many with that similarity, then it would appear to be a different type of thing, and would not accord with the particular economic mode of production-based socio-cultural traditions — and they’re considered quite clearly identifiable and open to study for the last century and a half at least of American public life — argued by the above-referenced historian to have affected certain areas of the southern United States.
Just like scholars debate the degree to which, say, a certain prolongued drought in 19th century Rwanda promoted the formation of group delineation later to be crystallized by colonial authorities as “Hutu” / “Tutsi”.
Can you please just turn this shit off sometimes? It’s just so fucking tedious.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
As a bona fide Anglo-Saxon-white-guy-Protestant dude, I can tell you, any time somebody talks about bringing back “Anglo-Saxon” values or any such bullshit, I hear a thinly veiled “White Power!” I’m not “ashamed” of my pasty-Protestant-Anglo-Saxonness; I’m not really “proud” of it, either. It’s a curiosity, nothing more. I think it’s kind of cool that my last name is traceable way back into the misty pre-Norman invasion mists of misty time, and that it was spelled “Hƿituc” (ƿith a ƿynn, or “wynn”–not a “p”–for you folks not schooled in Anglo-Saxon, ƿhich later became “w”, and is one of many funky, ƿacky letters ƿe’ve sadly lost*) and that it means, in essence, “little white dude”. But, really, that’s all it is, a curiosity. It’s no more worthy than somebody whose forebears came from Hungary and had a ő in their name or from China, and had a 樑 in their name or anything else. I know that, yeah, this country was built upon what you might call Anglo-Saxon legal and political traditions and all that, but, shit, we’re long beyond that now. We’ve made our own way, for better or worse, and we’ve built ourselves up to what we are from the hard work of a whole shitload of immigrants from all over the fucking world. We don’t have any particular ties to Britan anymore. Can’t we let it go?**
*Along with þ, ð, æ & ȝ.
**I know the answer to that, needless to say, is, yes, unless they happen to be a Republican, in which case, well, we’ll have to pry that Anglo-Saxon specialness and super-turbo awesomeness from their cold, dead hands.
Brachiator
@El Cid:
We come to different conclusions from our reading of the history. I was recently listening to an iTunes history broadcast which discussed how an increasingly exclusionary slave code developed in Virginia, an intellectual center of both the north and the south, based in part on the experiences and judgments of the Caribbean planters. And a number of the Caribbean plantation owners were absentee landlords who lived in England and traded with New England. The economy of the British Empire reinforced a notion of a unified British North America even as other forces were forging other identities.
But it is an interesting question as to how the people in the colonies began to see themselves as other than British. As an aside, there are interesting hints of this tension in Michael Mann’s version of “The Last of the Mohicans.”
Librarian
Mimi Du Jour: “Is this some kind of bust?”
Frank Drebin: “Yes, ma’am, it’s very impressive, but we need to ask you a few questions.”
El Cid
@divF: That’s because we’re all pro-Obama conspirators trying to keep silent his generations-long plan to capture power in the U.S. for his Kikuyu masters, but now you’ve spoiled it all.
FlipYrWhig
@valency:
Uh, while we’re on the subject, Mitt Romney’s father was from México.
HRA
I just read the entire article and the comments at the Telegraph. Anonymous advisers were interviewed for it. What is it about not discussing politics or campaigning in a foreign land that does not penetrate their small brains. It’s way beyond disgusting.
Brachiator
@El Cid:
No, I said, or tried to say that the author of a very good book about British naval history, The Command of the Ocean, discusses and cites references to a British North America. This is not the same thing as the views of individuals working with the British navy.
We seem to be passing by each other in posting. Interesting discussion, but unfortunately I have a dinner I have to go to.
West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.)
Thanks for the words of hope, Frankensteinbeck & Grandpa John. I hope you’re correct in regards to our prez staying prez! Now, I’m ducking out and going back to a Farscape marathon. For frell’s sake!
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
@Baud:
I’d take off my hat to you if I were wearing one. Shit, I’d take off my whole head to you if I could get it back on again.
Scott Alloway
@pragmatism: Romney’s a WASP? Not in my book. FSM almighty, a second-rate wannabe claiming Anglo-Saxon relations? Go back to Mexico, Willard.
Another Halocene Human
@karen marie: That’s all right, because Lord Romenel is here to explain to them who their betters are.
pragmatism
@Scott Alloway: Not in the book that Joseph smith made up either.
Matt McIrvin
@divF: Not only that, Obama’s mother’s heritage apparently doesn’t count either.
Assuming that one is even concerned about Anglo-Saxon heritage in the first place.
Another Halocene Human
@YAFB: Thanks for the tip:
Also, nobody has mentioned that Obama is of English descent on his mom’s side. He’s related to Dick f******* Cheney, for Pete’s sake!
(He’s also Irish. That shouldn’t matter, but he was just so awesome about the whole thing, raising a pint o’ Guinness in Old Munegal. Romney saying hateful shit about the US’ special “anglo-saxon” relationship is just the icing on this tribalism cake for me. It’s not the real reason I vote for Obama but it lets me be a football hooligan about it, I guess? Like, you mess with Obama, you’re messing with the whole trailer park… and we’re kinda scary. When Irish eyes are smiling and all that.)
Mr Furious
I’m sure wingnut lore has it that Obama threw the Churchill bust in the trash to make room for the MLK bust…
jenn
I’m so trying to imagine Queen Elizabeth II and Ann Romney here ….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1166490/Ones-new-best-friend-The-Queen-Michelle-new-touchy-feely-protocol.html
Another Halocene Human
@Matt McIrvin: psych.
karen marie
@Linda Featheringill: Great link. I did not know Obama’s family history with Churchill. Yeah, I don’t think I would have kept it either. I am going to go out on a limb here and assume that the loudest whiners on the topic are well aware of it.
Jay in Oregon
@Fax Paladin:
Which happened at least 25 years before Romney’s religion even existed, BTW.
scav
The thought of all the red blooded teahardists getting seriously excited about returning a manly bust the white house . . . rubes with fantasies of moobs is a hard image to shake. Well, that and the freaking Lets get costumed up like desperate The Price is Right contestants Tea Party Revolutionary Patriots salivating over closer ties with the Red Coats is typical and funny in the twisted 21st century manner.
Jay in Oregon
@El Cid:
That would be the same Representative Young that signed a treasonous “Letter of Declaration” written by Alaskan militia whackjob Schaeffer Cox, affirming their rights to “self-defense” against the federal government?
The same whackjob who was just convicted of a truckload of firearm violations—in Alaska—and of conspiring in a plot to kidnap and kill several Alaska State Troopers and a federal judge?
ABL
@AA+ Bonds: That about sums it up. I still can’t believe he said that shit. It’s just funny to me now.
I mean —
Oy.
TG Chicago
I like how the Telegraph article says:
Gee, ya think they might?
Even better, I found this line in another story:
Inching closer and closer to being accused of racial insensitivity! And all just because they’re saying a bunch of completely fucking racist shit. Who’d have thunk?
Too bad there are just “accusations”. If there was a way to put somebody on trial for racism, it’d be an open/shut case.
john fremont
.
Monarchs and Presidents in Islam National Review, Nov 21, 1986 by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
Does the average tea partier/wingnut realize that the British royal family has ancestry back to Mohammed?
Mnemosyne
@El Cid:
Not to mention the fact that the English settlers in New England were mostly dissenters (mostly Puritans, but also Quakers) while the English settlers in the Caribbean and Southern states were primarily Church of England.
We tend to discount today how huge the cultural and social divide was between Puritans and Church of England believers, but given that the English Civil War happened while the Americas were being settled by the English, there really was a huge gulf between the two nominally English groups.
pseudonymous in nc
@YAFB:
And the Torygraph is, let’s remember, the newspaper of choice for those who have been pining the decline of the British Empire since 1947.
200,000 or so: 0.33% of the population, vs. the 2% in the US. I noticed that the “I’m a Mormon” ads are running on Hulu, and they’re painfully obviously accentuating a diversity that is less than representative of the LDS at large, with a black British musician included in the rotation.
pseudonymous in nc
@Mnemosyne:
In the places where they lived relatively close together, Puritans would celebrate Christmas by going to Anglican churches and throwing rocks through the windows. Yes, Virginia, the War on Christmas started in the 1600s.
Mnemosyne
@Another Halocene Human:
Well, as we all know, “There’s No One as Irish as Barack O’Bama.”
Origuy
For that matter, Boris Johnson, the blond Conservative Lord Mayor of London is descended on his father’s side from Ali Kemal Bey, a Turkish journalist who was killed by a mob incited by Kemal Ataturk during the Turkish War of Independence.
Another book which talks about the “Anglo-Saxon” (and Norman, Danish, Irish, Scottish, Cornish, and Welsh) heritage of the early settlers is Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fisher. He breaks down the four folkways by discussing their dialects, food, games, politics, religion, etc.
kay
The conservative obsession with lineage, with the paternal line, is just bewildering to me.
I was taught the reverse, the sort of 4th grade public school line that you were basically fully “American” really the minute you said you were American, and that there wouldn’t be a whole lot of looking back, or relying on any tribal or ancestral identity.
Maybe that was wrong, over-simplified, a public school melting pot story that says you’re an individual and you’re supposed to just get ON with it, but it was appealing to me as a child and I feel as if it’s served me well as an adult. The general (aspirational) idea was you take people one at a time, as you find them, without a lot of reliance on shared traits coming thru bloodlines or whatever.
I feel what I was taught is much closer to what Obama expresses, where he seems to feel like this series of accidental meetings and people moving hither and yon and meeting up landed him in Kansas, of all places! “Who would have predicted THAT!” is the sense I get from him, and that’s familiar to me.
have that same sense of chance, where, you know, it could have played out much different, because there was no generational plan or scheme.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
Just to add some weight to the “maybe he really believes it” side of the scale, don’t forget how very important their Mayflower descent was to many of Joseph Smith’s early circle. While Romney isn’t a Mayflower descendant, as far as a quick skim can tell me, he is descended from both one of the first English converts to Mormonism and from “the Apostle Paul of Mormonism”.
(Not a Mormon, just a dead relative collector. You can’t really avoid seeing how important this sort of thing still is when you spend a lot of time around Mormons doing their temple work.)
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@kay:
Every group has its family historians, of course, but there are two groups for whom this obsession is a major part of their identities. One is centered in New England, among the Mayflower families and similar early settlers. The other is in the South, among the old plantation families.
For me, the lineage thing is tied to my love of history. I was a very happy girl when I discovered the WPA county and family histories. Forex: Felix Walker, responsible for the terms “bunkum”, “bunk”, and “debunk” is my father’s some-number-of-greats uncle. My husband is descended from one of the likely inventors of the Conestoga wagon, one of the stories I used to keep his nephew engaged at a museum instead of whining about being away from his video games. But it’s not a part of our identities the way it is for the DAR ladies.
Horrendo Slapp (formerly Jimperson Zibb, Duncan Dönitz, Otto Graf von Pfmidtnöchtler-Pízsmőgy, Mumphrey, et al.)
This is what I grew up believing, too, and I still think it’s true, whether or not some random conservative tool believes it or not. I think it’s why the U.S. has gotten as far as it has with so many races, creeds, ethnicities and so on, while so many others of what you might call multicultural empires or countries haven’t. The Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Soviet Union, even little Yugoslavia, they all fell to pieces because in each case, one group set itself up as the top dog, and all the other ethnicities seethed as the big guys devalued them and tried to make them assimilate. The other groups, on the whole, didn’t come into those countries or empires willfully, they were made to be part of them. At times, they weren’t free to speak their own languages or worship as they wanted.
Here, though, aside from the big exceptions of African slaves and the Native Americans who were shoved aside and all but wiped out, everybody became Americans willingly. I know I’m oversimplifying this, but I think there’s a lot of truth to it all the same. We don’t have a state religion; we don’t have a national language (and I’m dead set against ever making English “official”). Our only real creed, if you want to call it that, is a dedication to the Proposition That All [People] Are Created Equal, and that there isn’t any bloodline or pedigree you have to prove to be a “real” American. You’re an American when you make up your mind to be.
I know there’s a long and ugly strain running the other way, that whatever “others” are seen at the time as threats aren’t “real” Americans, no, not like us Western European white Protestants, and this line has come right down today as the teabaggers. But this way of thinking is against the more or less canonical American ideal, I think. I’d guess that even the most racist of teabaggers would claim to agree with the “You’re an American when you choose to be one” idea, even as they twist themselves inside out to explain why this group here or that one over there doesn’t really measure up for whatever bullshit reason.
Origuy
As a history buff, the genealogy gives me some insight into the personal histories of people, whether I’m related to them or not. I have an ancestor who joined the Union Army three months before the end of the Civil War, at age 28. Why did he wait so long to join? How did he avoid conscription earlier?
I’ve only found one ancestor that definitely was not born in America so far; Mitt’s Romney ancestor came after most of mine. Does that make me more American? Of course not.