Jonah Goldberg has some whitesplaning to do dammit, and no holiday weekend will stay him from his appointed rounds.
If the GOP wants to win more black votes, it will need to get a lot more “racist.”
The scare quotes are necessary because I don’t think the Republican Party is racist now (and, historically, has a lot less to answer for than the Democratic Party does).
But that hasn’t stopped people from slandering Republicans as racist for one reason or another.
Wow, that’s a pitch roughly the size of Utah over the plate. I’m going to step out of the batter’s box for a second so that I can get a running start at this thing, it’s not moving that fast. Clearly Jonah here is full, nay, gravid with excellent advice. Besides, GOP can’t be racist because Colin Powell!
Just consider some recent examples from over the summer. When Mitt Romney visited Michigan, he joked about not needing a birth certificate to prove he was from there.
Not very funny? OK, sure. Poor taste? Eh, maybe, I guess. “The basest and the most despicable bigotry we might be able to imagine”? Errr, no. And yet that’s what one respected “expert” on race, Michael Eric Dyson, called it on MSNBC.
I have to admit “noted race relations expert Jonah Goldberg” does have a nice ring to it, it’s a little much to fit on the business card along with the multi-cultural and multicolored stick figures, but you know, that privilege ain’t gonna assume itself. Sometimes a white guy just has to lay out what racism is to us black folk:
Now, the cynical motivations behind this relentless slander are too numerous to count. Such moral bullying makes white liberals feel better about themselves. It scares moderates and centrists away from the Republican Party, and it no doubt helps dissuade wavering blacks from even thinking about giving the GOP an honest look.
It also does wonders to stifle journalists terrified of having their racial bona fides questioned in any way. And it helps a feckless left-wing black political class explain away its own failures. Racial slander is like duct tape: There’s no limit to what you can do with it.
Wow. I had no idea being a black person was so simple. All this time if I ever wanted to get ahead in life, I could just use “racial slander” to put white America in its place. Truly we live in an age of post-racial America where I had no idea being white was so bloody difficult, laced with traps and pitfalls whenever you tried to explain to the brown horde that your policies were necessary medicine they needed. Somebody always comes along and racial slanders it. You guys, Jonah’s trying really hard here!
But can you imagine how much worse it will get if Republicans actually do reach out to black community (as they should)?
One of the points of racial slander is to signal that only liberal policies are guaranteed to be non-racist (even when such policies were forged with racist intent, like the Davis-Bacon Act). This is why the Congressional Black Caucus insists on calling itself the “conscience of the Congress.”
That’s why policies like school choice are routinely denounced as racist, even though they’re largely aimed at improving the lives of inner-city blacks trapped in bad schools. Teachers unions don’t like school choice, ergo, it’s racist.
It’s hard out there for a white guy, dedicated to trying to explain to the stupid, largely ignorant black masses that your policy is good for them dammit and they need to shut up and accept it. Why don’t they listen to Jonah? He’s got the business card and everything!
Any serious attempt by the GOP to win black votes won’t involve Republicans copycatting liberal policies. It will require going over the heads of black and white liberal slanderers to offer a sincere alternative to failed liberal policies on schools, poverty, crime, etc. The more effective that effort, the more the GOP will be called racist.
When Romney, whose father marched with Martin Luther King Jr., spoke to the NAACP, Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast dubbed him a “race-mongering pyromaniac,” primarily for using the term “ObamaCare” — a term Barack Obama used himself.
Just imagine the attacks in store for a more effective Republican.
If only black people like myself were smart enough to see through the racial slander…gosh they just might have that outreach they need here. Surely somebody should appoint Jonah in charge of it. Immediately.
the Conster
Keep fucking that chicken, nutjobs.
blahblah
Pierce did it better: esquire.com/blogs/politics/jonah-goldberg-republicans-black-vote-112312
JGabriel
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Zandar @ Top:
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Speaking of which, Mitt Romney’s new hometown, La Jolla CA, is inundated with the inundated with the stench of bird shit:
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Po’ rich white guy, it’s so unfair when karma targets you.
.
Chad
They just want to re-program the “Obots” they keep hearing about.
ruemara
I’m really not sure you should question Jonah Goldberg so. After all, we here at BJ are often hateful and judgmental to people on the right and lack openmindedness. We’re also naive Obots who see racism in very innocent statements. If we were less error prone racists towards white people, maybe we could really see beyond the fallacies that have led us to re-electing the lesser man, Barack Obama and move toward a more enlightened future, where we do not hate on white males who have a better vision for us. Truly, we can learn much if we would only listen to our betters.
lacp
Yes, if only Young Goodman Pantload was able to clear away the racial slander, black Americans would be 100% on board with tax cuts for the rich. What a moran.
Baud
I have a feeling we’re going to have an opportunity to test this theory.
slag
Jonah, son of Lucianne, is right. Black people don’t get to judge what’s racist because they have too much skin in the game. And they don’t get to vote for president because they don’t have enough skin in the game. Also too affirmative action is bad.
Spaghetti Lee
The scare quotes are necessary because I don’t think the Republican Party is racist now (and, historically, has a lot less to answer for than the Democratic Party does).
They’re still trying this? Anyone who tries to make this stupid argument oughta have to take a short-answer test. Define the following terms and their historical significance: ‘Southern Strategy’, ‘Strom Thurmond’, ‘1964 Presidential Election’, ‘Richard Nixon’, and ‘Lee Atwater.’
These morons are so literally Orwellian: Any inconvenient history just gets wiped off the books.
Jay
Over at Esquire, the great Charles Pierce punched Jonah squarely in the mouth.
Mister Harvest
Sadly, this is precisely and exactly what his target audience believes.
Jennifer
Color me stupid, but I believe Tomasky’s characterization probably had more to do with Mitt crowing, publicly, to members of his trogladyte base later that same day that he had gone to the NAACP and told “those people” that the free ride was over, moochers, when Mitt Romney gets inaugurated. As can be imagined, this didn’t go over all that well, maybe in part because food stamps were singled out and it’s pretty well known that the vast majority of food stamp moochers are white folk. Just a wild guess, but when you shoot your mouth off about how you told those people that the free ride on food stamps was coming to an end, and those people aren’t even the ones who are the major users of the program, to some hyper-sensitive souls it looks racist.
Good thing the Pantload is here to tell us why it’s not.
James E. Powell
So far, the best part of the Republican Party’s effort to “reach out” to African-American voters is the decision to have the senior senator from the great, and totally not racist, state of South Carolina to take the lead in launching groundless personal attacks on one of the most prominent African-American women.
Maybe they can get Haley “Boss Hogg” Barbour to explain why states need to make it more difficult to vote in urban areas.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
Shorter Goldberg: When life gives you lemons, make batteryacid-ade.
Maude
@JGabriel:
Isn’t that wonderful?
MattF
Goldberg believes that the victim here is none other than himself. I’ll admit that having to live on handouts from plutocrats is not a good way to live– and I can see that has to be someone’s fault.
FlipYrWhig
I love how Mitt is supposed to get collateral credit for his father’s anti-racism. Though I suppose it’s not surprising that lazy, talentless legacy Jonah Goldberg sees nothing amiss in crediting a later generation with a former one’s “accomplishments.”
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
As Roy Edroso likes to say: this is the stupidest (fornicating) thing ever written, and will remain so until Jonah Goldberg writes something else.
Ted & Hellen
A BJ thread about alleged racism.
That’s different.
ABL
I think I just had an aneurysm.
Jamey
Fix’t
Triassic Sands
The GOP was once the party of Lincoln and the racist South used to be Democrat/Dixiecrat. So, in that sense, both parties have racist pasts. On the other hand, the racist Southerners morphed into staunch Republicans, while the Democrats led the fight for civil rights. Lee Atwater admitted the racism of Republican campaigns, something that continues today.
Ignoring party names, many of the people Goldberg supports are racists. Most of the people he opposes are not. I don’t know if Goldberg himself is personally racist, but he sure is stupid.
Steeplejack
@Jennifer:
Exactly. From Tomasky’s original piece (July 12):
poco
@RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist: Win!
Chris
Good luck with that then.
Look, brainiac, when the Democrats won the black vote over, they didn’t do it by explaining the same policies more slooowly with a big smile on their faces until the silly black people went “Hey! Now I get it!” They did it by changing the substance of their platform until it addressed the things black people cared about. And that, for the most part, consisted of “copycatting liberal policies.”
You people, to coin a phrase, need to get your shit together and decide if you want to be conservatives or if you want to win anything other than the Angry White Conservative vote. Because you sure as shit can’t do both.
Jennifer
@Jennifer: @Steeplejack: Yes, it was Obamacare Romney mentioned. For some reason I had it in my head that it was food stamps – maybe he mentioned food stamps too? Still, the message was the same: get a job, moochers!
Jay C
IIJM, or wasn’t Mitt Romney’s (in)famous speech to the NAACP the one where he actually used the formulation “get free stuff from the government” – as a sort of admonition to his audience (as if getting said “free stuff” was the major political issue the NAACP and its membership cared about?)
FlipYrWhig
@Jay C: IIRC that was after the speech proper — he said it outside a fundraiser later that day after being asked about having been booed.
Xecky Gilchrist
The scare quotes are necessary because I don’t think the Republican Party is racist now
Not quite; those are not scare quotes, they are snot quotes. They mean that whatever is contained within should be read with the most whiny, snotty nasal voice you can possibly manage, and that somehow acts as a meaningful refutation.
Zandar
@Ted & Hellen:
Next time I’ll be sure to ask you first before I post something.
Chris
@Triassic Sands:
Always interested me how the entire civil rights era was essentially a fight within the Democratic Party, between the mainstream and the old Dixiecrat base. The Republicans were just kind of there. Sure, most of them went along with the flow, but it wasn’t them who took the civil rights issue off the shelf for the first time since Reconstruction in the postwar forties (that was Truman), and it wasn’t them who finally forced through the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the sixties (that was Johnson).
You’d have to go back to the nineteenth century for a time when you could credibly say that Republicans were the party of civil rights. Their claim to that died the moment they handed the South back to the old Confederate elites in the 1870s.
Yutsano
@Zandar: Apparently all posters (except for JC since he and Special Timmeh are besties!) now require pre-clearance for all postings so they do not offend Special Timmeh’s extremely delicate fee-fees. Anything else will generate a sternly worded e-mail or a nasty phone call. They talk several times a day you know!
SiubhanDuinne
@JGabriel:
La Jolla will annoy ya.
Apologies to Mel Tormé (California Sweet)
Chris T.
Yeah! And homosexuals complained when people called them “queer” but then started using the word themselves! And black people call each other the n-word so why can’t white people do it?
/sarcasm [it’s sad that I even need this tag]
Seriously, it’s not your use of particular words that makes you (“you” here meaning various Republicans) racist, it’s your racism that makes you racist. People like Goldberg and Douthat love to claim that things like “school choice” (i.e., vouchers) are designed to help out “those people” but they never get into the gritty details that show how it would work—or, in this case, wouldn’t work. In theory, vouchers could work, but only if they’re cranked down to the point of uselessness (e.g., if moving your kid to a private school got you one dollar in “voucher”, since it’s likely true that pulling one kid out of public school leaves that school with roughly $10 more to spend on the other kids).
Higgs Boson's Mate
Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed – by people of color in particular.
hitchhiker
Dear Jonah,
This is who you are: the silly son of a woman who claimed that she had banged Lyndon Johnson in order to impress her friends, and later denied it. Did she bang him while you were still a twinkle in her eye? No one can know. What we do know is that you’re a fool who has ridden a lame, disease-infested horse called Nepotism to your current position of influence over those whose IQ falls below the median. That’s who you are.
In other words, nobody with more than a few firing synapses cares what you think about anything, but we especially don’t care what you think about racism.
Yours truly,
The World
p.s. Did we mention that your mother is a disgrace? She is.
Tehanu
Not racist now … and they aren’t actually reaching out to the black community now. Riiiiiight.
I admit it, Charlie Pierce saw this first, but it can’t hurt to repeat it. We all know Jonah doesn’t read any kind of source material, but here’s proof he doesn’t even read what he writes himself.
debbie
And more than 40 years ago, after LBJ championed the Civil Rights Act, those same racists fled to the Republican Party, where they remain today. I suppose the mere act of entering those august surroundings must have turned them into patriots.
Does anyone ever point this out to Goldberg or has he never come face to face with someone who disagrees with him?
Hal
He went to the NAACP and said he was going to repeal Obamacare, got booed, and went to a conservative fundraiser to brag about basically making it out of the lions den. Romney was not booed for simply stating the term Obamacare.
Also, I love that Republicans only measure their actions on race to around the 1950’s. They conveniently ignore every bullshit act they pulled from the Civil Rights Movement, right up to election day 2012.
Ivan Ivanovich Renko
@debbie:
Fix’t.
bootsy
How could anyone accuse someone of racism who works for a magazine founded by Buckley, who so eloquently argued for the South’s “states rights” in keeping segregation alive?
Next you’ll say that St. Reagan was a racist, just for giving speeches in the South about “states rights.” His wife was on Differen’t Strokes, for Nixon’s sake!
Villago Delenda Est
Please. George Romney also introduced the custom of Presidential candidates releasing their tax returns for a number of prior years.
Unlike his parasite spawn, the Marquis du Mittens.
tbert
Why is it that every time a Republican claims that the Democratic Party is racist, they dredge up shit that no living Democrat has done? The Davis-Bacon Act? Seriously?
Interrobang
@debbie: Does anyone ever point this out to Goldberg or has he never come face to face with someone who disagrees with him?
I watched him dance and twist and split hairs and play bullshit semantics with any number of distinguished historians and academics who were utterly taking him apart over Liberal Fascism, so I can pretty much say without reservation that pointing out to him that he’s wrong is a waste of time; he’ll go to extraordinary lengths to attempt to twist reality itself to avoid admitting he’s wrong about anything. His defense against people with actual credentials was basically “But if I redefine ‘white’ so it actually means ‘black,’ then I’m actually right and you’re actually wrong, and it doesn’t matter that you’ve spent most of your life studying the subject, because shut up that’s why.”
I mean, it might have been funny, in a Black Knight sort of way, but it was really quite pathetic, actually.
He knows nothing about anything, and his employers should be ashamed of themselves for signing his paycheques, but as Goldberg himself amply demonstrates time and again, right-wingers have no shame.
Mike G
@debbie:
I frequently hear this argument from Repuke acquaintances — more Repukes than Dems voted for the Civil Rights Act blahblahblah Lincoln blahblahblah.
My reply is — So you’re a Republican because the party USED TO support civil rights? How does that work?
TG Chicago
I’m glad JoGo is willing to admit that the GOP has thus far made no effort to reach out to 10-15% of the American population based on their skin color. Nice Kinsley gaffe.
I also like the “The Democrats are at fault for slavery!!!” nonsense that ignores the Civil Rights-era realignment and the fact that the ancestors of those Democrats are now all southern Republicans.
jshooper
I just love how in a piece that is allegedly attempting to debunk the notion that the GOP is racist…or has a race problem…this asshole proceeds to talk about black people in the most disrespectful, resentful way possible…His resentment is practically leaping off the page…He wildly lashes out at black media figures, the congressional black caucus, Obama, the NAACP etc etc…Clowns like Goldberg don’t want to win over black voters…They just want to have a circle jerk with other right wingers about how awful those dumb n*ggers are….always playing the race card on them
Brachiator
Goldberg is a fool. I never paid much attention to him, and the quotes provided here reinforce my judgment.
Patricia Kayden
@jshooper: I agree with you but would add that Goldberg doesn’t care about reaching out to Black voters. I assume that he’s seeking out more White voters who think like him to get up and vote the next time around.
Seems like Romney lost the election because millions of people who voted for McCain the last time around sat it out this time. Perhaps many were White evangelicals who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Mormon. Goldberg and his ilk need to get those Whites voting again in 2016 if the Rethugs are going to win.
Felonius Monk
Once again Jonah Goldberg shits in his pants and tries to convince everyone that it doesn’t stink.
gorram
@Patricia Kayden:
(buzzer sounds) Wrong answer!
Gunga Dean
When you are born from stupidity into stupidity, I guess you should expect to emit stupidity
El Cid
I don’t suppose it occurred to such people as Jonah Goldberg to begin, as white Republicans, to go talk to black people and try to find common ground with a few ordinary African Americans, even if it’s a vanishingly tiny number at first.
No, no, we just have to try yelling different things at them and see whether or not they stop running away, and if they all keep running away, it’s their own damn fault.
Blue Meme
“Romney, whose father marched with Martin Luther King Jr….”
No, he didn’t.
Romney senior did march for civil rights:
aboutmittromney.com/romney_and_king.htm
But he didn’t march WITH MLK.
politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2007/dec/28/mitt-romney/george-romney-and-mlk-marched-but-no…
The difference is perhaps too subtle for a wanker like Goldberg to grasp.
Guiseppe Madre
Jonah and his teabagging pals think the whole “racism” thing is just an excuse used by black people to attempt to deny their natural inferiority.
oldswede
George Romney did not march with Dr. Martin Luther King. This canard has been shot down often. For one example, see this and scroll down to #4: Sunday Sanctimony
oldswede
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S.
Here’s another thing Goldberg fucked up about: The sponsors of the Davis-Bacon Act were Senator James J. Davis of Pennsylvania and Representative Robert Bacon of New York. I guess it could be that Goldberg saw the “Bacon” in the name of the act and assumed Bacon was Senator Augustus O. Bacon of Gerorgia, a Democrat who had fought for the confederacy, and was a white supremecist; but I think that gives him more credit for knowledge of history than he’s ever earned. So I don’t know why he chose that act out of who knows how many others he could have chosen to make his point; but it isn’t like he’s never made these dumbfuck mistakes before. It seems like everything he writes is a dumbfuck mistake. Has he ever been right about anything? How does this asshole still get paid for being wrong about everything all the time? I could write bad columns, crammed with dumbfuck mistakes twice a week for newspapers, and I’d be happy with one tenth of whatever they hand over to Goldberg.
Tommy D Cosmology
EVERY Republican candidate for President was a bigot, even the African American who said that he would not have a Muslim in his administration. Ironic that the LEAST bigoted were the Mormons.