Remember this greatest wingnut hit from the 2012 campaign?
In the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election, David Siegel, billionaire chief of Florida timeshare company Westgate Resorts, sent an email to all employees. “Of course, as your employer, I can’t tell you whom to vote for,” Siegel wrote, but offered “a few facts that might help you decide what is in your best interest.” These included that re-electing Obama would “threaten your job” and result in “less benefits and certainly less opportunity for everyone.”
Obama carved a backwards letter B on my economic growth picture and if you minimum wage slaves vote for him well it would be a shame if something were to happen to your job and HOLY CRAP IS THAT OBAMA’S ENTRANCE MUSIC I HEAR JIM?
Just over two years after penning that company-wide email, Siegel informed Westgate employees that instead of layoffs, he would boost their minimum wage to $10 per hour beginning in 2015.
In fact, according to Siegel, 2014 was a banner year. “We’re experiencing the best year in our history and I wanted to do something to show my gratitude for the employees who make that possible,” Siegel said in announcing the wage hike. He also recently told the Orlando Business Journal that “things have never been better.”
Westgate currently employees about 12,000 people. Though the minimum wage increase won’t impact all workers, including those who receive tips, commissions, or work under a collective bargaining agreement, a company spokesman told Vegas Inc. that thousands of employees will receive a raise because of the move.
Oh. Well then. Must be President Eric Cantor’s doing.
Karen in GA
He’s been brainwashed by the liebrul media and now he’s a socialist giving handouts! And Obama threatened him and made him do it!
/ half my family
CONGRATULATIONS!
He owns a timeshare company, therefore is human scum. I could care less what he thought in 2012 or now. It’s not like he is admitting he was wrong.
philpm
I’m assuming that the 11,995 employees who aren’t his family were threatening to quit and ruin his livelihood if they didn’t get a raise?
catclub
Has anyone actually heard what divisive things that they claim (for Instance Newt as mentioned on Charlie Pierce’s Gobshites Item) Obama has said? Quotes? Cause I really never have seen it. Maybe detecting it requires the right sensitivity. far right
Punchy
OT, but current:
Depending on how this gets adjudicated, I wonder if we’ll soon be seeing the NYPD turning their backs on subways and boycotting Subway restaurants. Because shut up that ‘s why.
SatanicPanic
I wonder if he’ll finish his stupid house
shelley
@catclub:
Details? Surely you jest.
And as far as the economy, Laura Ingraham insists that the economic improvement is all due to Republican gridlock. Genius!
Scotius
I highly recommend seeing the documentary “The Queen of Versailles”. This guy couldn’t bother hiding what an asshole he is even with the cameras running. I hope his kids pay him back when he’s too old to take care of himself any more. He has a nice wife though.
Turgidson
@catclub:
There are no actual inflammatory quotes – if there were, every wingnut from here to Uranus would be trotting them out in front of every camera on the planet.
I think the things Obama said that they’re clutching their pearls about were a couple of times when Obama said black peoples’ distrust of the police was, you know, understandable. But as the president tends to do, he said it in a sensible way that reasonable people wouldn’t have a problem with, even if they disagree. So the wingnut hate brigade can only refer to it elliptically and assume that their target audience will know what they’re referring to, comfortable in the knowledge that idiots like Chuck Todd won’t press them for details. And even if they were called on it, they can just pull out the ol’ “but Rev. Wright” and “but Al Sharpton” chestnuts, which never go out of style.
Patricia Kayden
So when do these geniuses admit that they were wrong?
Turgidson
And as for this Master of the Universe who thought a slight hike of the top tax bracket would bring armageddon, well I’m sure that, if asked, he’d be able to allocate credit for the economy’s strength to Zombie Reagan or Paul Ryan or some idiotic shit he learned from the WSJ’s editorial page or worse.
Villago Delenda Est
@Patricia Kayden:
Probably about the same time I’m crowned Tsar of all the Russias.
Redshift
@catclub: I think it’s pretty easy to see what Gingrich is talking about. “Divisive” means disagreeing with Republicans. Republicans can say any hateful crap they want about Democrats and Obama, and that’s not “divisive” because they know Real Americans agree with them.
It’s particularly “divisive” to talk about racial injustice, because since “we” elected Obama, we’re a post-racial society, so hurting the feelings of white people by suggesting we aren’t is much worse than any actual harm suffered by people of color.
(In fact, I suspect people like Gingrich don’t actually give a rat’s ass about this, but realize the power of continuing to spook older white people by telling them that everything is a zero-sum game, so any improvement in the lot of communities of color will necessarily be at their expense.)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
These are the “Queen of Versailles” people. I’ve never seen the movie but it seems the angle is they briefly lost their billionaire status in the Bush crash, so I don’t know how cromulent it is now. And whatever angle they take, whatever has happened since, the whole spectacle is off-putting to me.
The IMDB page does include this nugget, however
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@catclub: I used to think Bob Schiefer was one of the better Villagers, but the fact that he sits on his set with Gingrich and Condi Rice and treats them as experts should be deeply embarrassing to him, and I don’t think it is.
mai naem mobile
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Bob Schieffer hasn’t been onenof the better villagers for over twenty years since he became good buddies with George H.W.Bush. His brother was a lobbyist or something during W’s reign. I believe Schieffer was one of the ones who had an all white panel discussing the Henry Louis Gates hullaballoo.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: He’s no Brokaw, but his sneering contempt and loathing of Obama is just as obvious.
stinger
@catclub: I had lunch with a friend a couple of weeks ago. I knew we disagreed on reproductive rights, but we hadn’t directly discussed the President before (whom, btw, she never referred to as “the President” or “President Obama”, but always as “Barackobama”). She hates him and Eric Holder, also the NAACP, and to my astonishment called Obama “racially divisive”. I asked what he had said or done that was so racially divisive. The only specific my friend could come up with was the quote “He could have been my son.”
She also said that Obama was intentionally dragging down the USA’s reputation in the eyes of the world. I didn’t even bother to ask how, but instead asked her why. How could it be in the interests of the President of the United States (or the leader of any country anywhere) to lower the esteem in which the nation is held? She had — this will surprise you — no coherent answer.
When I delicately asked her if one reason she disliked this president so much was because he was black, she was so “offended” that she nearly walked out on me. I was calling her racist! She then spent the next hour making the racist arguments mentioned above.
I don’t watch Fox or the Sunday morning gabfests, or listen to hate radio, so all this was a bit astounding for me. I have since learned that these are standard right-wing talking points and tactics. She is otherwise a very nice person, and I am still a bit distressed by the conversation and what it revealed about aspects of her character.
Michael G
In one scene in Queen of Versailles, the business is very upfront about how shitty their time shares are: nobody who goes home and thinks about it *ever* returns. Thus that’s why they simply must make the sale immediately.
Sure, he is rich, which republicans think means he contributes to society. But to me, he’s rich because he figured out how to exploit human psychology. I’ll be damned if I let anyone think this money-sucking value vampire makes America a better country.
Pick any random worker in the country cutting grass, plunging toilets, or taking out garbage, and that person contributes more to the world than this guy ever will.
Woodrow/Asim
@Redshift: Damn straight they don’t really care about White People.
I’ve long suspected that some of the asshats ramping up this kind of toxic stew are just using folks, White and Black, and being hypocrites in the same way closeted self-hating LGBT politicos are. Prime example: Strom Thurmond, who spent half a life screaming about the horrors of “negroes” while supporting his multi-racial child through college — and from what his child says, he showed her real love and affection when they connected, over her life.
A lot of these demagogues know they are wrong, and simply have, like that Pharaoh in the Bible, hardened their hearts. They, and their water-carriers, are the real definitions of “sellouts,” in so many horrific ways.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Article of faith among wingnuts for the last month. I’ve been hearing hints of it for a long time, but apparently calling a Nazified police force on their toalitarian, black-man killing ways is unacceptable.
KG
Point of order: the proper phrasing of this sentiment is:
BY GAWD! THAT’S OBAMA’S MUSIC! WHAT’S HE DOING HERE?!
KG
@CONGRATULATIONS!: he’s been racially divisive since day one. Which in the wingnut mind was the day he was born (in Kenya). That’s what the Rev Wright stuff was about, that’s why some wingnuts like to point out that the president is only half black (not that they really care), that’s what the Trayvon could have been his son outrage was about, and that’s why anytime he says anything that might be perceived as racial will be about… I won’t be surprised if some wingnut makes his statement about Stuart Scott a racial issue
And damn, I’m going to miss Stuart Scott
Roger Moore
@Patricia Kayden:
Never. Instead, they’ll go the Minitrue route of trying to alter the past so those wrong statements were never made.
boatboy_srq
@Turgidson: Flipside of the Lee Atwater dogwhistle thing. If you quote a fragment out of context and add some “this sounds awful, doesn’t it” commentary, you don’t need to a direct quote using “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” or “Opiate of the Masses” for the wingnuts to get the idea.
Villago Delenda Est
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
They’re all irredeemable scum.
Wipe them out. All of them.
Bubblegum Tate
BAH GAWD! IT’S A STONE COLD ECONOMIC STUNNER!
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@stinger:
My (step)mom, who was actually raised in a trailer, says very similar things, but she’s at least honest enough to admit it’s because she thinks black people are inferior. That’s why it’s “embarrassing” to have the Obamas representing the US in front of the whole world, etc.
She doesn’t say these things very often in front of me because I can and will shut her down, but she still thinks them, and she knows damn well that these are race-based opinions.
srv
Just imagine how much better it would be if Obama wasn’t such a drag in capitalism
boatboy_srq
@Redshift:
I can’t help but think here that this is what all the various gerrymandering, grandfather-clausing, and Voter-ID’ing is all about. Because from the wingut perspective “we” did not elect Obama – “They™” did, and since (for reasons known only to wingnuts) [We]>[Them™] there had to be some ACORN skullduggery to make the difference.
brendancalling
Someone should call him and ask him if he still stands behind his words.
Villago Delenda Est
@stinger:
Amazing how this seems to happen, often. Vile racist shit only stink when the topic comes up, otherwise they’re really not so bad.
Villago Delenda Est
Here’s an utterly shocking story linked to Wonkette that you’ll find just about impossible to believe.
NOT.
Sarah Palin Being A Bit Of A Dick Again!
Eric U.
I always figured that nice people that say vile shit are actually vile and are just good at hiding it
Belafon
@Eric U.: It might actually be easier to solve it if people worked that way, but it doesnt. My mom once layed down on a woman in the middle of the street to keep the woman’s boyfriend from running over them, but I still have big fights over some of the things she says about blacks.
Matt McIrvin
@KG: The “only half black” emphasis is all about the idea that minorities are somehow specially privileged people, thanks to affirmative action and liberal guilt and the secret welfare that only black people get, and Obama is playing up his blackness to get in on that gravy train, to put one over on people. It’s the flip side of the white persecution narrative, and it’s an easy way to get sympathy from white people who feel put-upon.
It is, of course, complete horse hockey, requires denying every obvious social disadvantage that black Americans have in order to really logically work, and is the main way that really quite overt racism gets smuggled into socially acceptable discourse. You can flat-out resent black people as long as you say it’s for the special perks they’re getting that you don’t get.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): I seriously appreciate people like this, because at least no matter how offensive the next statement to come out of the piehole, I at least know it will be honest. And I know I’ll never be able to work with them so far as anything to do with racism or race-based topics goes, so at least the two of us can move on and leave the mutual antagonism to a minimum.
Liberty60
@Matt McIrvin:
I wonder if Mitt Romney’s sons ever drift off to sleep dreaming of waking up a black female unwed mother living in Cabrini Green housing project, and the wonderful life of power, privilege and comfort that would entail.
VincentN
@Belafon:
It’s actually pretty simple. People can be genuinely kind to those they consider as part of ‘their group” (however they define it – by race, wealth, sports team affiliation, etc.) and horrid to those not considered part of that group. Or they can think horrible things about a group in the abstract but be nice to a specific person they think is “not like the rest of those [insert disliked group].”
TriassicSands
It’s clear that Obama can’t be given any credit for anything positive that has happened — anywhere, ever.
Krugman just wrote a column about how much credit president’s deserve for good economic news. Not much, in general. However, in 2008, I thought Krugman, a Clinton supporter, was extremely unfair to Obama. It was sad seeing a brilliant Democrat showing such obvious bias and allowing it to color his opinions. In my opinion he was not only unfair, but also hypocritical. So, it is nice to see him writing in recent columns much more favorably about Obama’s accomplishments. As he points out, even if presidents generally don’t deserve much credit for good economic news, if either McCain or Romney had won, our economy would have suffered when compared with its performance with Obama in the White House.
He also points out that Republicans have been blaming Obama for everything bad, so now that things are going much better, isn’t is only fair that the Republicans start giving Obama some credit? Yeah, it would be fair, but it’s never going to happen. The Republicans will tie themselves in knots trying to find ways to continue to blame Obama for bad things and they’ll undoubtedly remain silent about an improving economy, unless they give all the credit to Republican governors.
MomSense
@Redshift:
Where did this “post-racial society” business come from? Was it a pundit created thing or was it a Republican snark thing? I just don’t know anyone who actually thought that electing Barack Obama would usher in a post-racial society.
mai naem mobile
When Obama was running your president, you heard the crap about how he was just a rock star speaker and how he was so inexperienced and you could go along with that and say ‘okay, this has not been proven to be untrue.’ Two years later, hes got Osama, the economy is inching up ever so slowly and, hey, at least its not crashing and hes passed healthcare reform and the wars,however slowly,are being wound down. And they still thrown garbage at him?? And,oh no, its not racism. No,sirreee, we aren’t racist. Seriously, go fuck off and DIAF.
lol
@MomSense:
Post-racial came from white people who thought electing a black president meant they could say all sorts of racist shit and you can’t call them on it because racism is obviously over because a minority of white people helped elect one black man to higher office for four years.
glory b
@stinger: Yeah, a black guy with a black wife says if they had a son, he’d be black.
I’m still wondering why that was sooooo offensive.
Another Holocene Human
@VincentN:
This is why I am horrified by the rhetoric around psychopaths and sociopaths these days, that they’re “not really human” and all the other alienating and othering language. Even if they did really all have to be locked up for our safety (not true), that xenophobic rhetoric is the groundwork for behaving just like the people you rhetorically condemned.
“Normal” people commit all sorts of crimes when under the influence of fear. Genocide. Torture. Rape. The worst of the worst, and all it takes is fear.
Sociopaths and psychopaths are only different because they don’t have that differentiating in-group behavior (consequentially, not saying this is motivating). They might even feign it, but secretly they hate you (or are indifferent to you) as much as you hate them thar M000slims.
Sociopaths in fact might be just like you, it’s just that their in-group consists of solely themselves and not, say, everyone who looks like them and shares their accent. The self-justifying of people who engage in the rankest kind of tribalism is just sickening.
I’ve also seen the othering language with autistic people. These discussions usually start with “they have no empathy” and end with “they’re not really human”. First of all, lie, secondly, taste the agenda here. More excuses to brutalize children with autism in state-funded institutes or homes and claim that since autistic children aren’t really human then torture, abuse, and neglect affect them differently, in fact paradoxically. This isn’t at all true, but some people will claim it with a straight face. (Google “DAN!” if you dare.)
I doubt that children with autism are more or less likely to have empathy than any other child but they do have an empathy “problem” which is the sensory issues that come with autism. There’s more than one kind of empathy. An important component is touch. Since many autistic children experience skin to skin touching as painful, they never set up the positive feedback circuit of affectionate touch. They want to be held and comforted but they experience it as frightening, hairy, and painful. They won’t hold or comfort others because they don’t like it themselves. If they do touch another it may be with an inappropriate grip. Temple Grandin, one of the most famous autistic advocates in the US, wrote about desensitizing herself to the pain of touch with a cattle holding device, the ultimate inappropriate grip. (It worked, though.) She described the process as calming.
Autistic children often have a broken theory of mind because they don’t react to stimuli the way neuro-typical people do. Everyone builds their TOK based on their own reactions. Ever heard of projection? The people with the most disordered TOKs are people with anti-social and especially personality disorders. Which says nothing of their ability to manipulate, this has more to do with cold-bloodedness than anything else. People with high amounts of empathy are not manipulators. They’re reciprocators if anything. To manipulate you have to fundamentally not care about the outcome to the other person.
Anti-social behavior is predicated by impulsivity. And this trait may be the most dangerous one in the severely autistic young adult. There is a small population of young adults with severe autism (and usually lots of comorbidity, ADHD, cognitive disabilities, physical disabilities, etc) who are not safe with their maternal caretakers. But with the attitudes of our society that a disability is a personal, family problem, and the throwaway rhetoric towards people with intellectual disabilities of any sort, I kind of understand why these parents ignore the warning signs and the pleas of friends and family and continue to care for this adult they can’t control.
Belafon
@VincentN: My mom is of the latter: “The ones I know are nice.” The woman she covered for was Latino, another group she’s not exactly thrilled with.
That’s why I said it’s not quite as simple as Eric was proposing. When I was a kid, we didn’t have a whole lot of money, but when my brother’s wealthy friends came over, we made sure they were fed. We took care of animals we found that were sick.
Another Holocene Human
@Matt McIrvin: I know quite a few disgusting white people who claimed they were Native American on college applications. And they weren’t even FFV claiming blood descent from Pocahontas, true but irrelevant. They were just liars.
They were in a bubble where they thought “real racism” (legitimate racism) didn’t exist and was all made up, the “race card” to get “free stuff” from suckers, I mean liberals.
Since they are liars themselves ….
Another Holocene Human
@mai naem mobile:
It was sour grapes and wound licking, though. The man is a shrewd politician. Just because he isn’t the raging narcissist of so many naive political junkies fantasies doesn’t mean he doesn’t have political chops. Anyone who knew about his career in IL would realize that. East coast media doesn’t pay much attention to flyover country is all.
Bubblegum Tate
@TriassicSands:
Hahaha! Please. Goopers steadfastly maintain that things aren’t even getting better. Hell, this doofus of an “analyst” maintains that we’ve had “several weeks of economic reports that have been one major disappointment after another.” Gee, he somehow missed that whole best-GDP-growth-in-about-a-decade thing. Somehow.
For bonus wingnuttery: He’s claiming that the forthcoming Arctic Blast is all but guaranteed to be the excuse for what is all but guaranteed to be lousy Q1 economic numbers because shut up, that’s why. And here I thought all the Arctic Blast did was prove that Al Gore is fat.
KG
@Matt McIrvin: very true, but it all plays back into the president somehow being divisive. it’s not about reality, it’s about truthiness. because as I’ve been saying for a while, the postmodernists won.
KG
@Bubblegum Tate: in about six months, they’ll start noticing good things happening and will give credit to the GOP majorities in Congress. After all, it’s what they did with Clinton.
WereBear
@Belafon: It’s because people behave differently according to who they think are fellow people.
Me, I have a HUGE circle… babies, old people, of any color or sexual inclination, creed or style. So I don’t have to make distinctions.
Heck, it’s fairly obvious I think pets are people too… and certainly every living thing is entitled to their own life and dignity.
It’s not difficult at all.
Shana
@stinger: Well, she’s an otherwise nice person to you at least.
MomSense
@lol:
Ok, but was it started by Republican operatives? I first remember hearing it from wannabe villagers, you know those pundits who haven’t arrived and seem to be on the farm team for a spot on the WAPO editorial page.
feebog
Color me unimpressed that this dirtbag is giving some of his employees a raise. Ten dollars an hour, wow. What’s next, a Christmas party?
ruemara
@stinger: honey, she’s a racist. Friends don’t let friends ignore the mental white hood they’re sporting. Don’t be nice, be ethical.
ruemara
@Belafon: Was it a black woman? There’s a big difference either way, between witnessing abuse without preventing it and seeing a person as possibly as good as or even better than you at things.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
Barack says, Barack says, Barack says…
Villago Delenda Est
@MomSense:
The scum of the Village.
Who are, I’ll concede, basically Rethug operatives.
Kyle
@Matt McIrvin:
As Chris Rock put it, “None of you (white guys) would trade places with me, and I’M RICH!”
JenJen
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: “The Queen of Versailles” is delicious.
TriassicSands
@Bubblegum Tate:
The mendacity and hypocrisy of Republicans, as individuals and as a party, are almost impossible to overstate. However, the point of my post was really about Krugman’s shift on Obama. I thought Krugman’s performance during the 2008 campaign was appalling, so it’s good to see him being fair to Obama and giving him credit when credit is due.
I’ll be watching Krugman in 2016. If he supports Clinton again, will he revert to his 2008 self, or has he matured and developed a stronger sense of balance than he had when Obama ran against Clinton? I’ll be really disappointed if the 2008 Krugman shows up again in 2016.