Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

T R E 4 5 O N

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

We still have time to mess this up!

The words do not have to be perfect.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Everybody saw this coming.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / This Week In Blackness / How the GOP Celebrates MLK

How the GOP Celebrates MLK

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mlk-priebus

Yesterday was Martin Luther King Day. To celebrate, actions and protests were planned all over the country. Hell, MTV even broadcast in black and white in an attempt to start a dialogue on race. Not to be forgotten, the GOP sent out this delightful photo of Reince Priebus, chairman of the GOP, standing in front of the King memorial.

Because, you know, when we think of the practices of the GOP, we think of the teachings of MLK.

Team Blackness also discussed the problematic thinking of NBC creating a new section just for black people, SNL’s gentrification sketch, and how to sue a tights company over your lack of orgasms.

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46Comments

  1. 1.

    RaflW

    It is not lost on me that the GOP picked a gray, rainy day for this photo op.

    Or that Reincypoo is all casual with his hands in his pocket, bored face, like he’s waiting for his limo to get him outta there.

    Or that he’s alone, as in, no one else from the GOP could be bothered to show up.

    Or that the quote could easily be read by fellow wingers as “The time is always right to do right” … so why don’t those lazy *&^# do right?

    What a multi-layered, frosted shit-cake.

  3. 3.

    Shakezula

    Based on the weather in that picture, he posed for it on Sunday, sent it out on Monday. Because nothing says I care like rushing out to take a picture at a person’s national monument a few hours before the holiday honoring that person.

  5. 5.

    elmo

    Oh, for the Photoshop skillz of my stepdaughter! The only way that picture is existentially accurate is if you envision Rancid PiePus pissing all over the MLK statue…

  8. 8.

    Violet

    He’s an awful person. Makes my skin crawl. He looks like he’s hiding all sorts of horrible secrets.

  10. 10.

    Cacti

    The worst thing about MLK Day is that it’s used by people who hated or would have hated him to make him some cuddly Santa Claus of Civil Rights figure…

    Rather than an activist who preached social justice, and said lots of uncomfortable things about our national fondness for violence, and the smug public attitudes toward poverty.

  11. 11.

    Waynski

    “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” Orwell

    Most people who read 1984 saw a dystopian vision of the future. The GOP saw a communications strategy.

  14. 14.

    Sly

    I submitted this over at LGM when the topic of the Right’s perennial effort to co-opt King as a conservative hero was brought up. It’s from Where Do We Go From Here, Chaos or Community?. Part retrospective on the movement and meditation on how it might play out, it was the last book written by King before his death.

    Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash.

    This characterization is necessarily general. It would be grossly unfair to omit recognition of a minority of whites who genuinely want authentic equality. Their commitment is real, sincere, and is expressed in a thousand deeds. But they are balanced at the other end of the pole by the unregenerate segregationists who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality. The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism. America had a master race in the antebellum South. Reestablishing it with a resurgent Klan and a totally disenfranchised lower class would realize the dream of too many
    extremists on the right.

    The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.

    The persistence of racism in depth and the dawning awareness that Negro demands will necessitate structural changes in society have generated a new phase of white resistance in North and South. Based on the cruel judgment that Negroes have come far enough, there is a strong mood to bring the civil rights movement to a halt or reduce it to a crawl. Negro demands that yesterday evoked admiration and support, today—to many—have become tiresome, unwarranted and a disturbance to the enjoyment of life. Cries of Black Power and riots are not the causes of white resistance, they are consequences of it.

    I’ve long believed that what was so remarkable about the movement’s leadership, and their greatest asset, was not in their organizational skill or their courage or their ability to present racism in morally unambiguous terms, but that they knew white people better than white people knew themselves.

  15. 15.

    Turd Burglar

    He looks like he’s standing at a urinal. No respect, no pride, just a privileged white guy looking arrogant.

  16. 16.

    PhoenixRising

    @Sly: Yep. The best part of ‘Selma’ was MLK explaining to the SNCC kids that he respected their work raising black consciousness, and they ought to respect the fact that his work focused on raising white consciousness.

  19. 19.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @Cacti:

    I think one of the reasons people are reacting so strongly against “Selma” is that it shows the ugly, dirty horror of what actually happened on that bridge, not the nice, sanitized version all us post-Civil Rights kids got taught in school. They were fucking beating people with baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire. That happened. In the United States of America, well within our parents’ memories.

  20. 20.

    jl

    @Turd Burglar: I think Priebus looks like a privileged white guy looking like a privileged white guy who doesn’t know how to look or what to think. Had to do some GOP outreach, whatever… stand there looking ? and wait for somebody to snap the pic. Then get back to work.

    Had they thought of the implicitly partisan ideological pun yet? It probably won’t be lost on the African-American community, or any other significant minority community of whatever description you like.

    ‘The time is always right to do right’, aka, we co-opt anything and anybody, because we are Right wing operatives, not a real poliitcal party anymore.

    Another entry in the annals of GOP outreach. Probably a minor one that will be forgotten in a day or two, to the conscious mind. But another brick in the wall that will drive away African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, Sikhs…. etc. etc.

    Good job, GOP. Keep it up. Probability that I will live to dance on your political grave ticked up just a little bit higher.
    But, it was transparent BS on MKL day, which I do admit is sad and regrettable.

  22. 22.

    TR

    @PhoenixRising:

    Yes, it is. Attention Balloon Juicers: The GOP fucked up the quote.

    It’s from King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

    Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

    Maybe it’s pedantic to point out how they screwed it up, but … no.

    Also, keep in mind that quote comes from King’s demand that the federal government take action in the South to secure the safety of African Americans who are being abused by local law enforcement. If Preibus wants to use that quote, fine, then he needs to follow the rest of the letter as well.

  23. 23.

    jl

    @TR: Thanks. Gotta get ‘right'(wing) in there as often as possible. That is the cynical view, that they purposely got it wrong. But who knows, their mishmash of incompetence, confusion and bad faith is very deep, and it is hard to fathom which is the driving force behind what they do in a particular instance.

    But, you know, this is GOP outreach, so you know they aren’t going to put much effort into doing quality work.

    Edit: And the GOP cannot follow the letter or the spirit of the whole of anything King said or wrote, since his advocacy for social justice for all the people of whatever description will come out as clearly as his message on racial civil rights. Can’t have that, it will wreck the co-opting effort.

  24. 24.

    jl

    Some evidence to support my hypothesis that incompetence, inattention and complete cluelessness is as reasonable explanation for what the GOP churns out as malice or Machiavellian coup-plotting or dog-whistling:

    Bobby Jindal Blasts Muslim ‘No-Go Zones’ After Fox News Retraction
    from TPM blog

    ‘ Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) on Monday sharply criticized so-called Muslim “no-go zones,” just two days after Fox News apologized for discussing them without any evidence to prove they exist.

    “In the West, non-assimilationist Muslims establish enclaves and carry out as much of Sharia law as they can without regard for the laws of the democratic countries which provided them a new home,” Jindal said in a speech to London’s Henry Jackson Society, as quoted by CNN. “It is startling to think that any country would allow, even unofficially, for a so called ‘no go zone.’” ‘

    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/bobby-jindal-no-go-zones

    I hope Ernst does as well as Jindal and Priegus tonight. It’s like a limbo dance where low bars can be the most difficult to beat. But, hey, I am rooting for Ernst tonight! She can do it! She has the chops!

  26. 26.

    WereBear

    @TR: Wow. That’s just jaw-droppingly arrogant and stupid. Nothing new, I know…

    But this, and Zandar’s wonderful article, just points up how the GOP are constantly dragging the country down to their level. And we just can’t manage that for much longer.

  27. 27.

    SatanicPanic

    @Turd Burglar: Like a teenager whose parents dragged him to a museum he didn’t want to go to. He’s got his hands in his pockets for crying out loud.

  30. 30.

    Hal

    Rinse Pubics is a vile human being. There is something so insufferably fake about him. He’s a robot programmed to dispense nothing but GOP talking points given out with a smile usually used by men who drive around neighborhoods trying to lure kids with the promise of free candy.

  31. 31.

    Caprice

    @Mnemosyne (iPhone): I agree. I was disappointed when I read her post. I don’t think Xeni was thinking clearly on this one. I wanted to share the link; some of the reader comments are excellent.

  32. 32.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @Caprice:

    I pretty much agree with the commenters because “fight speech with more speech” isn’t supposed to apply to actual libel and slander. The famous Falwell case was a protected parody — if they’d tried to publish an “investigative” article seriously making the same claims, Falwell would have won.

    I did appreciate the classic GIF, though. One of my favorites.

  33. 33.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @TR:

    Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

    But…but…

    The “quicksand of racial injustice” is the basis of the contemporary GOP…the Party of Jefferson Davis, the party that is convinced the wrong side won the Civil War. You know…the side that opposed Abraham Lincoln.

  34. 34.

    boatboy_srq

    @TR: That just screams deliberate alteration. One wonders whether, by changing the one word, the GOTea thinks they can avoid any complaint that they stole his exact words. Plus, with the Teahad’s fixation on “left/right”, it makes sense to reiterate one of their pet terms. As for the photo, RNC PR BS seems to be following the GOTea pattern of revering some historical figure renowned for upending the societal norms of the day only once s/he’s dead and memorialized in granite (just like Saint Ronnie, Lincoln, Jefferson, etc etc). Either all of that, or being typical Teahadists the effed up in the details again – but my votes on malicious intent with this one.

  36. 36.

    kuvasz

    Way to go Reince, there is nothing better for you than to look small standing next to a great man.

  37. 37.

    boatboy_srq

    @TR:

    that quote comes from King’s demand that the federal government take action in the South to secure the safety of African Americans who are being abused by local law enforcement.

    Takes some ‘nads to quote from THAT document after Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Louis Ross, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner.

  39. 39.

    PhoenixRising

    @SiubhanDuinne: I took my kid last night, and here’s what was interesting about the audience (putting on my Lily Tomlin hat for a moment): I was the only white person not old enough to remember the news footage the first time.

    That means something, and I have no idea what.

  41. 41.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Sly:

    It would be grossly unfair to omit recognition of a minority of whites who genuinely want authentic equality. Their commitment is real, sincere, and is expressed in a thousand deeds. But they are balanced at the other end of the pole by the unregenerate segregationists who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality.

    Balanced? This is far too kind. They outnumber us. Now, morally, they may collectively be featherweights, but numerically … see election, presidential, 2012.

  42. 42.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Violet: Scotty-boy is such a simpleton, to be the Koch’s creature. If he somehow does become president they will still own him, but if he goes down (in scandal, perhaps prosecution), he’ll go down alone.

  43. 43.

    jl

    @Another Holocene Human:

    I think the unregenerate segregationist whites are a small minority. The scared ignorant and bigoted whites who are willing to go along with unregenerate segregationist whites, and repeatedly get conned by politicians pandering to unregenerate segregationist whites, is sadly large. Maybe a majority of whites, still. They are not racists as long as people who do not look like them stay in their designated roles, whatever the bigoted white comfort zone happens to be these days. There have to SOME boundaries. A minority in a position of leadership is outside that comfort zone unless he or she consciously is in the service of white power structure, and any minority in leadership that shows any autonomy skeers them into hatred and even more bigotry. Sad commentary on some of my people.

  45. 45.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Because, you know, when we think of the practices of the GOP, we think of the teachings of MLK.

    So is MLK a Hard Right Conservative or a Commie this week in Wingnut land?

  46. 46.

    TG Chicago

    Y’all have mentioned a number of things odd about the symbolism of the photo. I’d add that the obvious image would be someone looking up at the statue thoughtfully. That’s a pretty obvious way to go. Instead Priebus seems to be turning his back on MLK — and rather dismissively at that.

    I don’t see how they thought sending out this image was a better idea than sending out nothing at all.

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