Dafna Linzer’s year-long ProPublica investigation into the factors surrounding supposedly color-blind presidential pardons from 1998 to 2008 is certainly one of the more important articles of the year. The bottom line is that white pardon seekers were four times more likely to be granted a pardon than blacks.
ProPublica’s review examined what happened after President George W. Bush decided at the beginning of his first term to rely almost entirely on the recommendations made by career lawyers in the Office of the Pardon Attorney.
The office was given wide latitude to apply subjective standards, including judgments about the “attitude” and the marital and financial stability of applicants. No two pardon cases match up perfectly, but records reveal repeated instances in which white applicants won pardons with transgressions on their records similar to those of blacks and other minorities who were denied.
Senior aides in the Bush White House say the president had hoped to take politics out of the process and avoid a repetition of the Marc Rich scandal, in which the fugitive financier won an eleventh-hour pardon tainted by his ex-wife’s donations to Democratic causes and the Clinton Presidential Library.
Justice Department officials said in a statement Friday that the pardon process takes into account many factors that cannot be statistically measured, such as an applicant’s candor and level of remorse.
“Nonetheless, we take the concerns seriously,” the statement said. “We will continue to evaluate the statistical analysis and, of course, are always working to improve the clemency process and ensure that every applicant gets a fair, merit-based evaluation.”
And given the extreme partisan politicization of the Justice Department under Bush 43, it’s no wonder that “wide latitude” was used to trash black applicants and give white collar whites a pass. Linzer explains this on Rachel Maddow’s show from Monday night:
“You know, they’re looking for the perfect person. They’re looking for this incredibly stable person, this ideal person who will not present a risk to the president. who will not be some person who goes out and commits a crime again. That’s their sense of what they’re looking for. Again, as you said, in each of these cases, we looked at bankruptcies, we looked at liens, tax liens against people. Did they own their own home? All kinds of things.
Each case we found minorities who were struck out who had bankruptcies or other issues. We found african-american applicants who wanted a pardon in order to improve their employment stability and were denied for employment instability. Or seeking a pardon because they want, you know, they want a better job. They want financial stability and denied for financial instability. At the same time we found successful white applicants pardoned by President Bush who had bankruptcies who filed for bankruptcy more than once.
Who were divorced multiple times, who had — for me one of the striking things was language that was used to describe African-Americans who had children outside of a marriage, where those children were described in denial recommendations as illegitimate or born out of wedlock. White successful applicants who had children outside of a marriage, those children were described as having been born from a previous or non-marital relationship, completely different language.”
It very much looks like the language used by these career Justice Department lawyers to describe minority pardon applicants, particularly African-Americans, was filled with negative racial dog whistle terms: “illegitimate children”, etc. It was staggering the fact that this happened time and time again. The protestations that the process was color-blind is what really eats at me, because it clearly was not.
Linzer’s investigation cites more examples:
In multiple cases, white and black pardon applicants who committed similar offenses and had comparable post-conviction records experienced opposite outcomes.
An African American woman from Little Rock, fined $3,000 for underreporting her income in 1989, was denied a pardon; a white woman from the same city who faked multiple tax returns to collect more than $25,000 in refunds got one. A black, first-time drug offender — a Vietnam veteran who got probation in South Carolina for possessing 1.1 grams of crack – was turned down. A white, fourth-time drug offender who did prison time for selling 1,050 grams of methamphetamine was pardoned.
All of the drug offenders forgiven during the Bush administration at the pardon attorney’s recommendation – 34 of them – were white.
Oh, and it gets worse besides just the race angle: the money and corruption angle was of course front and center as supplicants came to Congress to buy indulgences from the White House.
Turning over pardons to career officials has not removed money and politics from the process, the analysis found. Justice Department documents show that nearly 200 members of Congress from both parties contacted the pardons office regarding pending cases. In multiple instances, felons and their families made campaign contributions to the lawmakers supporting their pleas. Applicants with congressional support were three times as likely to be pardoned, the statistical analysis shows.
But in the end, white privilege was the name of the game.
The most striking disparity involved African Americans, who make up 38 percent of the federal prison population and have historically suffered from greater financial and marital instability. Of the nearly 500 cases in ProPublica’s sample, 12 percent of whites were pardoned, as were 10 percent of Hispanics.
None of the 62 African Americans in the random sample received a pardon. To assess the chances of black applicants, ProPublica used the sample to extrapolate the total number of black applicants and compare it with the seven blacks whom Bush pardoned. Allowing for a margin of error, this yielded a pardon rate of between 2 percent and 4 percent.
Everything the Bush administration did was political. Everything. And everything they did involving the lives of African-Americans turned to complete shit. Every. Single. Time. Just another line item on the long, long bill of goods that “compassionate conservatism” represents to the black community since the 80’s, I guess. I’m not surprised at this, just moderately depressed that the only thing this accomplished was sweeping yet another massive white privilege iceberg under the rug until somebody with enough tenacity actually asked questions. 38% of the prison population, 2-4% of the pardons. It’s enough weight on my soul to even make me miss a step trying to carry it.
At the very least I’d like to see a truly transparent pardon process come out of this disaster. That needs to happen regardless of this investigation, and the people to do it are President Obama and AG Eric Holder.
Here’s hoping we get an announcement on that new process soon, and thanks to Dafna Linzer and ProPublica for bringing this to light.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Welcome to Texas.
DougJ
Great post.
edmund dantes
I have never understood the requirement of “feelings of remorse”. Pardons are supposed to be used to correct gross injustices and wrongs perpetuated by the courts and society at large.
This, to me, would mean people that are wrongfully convicted or sentenced to a punishment that far outweighs the crime (a place where remorse might be handy).
burnspbesq
Discretion and transparency are irreconcilable. If you say you want transparency, you are in effect saying you want a different system, a system driven by defined standards, compliance with which can be measured. That might well be a better system, but it is not the system that the Framers built into the Constitution.
Tom Levenson
What DougJ says.
We need to keep pounding on this one: the Bush administration and the Republican party that both belched them up and that they then shaped is not so much a party as a gang. You’re one of ours, then that’s good enough. One of them, there’s no way you can ever be good enough.
A good first step would be to ask each of the Republican candidates how they stand on the corruption of the pardon process under Bush.
handsmile
And thanks to you, Zandar, for front-paging this report to provide broader attention to its appalling conclusions.
Rachel Maddow devoted a considerable portion of her Monday night program to the interview with Dafna Linzer. She was unstinting with praise for the meticulousness of the report’s findings and the years of dogged research prior to its publication. (I’ve never been quite sure of the degree to which Maddow is watched/valued by the BJ commentariat.)
I understand that PBS broadcast a segment on the ProPublica investigation last night. Also, I was gobsmacked to learn this morning that the report was co-published by Kaplan Test Prep Daily! (How did Charles Lane and Fred Hiatt ever permit that to happen??)
The report relates conflicts within the Bush administration on the operations of the pardons office, particularly its paucity of recommendations. One case is highlighted, involving a Brooklyn-based, Nigerian-born minister who faced deportation for a heroin conviction, that necessitated a Justice Department inspector general investigation.
Here is Roger Adams, who headed the pardons office from 1998-2008:
“When asked by investigators in the inspector general’s office to explain his remarks, Adams said that Nigerian immigrants “commit more crimes than other people” and that an applicant’s nationality is “an important consideration” in pardons, according to the report. “It’s one the White House wants to know about,” Adams told investigators.”
It will come as no surprise that Adams claims his remarks were taken out of context. By the way, Adams is “astounded” by the ProPublica findings because after all “I can recall several African Americans getting pardons.”
There is not enough bleach in all the world to cleanse the American government from the stains and despoliations of the Bush/Cheney administration. And, of course, we must look forward.
The Moar You Know
The outsourced Administration. Bush didn’t want to deal with anything and just turned it over to whomever was standing in front of him at the time so he could go back to playing with toy planes, pretzels, and his favorite plaything of all, booze.
Schlemizel
Que FAUX News headline:
“Pardons of black inmates increases 250% under Obama. Could race be a factor?“
amk
The neocons led bush-cheney admin with a complicit & compliant congress fucked up america forever in more ways than one can possibly imagine.
sherifffruitfly
Clearly the only rational conclusion to be drawn is that this is yet further proof that black folks are reverse-racist against white folks.
Poor, poor downtrodden us. (sobs)
Schlemizel
@The Moar You Know:
Don’t discount that they really want the government to fail. They like to put incompetent partisans in charge of things, then, when the inevitable screw up happens, claim that government can’t do anything right.
That Boy Blunder spent all the free time this disinterest in governance allowed him eating cheezy-poofs watching college sports on TV was, for him, just a happy coincidence.
Frankensteinbeck
Handsmile:
‘She goes off half cocked once in a blue moon, but is a breath of fresh air in the rancid conservative-fellating infotainment cloud of flatulence that is TV news.’
burnspbesq
@Tom Levenson:
That would actually be a pointless step, because every Republican candidate will reject the premise of the question and go off on some tangent.
From a purely legal perspective, it’s absurd to even talk about “corruption” of the pardon process, because the Constitution imposes no baseline against which it could be measured.
Roger Moore
You can’t depoliticize the pardon process by turning it over to the DOJ if you’re rapidly politicizing the DOJ at the same time. The only thing you can do is to hope it looks like you’re depoliticizing it in hopes of looking good politically.
burnspbesq
From The Federalist, No. 74 (written by Hamilton):
Clearly, Bush didn’t live up to the Hamiltonian ideal. And I think I implicitly conceded, in comment 4, that one can properly object on political or moral grounds to the manner in which a President exercises the pardon power. But there are no legal constraints on Presidential discretion in the exercise of the pardon power. Anyone or no one, for any reason or for no reason.
Citizen Alan
Every now and then, the idea pops into my head that at some point in the distant future, I might run out of things for which I can hate the Bush Administration. And then something like this comes out and I realize that no, I will hate them all until my dying breath. Fucking bastards.
Soonergrunt
What you are saying here is bad, Zandar. But it’s not the same thing as saying that white people were favored by the Bush administration over non-whites as a matter of policy from the oval office. These people were vetted and passed by career civil servants in the pardons office.
It seems to me that the problem is in the system itself. It is entirely possible for the system to have racist tendencies that express in the results of the pardons for whites vs. minorities, but it’s a hell of a leap to the conclusion that some commenters have made–a conclusion pushed by the picture accompanying the article–that racist outcomes were the result of intent.
Could the executive office of the President made a better effort at ensuring that the results were more balanced and that people got treated more fairly? Yeah, I’ll go there. I’ll even grant that they should have done so.
But that’s still not the same thing as implying that the results that obtained in the real world were due to intentional racism on the part of President Bush or any of his personal staff.
@Roger Moore:
I can see this definitely being a contributing factor, but with the Bush family, it’s ALWAYS about loyalty first, and then money with them.
gene108
@burnspbesq:
I would take your response to Tom’s point a step further.
Not only will you have tangents, the tangents will be filled with racist dog whistles about how superior America was in the “good old days” and how we need to “take our country back”.
TooManyJens
@Frankensteinbeck: I’m not sure who you’re quoting, but I wish to subscribe to their newsletter.
piratedan
@burnspbesq: well in this case, hows about we use the last administrations actions as the low bar and move on from there….
Zandar
@Soonergrunt: It’s nearly impossible for me or anyone else to prove the specific intent of racism going into the process.
It’s very difficult to argue in favor of the results of that process, however.
MikeJ
@Soonergrunt: When the criteria employed produce results that are so lopsided against a group of people that vote 90% against your party, suspicion is called for.
Whether it was by design or incompetence there’s no doubt of what the outcome was, and it’s the outcome one would expect if one were to be maximally cynical.
burnspbesq
@piratedan:
No objection.
One final point, and then I have to get to work.
@Roger Moore: The notion that the exercise of the pardon power should be apolitical is relatively new. I believe it was Madison who justified the granting of the pardon power by reference to its potential use as a tool to quell insurrection. And that is exactly how Washington used it in the first noteworthy exercise of the power, pardoning the only two participants in the Whiskey Rebellion who were convicted on Federal treason charges.
Schlemizel
@TooManyJens:
I believe he was offering an opinion on Maddow as the original comment wondered about the BJ attitude toward her. I agree with Frankenseinbecks assessment myself but think the general population here runs hot & cold on her depending on how they think she did on an obat/firebagger scale. Some percentage of people are pissed at her because they think she was too kind or too harsh on the President.
JGabriel
OT, but do you believe this shit?
TPM:
More than seven months after Obama ordered the (successful!) raid to kill or capture bin Laden, and the GOP is still Oh-and-another-thing-ing about it. Assholes.
.
Mnemosyne
@Soonergrunt:
Dude, please tell me that was snark. After their actions (or, rather, lack of them) with New Orleans and their well-known corruption of the Justice Department, including the civil rights division, we’re supposed to give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt on race and assume this was all an innocent mistake by Bush appointees? Seriously?
Mnemosyne
Also, too, it’s pretty well known at this point that Marc Rich wasn’t pardoned because he was a Democratic Party donor. He was pardoned because it was requested by Israel while Bill Clinton was trying to negotiate one last peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. But that, of course, is The Political Influence That Dare Not Speak Its Name.
Rihilism
This strikes me as pretty strong evidence of intent…
sherparick
It should be recalled that the Justice Department, including the civil service, was substantially politized during the Bush-Cheney Administration.
However, the real lesson to be drawn from this is that we Whites have variety of memes, stereotypes, and load of crap we carry in our little heads that we pick up growing up about the others in the world who are not so melanin challenged as ourselves. Unless one makes one-self conscious about this crap in one’s own head, to learn as Adam Smith wrote in “A Theory on Moral Sentiments” to imaginatively place one self in the shoes of another, then you will let these little mental algorithims run where the guy/gal who looks like you do, well he/she must really be alright, but that dark looking fellow, well, I know “how those people are.” It really operates below conscious thought, which is why Movement Conservatives get so angry when accused of being “racist” and just figure Liberals are finding a cheap way of getting moral superiority, since they don’t deliberately think about acting racist, and because it is not a deliberate spoken thought, the actual racists effects don’t count. Andrew Sullivan is exhibit A for such obtuseness when he talks about differences in group intelligence for racial groups.
catclub
um, I did not read the article, but given the start date listed in the post of 1998, I would have guessed that a racial bias in pardons is just about inherent in the US government, in any procedure that does not specifically come under equal opportunity oversight and regulations. Pardons don’t. The people in those offices are predominantly white,
inherent bias ( to a greater or lesser extent) happens.
Did she find a dramatic change in and after 2001? if so, why not mention that in the headline posting?
Villago Delenda Est
The bottom line is that if you install a loathsome sack of deserting shit in the White House, Presidential powers are going to be misused by said loathsome sack of deserting shit.
This is the lesson of 2001-2009.
Soonergrunt
@Zandar:
@Mnemosyne:
@Mnemosyne: I don’t attribute specific racist intent where I don’t see it when it is adequately explained by their general sociopathic behavior towards those they view as their lessers. That this behavior tends to affect minorities much more than it does whites is (I believe) more the result of the fact that minorities make up a much higher proportion of the socio-economic classes about which they don’t give a shit than do whites.
The problem isn’t that they are racists. The problem is that they are total bastards.
When Barbara Bush said
it wasn’t because she hated or despised African Americans any more than anyone else. It was because she doesn’t perceive the plight of the poor (who are disproportionately made up of minorities) to be worthy of her attention, and she couldn’t form a socially acceptable response, not even a fake one, when she was forced to confront it on national television.
I’m saying that Barb and her son don’t have any special enmity for minorities. I’m saying that they don’t give a damn, and I’m suggesting that it’s because poor people in general, and minorities in particular, can’t do anything for them.
Amir Khalid
@JGabriel:
Sure I can believe it. To Santorum and other Republicans, everything Obama does is wrong. Obama promptly announced the killing of Osama; therefore he should have kept Osama’s death a secret, even though Santorum can’t explain how America could have kept al-Qa’ida from noticing such a thing.
FormerSwingVoter
@Soonergrunt:
I think I agree with what you’re saying here. If this were really that Bush-specific, we wouldn’t see it in every state at every level everywhere within our law enforcement system.
African-Americans are forty times more likely to be imprisoned than white people for drug crimes, despite all studies showing that African-Americans have an equal or slightly lower likelihood to use or deal drugs than Caucasians. Not twice as likely. Not even ten times as likely. Forty fucking times as likely. That’s not due to Bush. That’s because every time you give a power structure of any sort the ability to use discretion, they will always always always apply that discretion differently to people of different races.
I can almost guarantee you that there are similar numbers in the pardons for even the bluest states. It’s fun to hate on Bush, but this kind of shit is everywhere in the system.
Citizen Alan
@JGabriel:
Of course, they’re still furious. The Repukes wanted bin Laden to live forever as a perpetual boogie-man. That’s why they let him escape at Tora Bora. That’s why they pursued policies that had the effect of improving Al-Qaeda’s recruitment. For the last ten years, Al-Qaeda has had no greater friend in all the world than the GOP.
Soonergrunt
@JGabriel: Rick who? This guy?
Tom Levenson
@burnspbesq: @gene108:
My point is that this is a (minor) LBJ pigf*cker moment. Or rather a reverse one with a tuck and inside spin.
Which is to say — it’s not the answers I care about, it’s foregrounding of the racisim in the question. Make GOPsters fumble about how they are so not racist, and the ongoing alienation of the party from the fastest growing segments of the electorate proceeds.
Yes, there will be dogwhistles to their base. So what? They don’t already have that vote locked up? The real race now is to make sure every last low-info voter who is actually not crazy gets to catch whiffs of the crazy as often as possible.
In other words, channeling LBJ, while I know that no GOP candidate is going to cop to institutionalized racism in the Bush administration, make them deny it.
Woodrowfan
someone call Ralph Nadar and tell him we found another reason to say there was a difference between Gore and Bush.
Jeff Fecke
I’m absolutely not surprised by this, and really, I don’t blame Bush specifically. Racism is endemic in our justice system. Why wouldn’t this apply to pardons?
Racism is generally systemic. It isn’t any one person’s fault. It’s all of our faults, collectively. Until and unless we actually start working to correct the racism in our system, it’s going to continue to flourish. Going after pardons is a good place to start, but we shouldn’t pretend this is the only problem, or even the most serious one.
That doesn’t diminish this story; it’s outrageous. I’m glad ProPublica did it. And we should work to solve it.
handsmile
Well, I’m not going to be bashful on the imputation of racism on the part of Roger Adams, who headed the Pardons Office throughout the Bush/Cheney years, as evidenced by his remarks in the case of the black evangelical minister Chibueze Okorie.
“[Okorie is] about as honest as you could expect from a Nigerian. Unfortunately that’s not very honest….[Nigerian immigrants] commit more crimes than other people.”
Investigating this case, officials from the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office determined that Adams was not citing any officially compiled crime statistics in those remarks. Moreover, they concluded:
Mnemosyne
@Soonergrunt:
Weirdly, I actually agree with you that Bush didn’t specifically hate minorities — that’s probably one reason they couched the language in the ways they did, by referring to black petitioners as having “illegitimate children” but white petitioners as having “children from a previous relationship.”
But the people he hired and put in charge were racist and did act out of racism, and he doesn’t get a free pass for that.
Pococurante
@Rihilism: Of course. Remember also that black folks “loot” during national disasters while white folks “scavenge desperately needed supplies”.
Soonergrunt
@Jeff Fecke: This is a better way of saying a lot of what I meant to say.
I have all sorts of reasons to hate Bush and his people. Some of those are very personal. But blaming him for something like this won’t solve this problem. It might make me feel better and be of a piece with things he is actually responsible for, but in will only make me feel better. It won’t actually relieve my moral responsibility as an American for the systemic problem of racism in my country.
That’s what I was trying to say earlier, and as per usual, somebody else made my point better than I did.
@Mnemosyne: I agree, and that’s why I originally said
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Schlemizel: My low opinion of Maddow’s show (which is not the same thing as having a negative opinion about Maddow herself) has little to do with where she lands on a given day and everything to do with a belief that the format of her show, and pretty much everything else in the evening lineup of the cable networks, is fundamentally useless and destructive. That she is the best of an extremely bad lot says a lot more about the rest of them than it does her. Just because I tend to agree with Maddow more often than the vast majority of her colleagues does not make the format any better.
slag
This can’t be true. We have a black President.
@Jeff Fecke:
I don’t think anyone is pretending that. I think people are taking the tiny slices of the system in their purview and recognizing the white privilege embedded therein. When more people do that–when we have more and more studies like this one–our cultural and political systems change. That’s why it’s great to highlight them when we can. More like them!
Cermet
Let$ me gue$$ what is the one BIG difference$ between ‘White$$$’ getting a pardon$$$$ and blacks trying to get a pardon? Say something like …$uh, like … $ maybe …; no, can’t see any reason$. I wonder why there is a difference in the rate $?$$$
slag
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): I hate teevee as much as the next person. But many of the clips of Maddow’s show I see online are really quite good. I’m sure my sample is biased, but that doesn’t make the good stuff any less good. It may just mean she needs more good stuff.
There’s not much wrong with the “format” of her show that I’ve seen. She’s doing good work within the constraints she has. You can’t expect any of these people to singlehandedly change American culture overnight, can you?
Roger Moore
@Rihilism:
It seems like evidence of bias, but not necessarily intent. It could easily be unconscious bias, looking at people who “look like me” and seeing their messed up personal lives as the kinds of things that could happen to anyone, while seeing the same things in people who “don’t look like me” as proof that they’re screwups. It happens all the time, even to people who honestly believe they’re unbiased.
Citizen Alan
@Mnemosyne:
I took his comment to mean that the Bush DOJ was not setting out with the deliberately malicious intent of being racists towards African-Americans. Rather it was the (equally bad) unconscious racism of internally believing that an African-American was more likely than a white to be a recidivist. Or a serial bankruptcy filer. Or that an African-American’s out-of-wedlock children were the result of character flaws endemic to African-American culture while a white’s out-of-wedlock children were the result of character flaws endemic to just that person rather than the larger white community.
None of which excuses them in any way — racism is racism. But I think it is more effective to challenge racists on the basis of their unconscious assumptions rather than viewing them as “eeevilll” cartoon villains who deliberately act out of malice. I’d wager none of the DOJ personnel responsible for these disparities consciously hates blacks on general principle. They’re just conditioned to slot blacks and whites into different categories for the same behavior. You know, the way after a hurricane the whites will bravely venture forth looking for emergency supplies while the blacks will just loot. That sort of thing.
handsmile
@Soonergrunt: (#32)
Rihilism
Whew! Sometimes the advert’s for this blog are just fucking weird. Apparently, based on this discussion (and based on previous web activity?), I have an ad for meeting single AA men…
@handsmile:
Wow! That is truly fucked up. But, hey, it only took them ~120 years, so I guess that’s a kind of progress…
Rosali
Great post.
Black rapper/singer John Forte was pardoned by GWB for his cocaine conviction. I guess his pardon was not recommended by the DOJ. Instead, his pardon was pushed by Carly Simon.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@slag: No, but I can wish that people would stop relying upon short segment cable news programs as the place from which to get their information. I understand that that isn’t going to happen, but the basic format of shows like Maddow’s is almost guaranteed to produce shallow and misinformed viewers. That’s true regardless of the leanings of the host. Yes, she probably does the best with what she has to work with, but what she has to work with is terrible. The basic premise of her show, just like all of the others like it, namely that this is a good way to educate people, is false.
slag
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN): I don’t know. I found this segment, for example, both mildly informative and mildly engaging. Yes, I was primed by having already read something about the topic, but I’m not sure how much of a difference that made. At the very least, I look at these programs as a means of quickly discerning whether or not I want to know more about a topic.
But then I watch entire online episodes of similarly formatted shows dedicated to other topics–NOVA ScienceNOW being a good example–for the very same reason. I’m never going to learn everything I want to know from it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t learn anything from it.
Rihilism
@Roger Moore:
True, and it’s awfully hard to prove intent. I, myself, am unconsciously predisposed to assume that every Republican I meet is a racist bastard, though I often intend not to do so…;)…..
slag
@Roger Moore:
I blame rampant pc egalitarianism for this problem.
Though, seriously speaking, I’ve stopped accepting this kind of excuse from grown adults who’ve lived in the world enough to make their way to the DOJ (or to The Daily Beast, for that matter). Really. At what point do you get to start holding people responsible for their attitudes and behaviors?
metricpenny
“It’s enough weight on my soul to even make me miss a step trying to carry it.”
Great description. I feel you Zandar.
Rihilism
@slag: I actually enjoy Maddow’s personality and style but I watch Maddow for similar reasons. I don’t expect to learn everything there is to know about any given topic, but often I’m made aware of things that hadn’t yet crossed my radar. She has also dabbled in the “long-form” news format as well with her documentary about the murder of Dr. Tiller. I hope she does more of that.
I tend to watch Frontline (often in collaboration with ProPublica) for more in-depth analysis of subjects, though it is still constrained by time limits and the range of subjects that can be effectively distilled into a 1-2 hour program.
It seems that books and long magazine articles would be the most efficacious means to acquire in-depth analysis, though you do need to consider the author’s biases (why does that word keep popping up?)….
Tone in DC
Hell no.
I cannot and will not give Bush Jr., his administration and his appointees the benefit of the doubt. Not after Katrina. Not after the US Attorney scandal.
Monica Goodling, Sara Taylor, Dana Perino and the rest of these poor excuses for human beings in no way, shape, or form merit the benefit of the doubt.
ABL
@Soonergrunt: i don’t understand the need to parse racist intent from racist outcome. the result is still the same.
it bothers me that the first step always seems to be to absolve a person of the charge “racist” before dealing with the real problem which is… racism.
intent? inherent bias? what’s the difference? the result is the same.
hopefully some day folks won’t see it as the ultimate offense to call someone or something racist and will see the ultimate offense as being the unequal outcomes that have plagued this country since its founding.
The Spy Who Loved Me
I’ve got a sinus headache today. I’m pretty sure it’s George Bush’s fault. Everything is.
Ben Cisco
@ABL:
From your keyboard to the Prophet’s ears.
Soonergrunt
@ABL: I’m not trying to absolve anyone of anything.
I think, and maybe I’m wrong, that if we blame them for things that we are responsible for fixing, that we risk letting ourselves off the hook instead of taking responsibility for fixing the problem.
They might, in fact, be racists, and this is a direct result of their racist intent.
Whether intent made it worse or not, I’m saying that there is racism in the system that was there before Bush and his cronies got there and while they may have temporarily made it worse, it was there after they left. Hopefully Obama and his people have diminished that, but I believe it will still be there to some extent even after they leave, and whether or not Bush and/or some of his people are racists and not merely sociopathic shit-heads, we, all of us, are responsible for allowing these episodes to occur, and we are guilty of the actions of our government and our society with respect to minorities here. From that guilt flows our responsibility for working to identify and fix these problems in our government and our society.
Again, after writing out a long screed, the simple answer comes–I don’t think the outcomes would’ve been much different under any other President, and therefore I don’t have any reason to believe that Bush or his minions are particularly racist compared to anyone else. I’d love to be able to say with 100% honesty and 100% certainty that such could never happen under President Democrat, but I think we all know that to not be true, and to also know that we have a long collective way to go before we can get there, and we shouldn’t be doing anything that rushes to absolve ourselves of our collective guilt.
FormerSwingVoter
@ABL: Parsing intent from outcome is really important to white people, as this is basically the first step to getting a white person to acknowledge that racism exists in the first place. Most white folks think “I am not a racist, and neither are my buddies on the police force” because they don’t know anyone going to Klan meetings; it’s only once you show the data that explicitly shows how things are worse and explain how those white cops they’re friends with just might be more willing to arrest black people than white people even if they don’t wear a white hood that it begins to resonate on any level.
TL;DR version: parsing racist intent from racist results is important to white people because that’s exactly how a lot of us got to recognize that racism still exists in the first place.
burnspbesq
@Cermet:
If you’re suggesting that there was bribery involved, I will ask what you have in the way of evidence. If you are suggesting that there might be some correlation between campaign contributions and pardons, that’s superficially plausible but unproven and probably unprovable.
Your argument reduces to the proposition that having better lawyers improves a petitioner’s chances of being pardoned. That’s neither outrageous, nor surprising, nor even newsworthy. It is widely acknowledge that Marc Rich’s pardon was the result of some extremely good lawyering, by (ironically enough) one Lewis (Scooter) Libby.
burnspbesq
@ABL:
In effect, you are saying that it is always appropriate to infer discriminatory motive from disparate impact.
That’s not the law, and I suspect you know that’s not the law.
I also think it’s epistemologically incorrect. But that’s me. YMMV.
If that’s the way you choose to roll, then roll that way.
Schlemizel
@burnspbesq:
Thats not how I take what she said. What I see is that it does not matter if Bush was a racist, the end result of his actions showed a decided advantage to the majority class and a decided disadvantage to the minority one. They continued, and in many cases extended, the cost of being a minority in America.
That would be racist.
In fact it might help in coming to understand the difficulty in ending racial discrimination if people would realize that they might not think of themselves as racist while they end up supporting racist goals.
Mnemosyne
@FormerSwingVoter:
Yep, this. Most of us white folks can point to that moment where it finally clicked because someone pointed out that while we might not have had bad intentions when we said/did something that was racist, it was still racist to say/do it. It seems like a simple connection to make, but it really isn’t.
Chuck Butcher
It seems to me that no matter how rigorous a use of statistics used in matters like pardons or even home loans blacks (minorities) will lose thanks to the “heads you lose, tails you lose” position we’ve created over the last 250 years or so. Whenever you put any person in a lose/lose position you will get undesirable results. Sometimes sufficient dedication and luck over-rule that result but the outcomes are self-reinforcing of the view that they are simply losers.
Things like gang culture and other socially undesirable acts don’t arise in a vacume, it is an entirely predictable reaction to try to find approval and “family” under a set of “social” rules or to disregard the social constraints in the face of what can only be seen as a broken deal.
We (and I don’t just mean “whites”) keep telling people that they are equal and then forcing them to be unequal and expect good results. Breaking that self-reinforcing cycle is the real trick and the how is a real damn good question.