Weird. John Aravosis is shocked to find out that the National Review is behaving exactly like the National Review behaved forty years ago.
In other news the GOP is freaking out that people will think that they’re racists. Or maybe they’re worried that their blatant f*cking racism will hurt the tribe in November, who knows. Sounds like a distinction without a difference.
John S.
That’s a very Krugman-esque title, Tim.
John Cole
God forbid they burt the tribe.
Tim F.
1) I don’t read the Times any more, 2) popular song lines with punchy political connotations get cannibalized fairly often, and 3) you’re a pedant.
4tehlulz
burt the tribe?
Studly Pantload
What might one do to ernie one’s tribe, and in either case, is there felt involved?
demkat620
I think I’ve overdosed on thi9s. Too funny. Just too funny.
Do they not get how stupid they look? Tucker had some Politico guy on talking about this and he was saying something like The GOP needs to learn things that are inherent in most people. My jaw dropped I just lost it.
How the fuck did these people ever win anything?
demkat620
Oh and a hearty “use fuckin spell check” to you Tim. I just googled “burt the tribe”
I’ve been hear too long.
Digital Amish
Shorter RNC
“Exactly how much racism or sexism can we use?”
4tehlulz
What the hell does that even mean?
Sstarr
I can start to see the real outline of the Republican attack on Obama – IF he’s nominated. They’ll say he’s not a real American. He spent too much time abroad. He grew up in Hawaii. He’s not an authentic, real, true blue American. He won’t wear his lapel pin. He’s not patriotic enough. He may be nice, but deep down he’s just not one of US.
There you go! You’ve cleaned up and sanitized the anxieties of the Republican party’s base for general public consumption. This attack is just a more respectable version of the slander that Obama is secretly a Muslim fanatic, or that he’s a scary angry black man.
It may be effective. It could be hard to combat.
demkat620
He meant that most people know there are lines not to cross but that the GOP don’t know what or where the lines are.
Jen
Sstarr, I think you’re right and I hope Greenwald is also right.
BTW, is “Nedra Pickler” a name out of Harry Potter or the Lemony Snicket series, do you think?
Dug Jay
Apparently Tim doesn’t read this blog. This nonsense was covered in previous editions going back to early last week.
Mike S
My favorite part of the NRO post.
If you don’t want to be called a racist, I suggest you stop being one.
demkat620
I’ve been impressed with Obama’s handling of this stuff as well. He just doesn’t give them any rope. Just even handledly turns it back on them. Very cool stuff.
jrg
From the Carpetbagger Article:
It might be that the GOP has finally grown a brain and realized what kind of damage Media Matters and people with digital recorders can do.
People like Eric Boehlert have been fighting a guerrilla campaign against these sleaze balls, and doing a hell of a job of capturing their oratory bombs and throwing them back to a much wider audience.
It must suck for the GOP – what used to be their greatest strength is quickly becoming their greatest weakness. Now they’ve got to save all their “Macacas” for the Klan rally.
calipygian
To be fair, Lisa Schiffern, the dumbass who posted that particularly horrible dreck, kind of sort of apologized:
Shorter dickhead: Sorry you were too dumb to understand the point that I made poorly.
Dennis - SGMM
Good thing you fixed that post for verily it is said:
Burt not the tribe lest rather than burter thou becomest burtee.
MonkeyBoy
Why can’t we just have an honest discussion of whether a white woman is a slut if she marries a well endowed black buck with a lot of stamina.
Jeffro
The GOP’s seeing how far they can go, not to avoid offending minorities, but how far they can play their racist-tinged games without offending ‘soccer moms’ and what not.
They could give a sh!t about what African Americans think (obviously). And while the article tries to be even-handed about the GOP focus-grouping racist/sexist attacks, you know they’re just concerned about the former for the practical reason that if Hillary’s nominated, their work is already done – McCain can and will beat her.
Delia
Translation: Sociopaths, who operate by ruthless manipulation of other people, actually have no understanding of the things like morality, decency, and ethics that are inherent in most people. They need to study them, not so they can absorb any sort of morality, which is foreign to their nature, but so they can know how to talk the code necessary to enable them to manipulate their targets.
Jorge
Obama has always been a half-breed with a funny name. The swift-boaters are not going to be the first people to call him names and make fun of him. My guess is that when they start treading in those waters he’ll do the same thing he did to the Clinton’s – throw them an anchor.
jake
Alarmingly accurate PotD. Fortunately, this is the GOP we’re talking about. Most sociopaths don’t announce they’re looking for victims, but the Little Party that Fails can’t help itself. I guess they’ll salvage this lack of message discipline by running bigoted ads anyway and claiming that the only reason anyone’s saying they’re bigoted is because the RNCs plans to be extra special nice to their brown skinned brothers and ladies got misinterpreted by the Librul MSM.
What’s a nedra and how do you pickle one?
myiq2xu
Since you mentioned it
chopper
i do believe it involves tribe burting.
calipygian
Kellyanne Conway is quoted as saying:
Insert cheap and tawdry joke here.
p.a.
I think the GOP’s ‘let’s figure out how not to appear racist’ strategy will last until the polls show them in trouble- if they don’t already. Then it will be ‘all Willie Horton all the time’. By the time they’re done, the true believers will think they’d be better off with Osama as pres. than Obama.
myiq2xu
I remember when her last name was “Fitzpatrick” and she was a regular on Politically Incorrect.
She always wore miniskirts and we had to take a shot every time she flashed her panties.
wasabi gasp
The Full Frontal Burt
Martin
To be fair, the focus group came back and said that statement indeed crossed the line.
Honestly, these jackasses are perfectly wiling to twist Michelle Obama’s live comment to fit their meme without apology, yet we give them a pass when they run a piece through probably 3 editors and a handful or rewrites and come back a week later and declare, “Oh, sorry, when I suggested he was probably a communist nigger-jew, y’all missed my real point that we don’t *actually* know what derogatory label to attach to him that we can hang him on later. ”
And the interesting part is that they aren’t the only ones to start on the ‘he’s an enigma’ meme recently. WaPo has been as well. So, I don’t buy the apology. I’ll take it as backpedaling over an honest statement that didn’t track.
coolcajun
The democrats are worse! – Had to repeat the oh so popular RNC tag line.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
There is another angle to this that everybody is missing.
This is just going to destroy the GOP’s legendary message control. All these years they’ve been able to play with fire, finely calibrating their dog whistle messages (hello Willie Horton!) to get maximum effect without offending the tender sensibilities of the soccer moms, because they could count on everybody on their side to stick to the script. Walking just up to the line of blatant offensiveness without actually crossing over it only works well when everybody on the team does it together, because otherwise it gives the game away.
That won’t work this time because having a woman or minority as the Dem candidate will be like waving a red flag at a bull. The nastiest part of the GOP base won’t listen to their marching orders, they won’t stick to the approved talking points, instead their brains will swell up with rage and they will just charge!!!
The more moderates GOPers will watch in horror as the red-meat wing of their army ignores all of their carefully crafted plans and goes galloping straight into the teeth of PC gulch with nary a moment’s thought for what might happen, or how it fits into the larger strategy. The charge of the Iron-My-Shirts brigage will be long remembered.
So I hope the RNC spends a bazillion dollars on preparing focus-group tested subliminal messages – it will be money totally wasted. You might as well design a windmill to generate energy from a tornado. The illusion that they are going to be able to control and calibrate what is going to happen is about as laughable.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
brigage = brigade
(sigh) this is what happens when you burt something out without proofreading.
The Other Steve
I really don’t care what they do in Florida.
Here in Minnesota, we’re having a party!
The Legislature just overrode the Governor’s Veto on a Transportation Bill!
Not only that, but it was BI-PARTISAN! Republicans have lost seats in the last two election cycles over this issue and the Governor’s previous vetoes. They didn’t want to lose another 10 seats over the issue.
A lousy 5 cents a gallon. That’s all it was, but it’s been vetoed three times.
Apparently these Republicans woke up and realized they didn’t want to see another bridge go down.
Oregon guy
But the real question here is: does anyone on the intert00bz have screenshots of Kellyanne Coneay nee’ Fitzpatrick’s panty flashes?
Let’s focus on the important things, people.
Gus
TOS, I’m ambivalent about the gas tax. I feel it needs to be done, but it’s a regressive tax.
Ninerdave
I fully support tribe burting. I always have. Obama on the other hand was for tribe burting before he was against it.
jake
OT:
William wait ’til we get our Haynes on you takes a hike.
AaaaoooooGAA! AaaOOOgaaa!
Attention crew members of the U.S.S. Bushtanic! Even though it is not Friday afternoon, please prepare for another deck chair rotation!
And the band played on…
myiq2xu
I think she was wearing panties.
zsa
I generally agree with ThatLeftTurnInABQ … the GOP strategists are not going to be able to restrain their attack dogs and it will really burt them in November.
But … I keep thinking back to something the Poorman wrote about a year ago … most white Americans will talk about racial equality, but when they get into the privacy of the voting booth, where it’s just them and the ballot … they’ll vote for the other guy. Not all of them, but enough to tip the election to a reasonable-seeming white guy.
Democrats seem to have no qualms about voting for Obama (and you know, once you vote black …), but that’s a small subset of liberal commie pinko subversives. The general population is a lot, well, stupider, and a lot more scared of black men.
The Other Steve
It is, but there’s really no way around it. Trying to fund your roads using income tax from the general fund has been a disaster.
Another component of the bill was a .25% increase in sales tax in the local metro area to raise money for increasing the train system.
Punchy
Quit using my moniker in vain, Timothy.
jcricket
This GOP attack is leveled (sp?) against anyone who isn’t a white, married, evangelical citizen of one of the midwestern or southern states.
They regularly talk about “coastal elites”. Got news for you asshats, the coasts with 50% of the population are as much “America” as the midwest. The mountain west, with its liberalizing states (CO, MT, etc.) is as much “America” as the deep south. People who live in cities represent the same proportion (or more) of America compared to those who live in rural areas. And so on.
That the media allows Republicans to continue to use this attack is just infuriating.
jcricket
Obama has only recently been in favor of tribe burting. Hillary, on the other hand, has 15+ years experience with both her own personal tribe burting, and spreading the gospel of American tribe burting to the world.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
zsa,
I also worry about the Bradley effect, but I’m guessing that it works much better when some plausible deniability is available in the mind of the voter being influenced, that they can tell themselves they aren’t really making a racist decision. The problem for the GOP in running against Obama is that there isn’t going to be any “air gap” between mildly racist and subliminal influence, and the really nasty and explicitly KKK type stuff.
Once they lose message control, the entire spectrum from mildly racist to Oh-My-God will be covered. I think that will cause some considerable discomfort to people who like to think of themselves as being different from the KKK – the “I’m not racist, I’m just worried about (cough) urban (cough) crime” set. That group isn’t going to enjoy rubbing elbows with the Cross Burners, and unlike during a normal election, the latter aren’t going to just go take a vacation in the woods for 3 months to stay out of sight for the good of the party.
Here’s a small taste of the kind of distractions that McCain will be dealing with from here on out:
I do not envy McCain’s communications director. That job is not going to be fun. How are they going to get their message out, if every 2 days or so he’s having to turn around and say: “I take responsibility, and I apologize”. It will become the theme for the campaign – “Vote for John McCain, a President who will say he’s sorry!”
libarbarian
They are DEFINITELY going to play to white fears about “uppity blacks” – not Obama but his unnamed and amorphous “followers”:
Black Hillary Supporters May Be Receiving Death Threats
The “Not surprisingly” lead-in is a great way of implying that the silence is not because the death threats are coming from a small # of isolated nutcases or targeted at a tiny number of outspoken black Clinton supporters, but are instead so systematic that they have intimidated any and all blacks who dont support Obama and might want to come forward into silence … without actually saying anything that can be proved false when this is all shown to be a big crock of shit.
Emphasis in Original.
Translation: If they are even threatening their fellow blacks then surely they must be willing to do worse to us poor defenseless whites!!!
Man, I hope this shit doesn’t end up working.
libarbarian
Emphasis in Original.
Sorry it was meant to read
libarbarian
The strategy might actually work because it combines two different irrational fears into one larger one — it combines the “gangs of blacks are going to come for us” racial angle with the “gangs of young dirty hippies Obama cultists are going to come for us” angle that will appeal to the old ex-liberal, but now conservative and scared of change, babyboomers who still remember the Chicago riots of ’68.
The goal is to change the image of the Obama campaign and it’s supporters from an inspiring movement that pulls young people into politics into a cross between the Black Panthers and the Manson family who will burn this country down in a spasm of racial and class hatred.
Fuck ’em. I hope they burn in hell.