What’s Next
February 9, 2010
Main Eventer
February 8, 2010
Are You Listening?
February 8, 2010
Weekend Box Office
February 7, 2010
Q & A
February 7, 2010
I wish I had been contacted last month by Research 2000, the polling firm recently hired by the Daily Kos to ascertain the views of “self-identified Republicans” (even though I’m not a self-identified Republican). If I had been contacted, I would have given the following responses to the firm’s unusual questions:
1. In the 2010 Congressional elections will you definitely vote, vote, not likely vote, or definitely will not vote? I will definitely vote.
2. If the 2012 Primary for President were held today, which of the following would you vote for—Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Tim Pawlenty, Ron Paul or John Thune? Mitt Romney.
3. Should Barack Obama be impeached, or not? No. Egotism is not a high crime.
4. Do you believe Barack Obama was born in the United States, or not? Yes, I believe he was born in Hawaii—and I also believe “birthers” like Joseph Farah are profoundly ignorant.
5. Do you think Barack Obama is a socialist? He’s certainly a committed progressive…
6. Do you believe Barack Obama wants the terrorists to win? Intentionally? No. However, he’s nowhere near as aggressive with regard to terrorism as I would like him to be.
7. Do you believe ACORN stole the 2008 election? No, the voters in the 2008 GOP primaries effectively threw the general election by failing to line up behind Romney.
8. Do you believe Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Barack Obama? Are either of them truly qualified for the job?
9. Do you believe Barack Obama is a racist who hates White people? No, and shame on Glenn Beck for suggesting that he was in 2009.
10. Do you believe your state should secede from the United States? No, not after Scott Brown’s win!
11. Should Congress make it easier for workers to form and join labor unions? Not through card check.
12. Would you favor or oppose giving illegal immigrants now living in the United States the right to live here legally if they pay a fine and learn English? No; it’s de facto amnesty. Immigration reform is needed, to be sure, but amnesty didn’t work in 1986 and de facto amnesty won’t work now.
13. Should openly gay men and women be allowed to serve in the military? I’ve never bought the notion that it would necessarily be disruptive to have “out” gays and lesbians serve. Because of cultural changes, I figure it’s only a matter of years before DADT is done away with.
14. Should same sex couples be allowed to marry? This matter should be resolved by the states; it should not be a federal issue. If a state wishes to allow same-sex marriage, fine. If a state does not wish to, then it’s up to gay marriage advocates in those states to convince legislators and citizens that gay and lesbian couples should not be denied an opportunity to marry.
15. Should gay couples receive any state or federal benefits? The question is void for vagueness. Does this poorly worded question refer to civil unions, and the opposition to/support for such a concept? I have no problem with civil unions, and in fact supported the Vermont Supreme Court’s ruling in Baker v. Vermont, since it was not “judicial activism” in the traditional sense.
16. Should openly gay men and women be allowed to teach in public schools? America’s supposed to be a merit-based society; if the most qualified person for a teaching position happens to be homosexual, they should not be denied the position because of their sexuality. Ronald Reagan felt the same way.
17. Should sex education be taught in the public schools? Yes, so long as it’s made clear that abstinence is the most foolproof way to avoid an STD or pregnancy.
18. Should public school students be taught that the book of Genesis in the Bible explains how God created the world? Again, void for vagueness. Does this refer to the creationism vs. evolution debate? If so, then what’s wrong with teaching that evolution is, from a certain perspective, a form of intelligent design?
19. Are marriages equal partnerships, or are men the leaders of their households? Once again, void for vagueness; how many people are running around today telling wives to submit to their husbands?
20. Should contraceptive use be outlawed? No, and it never will be; Griswold v. Connecticut is as protected as Brown v. Board of Education.
21. Do you believe the birth control pill is abortion? No, but those who believe otherwise aren’t necessarily right-wing idiots, which is what the question implies.
22. Do you consider abortion to be murder? One more time, void for vagueness. One can oppose Roe v. Wade without necessarily regarding first- or even second-trimester abortions as “murder” in the legal sense.
23. Do you support the death penalty? Yes, in limited cases (think Timothy McVeigh).
24. Should women work outside the home? Is this supposed to be a serious question in 2010? Lord love a duck…
25. Do you believe that the only way for an individual to go to heaven is though Jesus Christ, or can one make it to heaven through another faith? For the fifth time, void for vagueness—and also predicated on prejudice, as a non-Christian Republican would never be asked such a question.
So there!
Good God!
February 6, 2010
The Upside of Anger
February 5, 2010
Insight
February 4, 2010
Radio Daze
February 3, 2010
Common Sense
February 3, 2010
Idle Chatter
February 2, 2010
Oh, Baby!
February 1, 2010
Pastime Paradise
February 1, 2010
There have been a number of incidents over the years that have made me skeptical of the Republican Party’s ability to attract black voters. One such incident occurred ten years ago this month; it was an incident that made me profoundly disillusioned about politics and, at least for a time, completely contemptuous of the Republican Party.
On February 2, 2000, then-Texas Governor and Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush spoke at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. In the speech, Bush declared that he would work to keep ”our ideas, Republican ideas, conservative ideas, at the top of the national agenda.”
Unfortunately, Bush failed to address the school’s controversial history. As conservative columnist John Leo noted in March 2000, “Nothing in Bush’s Feb. 2 talk was dishonorable or offensive. It was a standard stump speech calling for standards and discipline in public schools, respecting and rebuilding the military, and returning dignity and honor to the White House. But he spoke under the auspices of a university that forbids interracial dating and has historically been committed to the notion that the Bible calls for the separation of the races….The Bob Jones tradition has managed to combine negative attitudes toward non-whites with negative attitudes toward non-fundamentalist Christians, Catholics mostly, but members of some other Protestant denominations as well. Bob Jones Sr., founder of the university, was a fanatic anti-Catholic, active in the movement to defeat Al Smith, the Catholic Democratic nominee for president in 1928. Bob Jones Jr., son of the founder, was a close friend and ally of Ian Paisley, the rabidly anti-Catholic leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party. In 1966, two days after Paisley was released from prison, Jones traveled to Northern Ireland to give Paisley an honorary degree from Bob Jones University. (Others who received Bob Jones honorary degrees around the same time were George Wallace, Strom Thurmond and Lester Maddox.)”
I was horrified by Bush’s decision to speak at such an institution. Wasn’t this the man who had promised to be a different kind of Republican? Wasn’t this the man who boasted about his success attracting the nonwhite vote in Texas? Why was this man bowing down to bigots?
For years, I had hoped that the GOP would make a serious effort to reach out to urban voters, convincing these voters that the Republican approach to educational and economic issues was far more beneficial to urban America than the Democratic approach. When Bush announced his bid for the White House, I was sure that he would bring this dream of outreach to reality.
Once Bush chose to speak at Bob Jones without condemning the university’s history of exclusion, I realized that this dream would be deferred permanently, and that the GOP was only interested in turning out as much of the older white Southern evangelical vote as possible. I felt betrayed, abandoned, screwed; I believed that with one action, Bush had humiliated every nonwhite conservative who had defended the GOP against claims of racial divisiveness.
For weeks after Bush’s speech, I could not bear to watch or listen to him. I felt as though he told me that I did not count, that my vote did not count, that no one other than older white Southern evangelicals counted in his mind.
As much as I disliked New York Times columnist Bob Herbert’s left-wing politics, I could not fault him for a scornful column he wrote days after Bush’s BJU appearance. “Wave goodbye to that fantasy of a more inclusive Republican Party,” Herbert declared. He also noted, “The former head of the university, Bob Jones Jr., engaged in an astonishing series of attacks on Catholics in the 1980’s, asserting that ‘all the popes are demon-possessed’ and that Pope John Paul II was ‘the greatest danger we face today.’ ‘The papacy,’ he said, ‘is the religion of Antichrist and is a satanic system.’”
Bush’s main rival for the GOP nomination, John McCain, strongly condemned Bush’s cowardice, as did Democratic contender Bill Bradley. The controversy became so unbearable for Bush that he apologized to American Catholics for failing to condemn BJU’s bigotry.
Eventually, my anti-Bush anger subsided, though I never forgot the foolishness behind his decision to speak at the scandalous school. (I voted for Bush that fall, though it was more of an anti-Al Gore vote than it was a pro-Bush vote.)
My cynicism about the GOP’s ability to attract more than a handful of black votes has its roots in the events of February 2000. By agreeing to speak at Bob Jones, Bush proved that he was not, in fact, a different kind of Republican, and that the GOP’s permanent strategy was to turn out its base and leave other demographic groups to the Democrats.
I was not surprised in the least when Clarence Thomas wrote in his 2007 autobiography My Grandfather’s Son about his frustrations with the Reagan-era GOP. Thomas wrote that during his days as Reagan’s EEOC chairman, he had “…come to realize, as I told a reporter, that ‘conservatives don’t exactly break their necks to tell blacks that they’re welcome.’ Was it because [conservatives] were prejudiced? Perhaps some of them were, but the real reason, I suspected, was that blacks didn’t vote for Republicans…As a result, there was little interest within the [Reagan] administration in helping a constituency that wouldn’t do anything in return to help [Reagan]. My suspicions were confirmed when I offered my assistance to President Reagan’s reelection campaign, only to be met with near-total indifference. One political consultant was honest enough to tell me straight out that since [Reagan’s] reelection strategy didn’t include the black vote, there was no role for me.”
One can support the GOP’s proposals to fix social problems without necessarily supporting the GOP itself. The events of February 2000 were positive, in a way: the fallout from Bush’s visit to BJU forced me to get rid of my naïve illusions about outreach, about Republican electoral strategies, about the virtue of politics. Now, I can’t help rolling my eyes whenever I hear conservative pundits discussing ways for the Republicans to attract black votes. The Republican Party is not actually interested in attracting black votes, a truth that Bush’s visit to that racially retrograde school made self-evident. The GOP believes, then as now, that the path to electoral victory relies in grinding out as much of the party base—older white Southern evangelicals—as possible. Thus, whenever conservatives discuss GOP outreach, I start to get a little wary; do the pundits who believe in GOP outreach also believe in unicorns and fairies?
