Moe Lane

I was born a Democrat; grew up in a labor union household; and generally raised in an atmosphere with, ah, colorful language. And if I had ever used this kind of language my father the union organizer would have backhanded me for it:

Standing in front of the Education Department’s headquarters in downtown Washington, Miami-Dade County teacher Ceresta Smith referred to former District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee—founder and CEO of the advocacy group StudentsFirst—as an “Asian b[*]tch.”

He’d have been right to, too.  Democrat or no, that sh*t just ain’t right.  But I’m willing to bet that the Democrats will tolerate it being said about Ms. Rhee… (more…)

I personally think that Sean Higgens is taking too seriously Josh Marshall’s pandering to his own side over minorities in the GOP – short version: Marshall’s assertion of increased minorities in GOP = white people fleeing GOP is mostly aimed at making white Democrats feel better at their own not-very-closeted racism* – but I’d like to note this:

[A]s any Republican fundraising consultant will tell you, there’s no better way to make Republican donors open their wallets than to send out a mailer with a black conservative asking for money. The Republican Party could use a lot more credible black and Hispanic primary candidates, perhaps. But when given the opportunity, Republican primary voters in extremely white districts do nominate conservative Black and Hispanic candidates for office.

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There is a remarkable disconnect here.  Which is a shame, because otherwise it was a pretty good essay on the way that the moralistic (mostly) Left keeps cheapening the language (not that Michael Moynihan would put it that way).

“It’s a movie! It’s a movie! It’s a movie!” an exasperated Mark Boal told The Times of London last week. Boal is the journalist turned screenwriter behind Zero Dark Thirty , a gripping dramatization of America’s decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden. And unless you have retreated to a cave in Tora Bora, you’ve likely heard that the film’s depiction of torture [he means 'waterboarding' -ML] has engendered so much controversy that it has been denounced by politicians, pundits, and members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

[snip of various stuff, eventually ending up on the TV show Girls, and Lena Dunham's circle of friends.]

What is alarming, though, is that the most toxic charge in public life—the accusation of racism—demands a rather low burden of proof, and there are no sanctions to be levied against those who deploy the charge carelessly.

Because if Lena Dunham is racist, then what does one call David Duke?

I dunno, Michael Moynihan – hey! If waterboarding is torture, then what does one call cutting off fingers with a custom-built machine?

Moe Lane

[FURTHER UPDATE: Media Trackers retracts, apologizes for putting out the story. My apologies to Mr. Frank for my reaction; it was obviously uncalled for.]

[UPDATE: The police are now reporting that the staffer's story has been recanted. Absent any evidence to the contrary, this would include the alleged text messages: I look forward with some interest to whether that, at least, can be verified. And yes, you may safely assume that I do not appreciate people lying to the police about things like this. - Moe Lane]

OK, remember the Kyle Wood incident from last week?  Short version is, Kyle Wood is a staffer for Chad Lee, the Republican candidate for WI-02, which is Tammy Baldwin’s current district.  Chad is opposed by Mark Pocan.  Tammy Baldwin happens to be gay.  Mark Pocan happens to be gay.  Kyle Wood happens to be gay.  And Kyle Wood was assaulted in his home last week, allegedly for being a gay Republican who was out of the closet and supporting a straight Republican running in a Democratic district.  This is a real story: the cops are looking for “Male, white, mid-20s, 6′-6’2″, curly brown hair, broad nose, with a muscular build.”

Now, let’s meet Philip Frank.

[picture removed]

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So, via Erick I see that the Atlantic is having a tizzy – or possibly an episode – over this Obamaphone Woman video…

Oh, dear: wrong video.  Can’t imagine how that got in there.  Here’s the real one.

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Here’s a quick question: what do you see, when you see this picture?  There are two answers.

(Via Colorado Observer)

If you’re a regular person, you see Eun Cha, war veteran, businessman, and naturalized citizen.  This is one of those guys who we’re thinking about when we talk about the American Dream, and how it can transform people’s lives; Mr. Cha emigrated to this country from South Korea, then built a life for himself and his family by working his way up through the Coors Brewing Company (this will be important later).  This is, in short, a guy who heard about America, thought that it was a great idea, and made it work for him – and by extension, us.

If you’re Ed Perlmutter, on the other hand, you see some evil Chinese guy out to steal good American jobs, or whatever the heck it is that Perlmutter thinks will pander to (the hopefully rare) racist voters in Colorado’s 7th district.

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Via Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt:

One of the things I’ve learned this week is that Republicans are the most incompetent racists ever. They’re just bloody awful at it.

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) August 30, 2012

…but then, you knew that already. The GOP is, after all, the political party where a President who was the governor of a Southern state can casually say “We looked like a normal couple” when explaining how he and his (African-American) National Security Advisor managed to avoid being detected on their way to a surprise visit to the troops in Iraq*.  Yet one more way that former President Bush continues to be a large, indigestible lump in the Left’s narrative… but I digress.

Moe Lane

*That, by the way, is what an actual dog whistle ‘sounds’ like: and the message that it gave to racists was You’re not welcome around here.

[Well, this is embarrassing: Jeffries of course won his nomination, because the Good Lord looks after fools, drunks, and the United States of America. Everybody have a good laugh at me; I somehow crossed wires on this one. Corrections and annotations below.- Moe Lane]

Politicker has the background. Basically, it went down like this: over in NY-08 the choice for the Democratic nomination was between Hakeem Jeffries and Charles Barron. The major difference between the two was that Mr. Jeffries did not have a history of praising Muammar Qaddafi and Robert Mugabe, calling Israel a terrorist nation, and/or advocating physical attacks on white people*… and while in a civilized party having an opponent who did all these things would pretty much guarantee you the nomination, in the Democratic party none of this is an insurmountable obstacles to a nomination. So, MoveOn.org – like a good little fully-owned subsidiary (and toady) of the Democratic establishment, went full-bore against Mr. Barron. To quote them: “There are some people who don’t belong in elected office. Charles Barron is one of those people.” Which is a reasonable statement, no matter what your partisan alignment is, right?

Alas… Charles Barron won [lost, thank God] his nomination battle, so you’d expect MoveOn.org to then put basic human decency about abjectly pitiful partisanship and start [be happy about it (and never mind backing Republican Alan Bellone)]... HAHAHA! I slay myself. No, of course MoveOn.org went into full reverse and started begging Barron’s pardon:

Last month, you received an email from MoveOn about Councilman Charles Barron, a candidate for Congress in your district. It was offensive and inflammatory—and we shouldn’t have sent it.

On behalf of the MoveOn staff, I apologize to you and to the Brooklyn community.

Although I half-believe that apology represents true regret, actually. It must have been quite a strain for MoveOn.org to not cleave to the Jew-hating racist in the first place; being able to go back to Charles Barrons’ bigoted embrace must have been fundamentally reassuring to them on, and I use the term fairly loosely, a spiritual level. In that context it’s almost a shame that Barron made them crawl like that, but then… it’s MoveOn.org. They chose a long time ago to be convenient… receptacles… for their Democratic betters; I can’t be expected to respect them if they won’t even respect themselves. [Umm... actually, that pretty much can stay the same.  In fact, the fact that Barron lost this race reinforces the above paragraph.]

One last note: during their earlier – and possibly? probably? forced – disapproval of Charles Barron, MoveOn.org sought to insult Barron by calling him the dirtiest term in their particular, and rather debased, lexicon (‘tea partier’). Two points about that. One, the typical length of time that any filth-mongering racist scum of Barron’s caliber would spend at a Tea Party function before being shown the door would be, at best, measured in minutes. Second: while I understand that Moveon.org is upset that the Tea Party gets respect while it does not, I politely suggest that one major reason why this would be so is because the Tea Party’s favored reaction to losing a particular internal political fight is not to abjectly surrender. [As well as winning a particular internal political fight, too.  Seriously: the more I think about it, the more depraved this Moveon.org apology is.  The bad guy lost this primary, remember? So why apologize to him?]

Have a nice day! [Also still true: and, in fact, I am keeping this up on RS's front page anyway.  This is pretty disgusting stuff on MoveOn.org's part, really.]

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*They were also upset that Charles Barron is against same-sex marriage. I happen to disagree with him on that, too – but I’m not seeing where that’s even close in equivalence to suggesting that the entire nation of Israel is made up of terrorists. Opposing same-sex marriage is, in point of fact, one of two mainstream positions in American contemporary political thought; while Barron’s blind hatred of Israel is a fringe position found only among the most miserable of wretches.

You know.  The one who said “G*d d*mn America.”

You hear that, folks?  Team Romney wants to make it clear that they REPUDIATE any possible reference by scurrilous individuals about Barack Obama’s willingness to sit and listen to a race-baiting, white-hating bigot preacher for nigh-on twenty years.  They probably will REPUDIATE any mentioning of the fact that said race-baiting, white-hating bigot preacher is out there telling people that the Obama campaign offered him hush money during 2008, too.  Yup.  They’re going to REPUDIATE it all in order to better focus on the economy, which by the way is absolutely HORRIBLE because of the President and his political party.

Hey, you want to see the press conference that Team Romney had to announce that they were going to REPUDIATE any Rev. Jeremiah Wright line of attack?  Here you go:

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Wait, what?

House Democrats received training this week on how to address the issue of race to defend government programs, according to training materials obtained by The Washington Examiner.

The prepared content of a Tuesday presentation to the House Democratic Caucus and staff indicates that Democrats will seek to portray apparently neutral free-market rhetoric as being charged with racial bias, conscious or unconscious.

I don’t know what’s more bemusing: that the Democrats are conceding that they have no interest in themselves engaging in ‘free-market rhetoric,’ or that they’ve found a convenient person with the right melanin skin content to tell them that it’s quite all right to judge Republicans by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.  Probably the former: goodness knows we already knew that the only real way for minorities to advance in the Democratic party is in the career path of “scaring minorities into voting Democratic.”

I had more, but it’s Mother’s Day.

Moe Lane

It’s all because of racism, of course:

But the main quarrels Democratic voters [in Jefferson County, Ohio] have with Mr. Obama have nothing to do with race. They include his rejection of one proposed route for the Keystone pipeline, a stance they say will harm this area, whose backbone, the Ohio River, is lined with metal mills and coal mines.

Oh, I’m sorry, but that was paragraph fifteen.  Presumably the NYT decided that its readers weren’t going to read past paragraphs three and four: (more…)

…in the DC area have been taken out of context.

My comments were taken out of context & construed as disparaging 2 entire Asian biz community. We DO deserve our bizs t/b nice places in W8!

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