Joe Biden is getting a lot of flak for his remark that the Republicans who want to "unshackle" Wall Street would "put y'all back in chains". Republicans and the MSM are playing the race card, claiming that Biden played the race card. Well, phooey.
You go, Joe! More and better!
Republicans have been playing the race card since the Southern Strategy began in 1964, after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. The South has been playing the race card since the Southern Baptist church split from the Northern Baptists over slavery in 1845, and even before. The entire race deck, in fact.
Even the most progressive commentators refuse to consider this a factor. Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell frequently ask whether Republicans are as stupid or crazy as their words and actions suggest. No, they are that racist, bigoted, and greedy. So much so that, like the Old South ever preparing to rise again against Northern tyranny (which many of them are), they don't care whether they can win as long as they can fight.
It is time they stopped getting a pass from the MSM. You can help.
Note:Apologies in advance for N-bombs below. I feel that I have to quote the racists concerned literally, without whitewashing.
Racism has been in decline in the US since the end of the Civil War, but you wouldn't know it from the White Supremacists who put in Jim Crow, and then the Southern Strategy.
How do I know that racism is in decline? You can't just ask people in a poll, you know. Well, there is the legal progress we have made in fits and starts since the Emancipation Proclamation and the Reconstruction Amendments. Harry Truman made it obvious when he desegregated the military, a process that started well before his famous 1948 stroke of the pen, and continued long after. Loving v. Virginia and Brown v. Board were both evidence, as was the gradual decline in the vehemence of the segregationist opposition. The Civil Rights Acts and the Voting Rights Act, also. But those are top-down actions. What really shows the difference is the steadily increasing rate of intermarriage, of which our President is a sterling example.
How do I know that Republicans are racists? For a start, they occasionally admit it. They used to brag about it. Let's start with a prime old example, from when the Republican Party became the party of segregation after Brown v. Board mandated school desegregation.
Why the South Must Prevail (PDF)
William F. Buckley
William F. Buckley, Rest in Praise
Glowing obits obscure an ugly record
A 1957 editorial written by Buckley, "Why the South Must Prevail" (National Review, 8/24/57), cited the "cultural superiority of white over Negro" in explaining why whites were "entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where [they do] not predominate numerically." Appearing on NPRâs Fresh Air in 1989 (rebroadcast 2/28/08), he stood by the passage. "Well, I think that's absolutely correct," Buckley told host Terry Gross when she read it back to him.
Buckley is often held up as a model of the Republican intellectual and of Republican moderation, because he threw out the real crazies from the John Birch Society and ran a PBS talk show, Firing Line, that welcomed people of all viewpoints for Buckley to skewer, and became a prototype for the Firing Squad shows on Fox. Feh.
Here are some more recent examples. I have collected many more, and so have others.
I'm not a racist. I hate Obama's White half as much as I hate his Black half.
However, they show it in their actions 24/7. And it isn't just Blacks that they attack as unReal unAmericans. These are equal-opportunity haters. It is literally a war on everybody but old rich White pseudo-Christian males and their hangers-on. More than war, to the Religious Right. Armageddon, against the Antichrist himself, who is either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, apparently. ^^
- Voter suppression
- The racist drug war
- The War on Women
- The War on Latinos (immigrant or not)
- The War on teh Gay
- The War on other minorities
- The War on retirees
- The War on children
- The War on Jesus
- The War on facts
- The War—Crusade, actually— on Muslims
- Endless war on real countries
- The War on unions
- The War on the poor
- The War on Civil Liberties
Not all Republicans are racists, as far as I can tell. I have old college classmates whom I encounter regularly on a mailing list who buy the line on tax cuts for the wealthy, but are in complete denial about almost everything to do with the cuts (such as the accompanying plan to raise taxes on the middle class and the poor) and everything else.
And some racists voted for Obama in 2008. Apparently, McCain/Palin were too much for them. We have anecdotes of GOTV workers being told, "We're votin' for the nigger."
But these are exceptions. It's like the old joke that it is the 95% of crooked lawyers who give the rest of the profession a bad name. The Republican Party is founded on racism. Racism is very nearly its first principle, although it cannot displace greed from pride of place. However, overt racism is no longer acceptable in public political discourse. No problem, Dog Whistle code has been developed at least since the Civil War was officially fought over States' Rights, not slavery. Or the Peculiar Institution.
Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained it best.
As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.
You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."
Although the Southern Strategy was formalized in 1968, it was alive and well at the 1964 Republican Convention, and throughout the Goldwater campaign. Jackie Robinson, most famous for desegregating baseball, was a guest of Nelson Rockefeller at the Conventions in 1960 and 1964, and said it best.
That convention was one of the most unforgettable and frightening experiences of my life. The hatred I saw was unique to me because it was hatred directed against a white man. It embodied a revulsion for all he stood for, including his enlightened attitude towards black people.
A new breed of Republicans had taken over the GOP. As I watched this steamroller operation in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler's Germany.
So much for Godwin. The Nazi card! 1964!
So if you can't say, "Nigger, nigger," what do you say? Most of the following words and phrases has a legitimate public meaning, but all have a private meaning appealing to racism, bigotry, or insensate greed. I have documented the great majority of them in dKosopedia, starting at the Code Words page, so I will not repeat all of the definitions here. Basically, if it helps Blacks or anybody else, they're against it, but they have to give a high-sounding excuse for why they really, really hate it. Also, OMG, he's BLACK!!! But only half-black, therefore not a real Black like Herman Cain.
- Activist judge—Impeach
Earl WarrenJohn Roberts!
- The American People
- Compassionate Conservatism
- Communist, Fascist, Socialist
- Common sense solution
- Culture War
- Darwinism—Yup, we are all descended from Black Africans
- Death panels
- Demeaning the Presidency
- Socialized medicine
- Elitism
- Entitlement reform
- Enumerated powers
- Fair and Balanced
- Family Values
- Foreign, specifically Kenyan
- Immorality
- Lamestream media
- Legal technicalities
- Liberal bias
- Liberty
- Limited government
- Original Intent—of the Confederate Constitution
- Outside agitators
- Outside the mainstream
- Playing the race card
- Principled stand
- Quotas
- Real Americans
- Reparations
- Responsibility
- Right to Work
- Run government like a business—Enron
- Socialized medicine
- States' Rights
- Tort reform
- Trickle-down (fairy dust)
- Tyranny
- Uppity
- Voter fraud
- Waste, fraud, and abuse
- Welfare Queen
- Food-stamp President
Now we need to be on the lookout for any new ones, and hold Republican feet to the fire on them. Like Mitt in the UK, saying that Obama can't understand our special relationship with the UK because he does not share our Anglo-Saxon heritage. Which is a joke, firstly because England was overrun by all of its neighbors, plus the Romans, for a thousand years; it was then run by Norman French rulers, then Scots, then Dutch, and then Germans for nearly the last millennium, and lastly because of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and the Empire.
What Romney means is that Obama does not share the aristocratic and still imperialist values of the British elites.
Or Mitt in Israel, saying that it is the cultures of the Jews and the Muslim Palestinians that make the economic differences between them. Nothing to do with Israeli oppression and endemic racism at all. Nothing to see here, folks. Never mind that at various times the Arab, Persian, and later Turkish cultures were the intellectual and economic leaders of most of the Old World outside China.
Unshackled, indeed. Talk about Dog Whistle race cards. Because all that is wrong with corporations, and especially Wall Street, is that we keep them shackled like slaves, instead of giving them the full rights provided to ex-slaves in the Reconstruction Amendments. And more.
Got any more good ones?
Additions:
Kossacks are in fact doing a good job of calling out some of the Dog Whistles. Here are some recent diaries doing just that.
Tony Perkins blames White House policy for shooting at Family Research Council HQ
He blamed the Southern Policy Law Center, and that Kenyan Muslim Socialist, too. Pretty loud for a Dog Whistle, but they have all kinds.
The Benefit of Being Right
What, Blacks can hear Dog Whistles? Who knew?
Pittsburgh Stealers: The Voter ID & Paul Ryan Strategy
Romney to NAACP, done.
EPIC FAIL: Sen. Rand Paul gets fooled by Truthers. Conspiracy Theorists winning in the GOP
...McCarthyistic dog whistles by Bachmann, Allan West and other crackpots over things like conspiracies about secret muslims taking over the government, FEMA camps, looming hyper-inflation, dead voters led by ACORN, Obama's birth certificates, death panels and other paranoid nonsense...
Also pretty loud for Dog Whistles, but there it is.
Ryan, Rand and a bucket full of red herrings
Catholic Dog Whistles about women, oh yeah.
I'm sorry, did Brit Hume say things are GETTING ugly?
Reagan, The Great Prevaricator, down in Mississippi, not being racist at all, no way, no suh!
Why I Support the President of the United States
He has been called the Food Stamp President and he been exposed to dog whistles so loud they've converted to full-on sirens.
Joe Biden could have used better language
Commenters call out Diarist. One points to Joan Walsh.
Joe Biden was right
But “chains” and “shackles” have had literal and metaphorical roles in America’s history of class conflict and social injustice, all the way back to the founding. This may be an uncomfortable truth, for all of us, but white people have been “chained” and “shackled” too. Most white immigrants in the 17th and 18th centuries came here as indentured servants; there used to be debtors’ prisons where the poor were literally shackled for the crime of poverty...Good for Biden for sticking to his guns about the way a Romney-Ryan administration would shackle so many of us again.
White Supremacists Hear Mitt Romney's Racist Welfare "Dog Whistles" Crystal Clear
Explains how White Supremacists are spinning Romney's Dog Whistles. He's just a pussy-footer who can't tell it like it is. ^^
Rachel Maddow: Romney thought he could hide Ryan's extremism on social issues. Romney was Wrong!
Here is Karen Finney, former Communications Director for the DNC.
I think they'll microtarget this issue, meaning they will figure out which voters do we really need to communicate that message to. Because, remember when Mitt Romney was asked, for example, about Sandra Fluke, he said, Well, I wouldn't use that language. So he knows sometimes you have to cool it, and then other times, you've got to make sure that you're communicating to your base with those dog whistles.
Rachel responded,
Yeah, and if they're successful in microtargeting it and not making it a national story, when they do choose to address this issue, that will mean that the Internet and social media have failed. I don't think that will happen.
Hey! That's us! You go, girls.