Y'know by now we all should be pretty used to Republicans saying crazy fracked-up crap. Really fracked up. I mean, that's what Trump's entire campaign is about. Saying fracked- up crap, then attacking anyone who stops and says "Hey, that was fracked-up crap!," and then whining about "political correctness" and yeah, y'know, he was just "telling it like it is."
No, really you weren't. You're telling it how it isn't, but wish that it was. You're telling yourself a bogus, hateful lie and then trying to deflect from the fact it's a lie to rally to your side all the people who desperately want to believe the lie and get blame off themselves, people who love pointing fingers at other people in vulnerable positions so that they're responsible for nothing. Accountable for nothing. Capable of correcting, nothing. Certainly not helping them. Not even a little.
They're like the schoolyard bully who grabs your wrist then shoves your own knuckles into your nose while chanting "Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself."
That pretty much defines the state of Republicanism today. Like when they drop "anchor baby" on native-born American citizens and then whimper it's "name-calling" to point out that the term is blatantly racist and offensive. They wouldn't be using it if it wasn't.
Dr. Ben Carson would be Republican nominee for president was no exception to that when he said Obamacare was "worse than slavery," then claimed he didn't say that and anyone who said he did say that "
was a liberal liar" just before he again said "and
it is like slavery in a way" at CPAC.
:Face Palm:
Wed Sep 09, 2015 at 1:32 PM PT: Here's Carson on Fox.
Continued over the orange flip.
Or more recently as shown in his Op-Ed to Black Lives Matter in USA Today. I mean, it starts are well enough, but then ... oh brother.
But unjust treatment from police did not fill our inner cities with people who face growing hopelessness. Young men and women can't find jobs. Parents don't have the skills to compete in a modern job market. Far too many families are torn and tattered by self-inflicted wounds. Violence often walks alongside people who have given up hope.
I grew up in neighborhoods most Americans were told to never drive through. I saw bullets, drugs and death in the same places I played tag and ball with my friends. Both of my older cousins died on the streets where I lived. I thought that was my destiny.
...
Let’s confront the entertainment industry that lines its pockets by glamorizing a life where black men are thugs and our women are trash. Let’s tell them we plan to start talking with our wallets. [As if Black Leaders didn't do just that over the all-white Oscar nominees this year]
It is time for them to pick on someone else because we have had enough. Demeaning women is not art, and it shouldn’t be profitable. Neither is glorifying violence and equating prison time with authenticity. Straight Outta Compton, #1 in movie theaters, is just the latest example. You only have to watch the trailers.
Ben Carson was born in 1951. He was nearly 40 by the time N.W.A. was formed. He probably doesn't even really know what N.W.A.
stands for and why they mattered as a group. I think he'd probably be
shocked to learn that the issue of "hope in the face of hopelessness" while dealing with brutal police and an apathetic nation is exactly what that group was all about.
To be fair, Carson doesn't only blame Straight Outta Compton and the entertainment industry. Nor is he entirely wrong if he would have mentioned many other films, starting with Birth of a Nation, Gone With The Wind and many thousands of stereotypical and exploitive films and televsion shows, from '70s blaxploitation flix to Empire and Real Housewives of "I'm gonna kill dat bitch" that demean black people.
The group Public Enemy brought up the same issue when they wrote "Burn Hollywood Burn"
"Go Step and Fetch this Shit!"
Not to mention doing the
Hollywood Shuffle.
So besides the fact that a ton of people have been bitching out Hollywood on how they handle black people—ever heard of Spike Lee?—Dr Carson seems to think he's reached an epiphany by blaming Hollywood for black hopelessness.
Yeah, not so much.
He also says that #BLM is wasting it's time disrupting Bernie Sanders events. I would say it's been a mixed bag that has both heightened their profile and angered many of those who would otherwise be in full support of their goals. Six of one, half a dozen of another.
He says that they instead should be disrupting teachers unions for failing our kids, while for some reason ignoring school administration failures and the dollars being sucked out of our public schools to support private and charter schools with hand-picked students leaving the rest with the least in resources for handling the most challenging kids.
He says we should tear down the crack house, while somehow ignoring the liquor stores and the major pharmaceutical companies whose products cause so many side-effects you need medicine to fix the problems caused by your medicine. If you survive that is.
He says we should give up on the "War On Poverty" and that apparently Medicare, Medicaid, TANF, WIC and SNAP have all been a failed $19 trillion waste of money, without mentioning the many millions of Americans who were lifted out of poverty, starvation and slow painful death due to untreated illness by those programs.
He says we should criticize the Democratic Party for all the above and the general failure— I guess—of somehow not accomplishing 100% Employment so that everyone has a job—even the disabled, children and the elderly it would seem—along with good enough credit to buy their own home instead of using Section 8 and food stamps. [Or being suckered into hand-grenade sub-prime loans] And never mind the fact that many people who are on the Section 8 and food stamps programs are employed. They just aren't being paid enough to survive on their own.
A home health care worker in Durham, N.C.; a McDonald’s cashier in Chicago; a bank teller in New York; an adjunct professor in Maywood, Ill. They are all evidence of an improving economy, because they are working and not among the steadily declining ranks of the unemployed.
Yet these same people also are on public assistance—relying on food stamps, Medicaid or other stretches of the safety net to help cover basic expenses when their paychecks come up short.
He even says that #BLM should talk to the Republican Party. Yeah, he really does.
Finally, we need to go over to the Republican Party. We need to tell them they have ignored us for too long. They need to invite us in and listen to us. We need to communicate and find a different way.
Yeah, sure—that's gonna happen. Any second now. I'm sure the Republicans will treat #BLM protestors with about the same level of respect
they've shown Jorge Ramos.
Trump supporter: You are very rude. It's not about you.
Jorge Ramos: It's not about ...
Trump supporter: Get out of my country. Get out.
Jorge Ramos: This is not about ...I'm a U.S. citizen too.
Trump supporter: Well, whatever. No. Univision, no. It's not about you (pointing in Ramos' face)
Jorge Ramos: It's not about you. It's about the United States.
Trump supporter: No, it is (unintelligible)
None of this is surprising, but when he says about
Straight Outta Compton "You only have to watch the trailers"—I have to wonder, just what trailer was he actually watching?
Contrary to Carson's claims, most of the "thugs" that you see in Straight Outta Compton all have badges.
I grew up in South Central L.A. I was here for the Rodney King beating trial and the days of rioting that followed the officers' acquittal. I saw it all first-hand. Right now I live just two miles from Compton. It's right down Rosecrans Avenue to the east of me, but I know I'm pretty much living on another planet from what goes on there. It's still massively fracked up. So I have a source, someone on the inside who I've known for years and was right there in the middle of things as all of them were coming up and who happens to currently work for Snoop Dogg. I called him up yesterday and asked him what he thought of the esteemed Dr. Ben Carson and his comments on the film.
Big Al: Some people think they know about shit and they don't have any idea. It's worse than it's ever been. Cops beating up a 60-year-old woman on the freeway. [A retired CHP officer technically. He retired. The California Highway Patrol coughed up a $1.5 million settlement]
Me: Carson also said they were "glorifying violence and prison."
Big Al: What member of N.W.A. ever went to prison? Even Easy-E, he never had a felony. Misdemeanors, but he was clean. He had a valid gun permit, carried it all the time when he went out. The situation outside the recording studio where the police threw them on the ground happened. It was the police who threw cherry-bombs into the crowd and started a riot [at one show where they performed "F--- Tha Police," as dramatized in the film]
Frankly, this could be the #BLM theme song right here. (Warning very NSFW!)
But it's not that everything they ever said or released was negative, it wasn't.
Here's an interview with the cast of Straight Outta Compton, including Ice Cube and his son O'Shea Jackson Jr. who plays his father in the film.
The bottom line point is that this was a seminal group who along with Ice T and East Coasters Public Enemy were among the first African American musicians since Grand Master Flash's "The Message" and Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" to openly and honestly discuss the situation in the inner city, particularly the poverty, drugs and out-of-control police.
They Matter.
They were then, in many ways, what #BlackLivesMatter is now. Loud. Brash. Unabashed. Annoying. And exactly on POINT in bringing to light an issue that is quite literally a matter of life and death for about 1,100 people each and every year.
"Thugs" they ain't. They are in fact, besides being heralds for change on civil rights whose original message still resonates 25 years later, exactly the type of successful, dynamic, bold entrepreneurs who started with next to nothing to change the music industry and much of the world in the way that the GOP argues we should have more of. Dr. Dre's Beats Music deal with Apple alone netted him $3 Billion. That's TRUMP money. Dr Dre not only discovered Snoop Dogg, he also discovered Eminem. You'd need to slam together three Mitt Romney's to make one Dr. Dre with a net worth of $700 million.
But then again Ben Carson, like a lot of know-nothing wingnuts, will. never. know. the. difference. If he thinks you look like a "thug", you're a thug, no need to open his eyes and see the truth.