Responding to the Senate argument made by Sen Jay Rockefeller this week that "some" - SOME - "people were driven to oppose Obamacare for Racial reasons", Joe Scarborough - as per usual - has lept forward to proclaim that clearly that can't be right because none - not one - of any of the people he's ever heard talking about how much they hate Obamacare ever brought up his race.
"I must say, I have been behind closed doors with thousands of conservatives through the years. I have never once heard one of them say in the deep south or in the northeast or in South Boston, 'Boy, I really hate Obamacare because that black president' -- no, I've never heard anybody come close to saying that," Scarborough said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "And I have spoken to some wildly right wing groups. I have never heard it once."
So Scarborough's never heard it on the Republican Cocktail and Weiner Circuit? Muffy speaking soto-voice to Biff while her fresh caviar-in-a-blanket awaits, "I really hate that
Black-Negro-Mulatto-Jigaboo-Halfrican-Mud Duck-Very-Very-Urban-Inner City-Food Stamp-Welfare King President and his Obamacare".
Yeah, nobody ever says that. Unless they're a (now ex) NH Police Commissioner at a local diner ["I'm tired of seeing That Fucking Nigger on the TV"] because if someone had said anything racial clearly Mr. Joe Scarborough would have been the very first to hear about it.
.
And except for Rush Limbaugh who after coining the charming term "Half-rican" and debuting that stellar composition "Barack:The Magic Negro" later claimed that Obamacare was Really Reparations for Black People or when former Tea Party Express head Mark Wllliam's called the President a "Indonesian Muslim Welfare Thug and Racist-in-Chief" - because what the Total-Frack was he talking about other than saying the President was using the government - and Obamacare - and some kind of Anti-White Vendetta?. Meanwhile we have Newt Gingrich as his accusations that Obama is the Greatest Food Stamp President Ever, even though participation in SNAP increased before Obama took office as a consequence of the 2008 financial crash, Gingrich would prefer to portray Obama as the "Lord-God-King of the Goverment Handout", as if that doesn't have racial overtones and doesn't continue to stoke the fire of White resentment over the "handouts and entitlements of Obamacare".
And then you have freshly convicted felon and long-time congenital liar Dinesh D'Souza "2016:Obama's America" Fool-umentary which attempts to portray President Obama as a Closeted Anti-Colonial (Anti-White), Mau Mau Neo-Revolutionary like his Dad [who was actually none of the above and an Athiest] with designs to implement the Final (White Death Panel Fuel) Solution".
2016 Obama's America takes audiences on a gripping visual journey into the heart of the world’s most powerful office to reveal the struggle of whether one man's past will redefine America over the next four years. The film examines the question, "If Obama wins a second term, where will we be in 2016?"
And there's been all the people who claimed that
ObamaCare is White Slavery, as well as both Cliven Bundy ["Let me tell you something I know about
the Negro"] and Phil Robertson ["Nobody was singing the blues..."] who said - in their own endearing ways - that Black people were likley better off
with Slavery, than they are with Entitlements, of which Obamacare is apparently
either one depending on whether you ask
Dr. Ben Carson anything about it.
But clearly Joe Scarabough hasn't heard about any of this, so therefore it never happened - right?
And then there was this, which Scarborough apparently never saw or heard about.
And of course, this...
The first problem that Conservatives have on this issue - is credibility. They have none.
Every Time something like this is said, or shown in a poster or billboard, they claim to have
not seen it. What, are they blind? Are we supposed to believe they suddenly can't see it when a Republcan Mayor puts out pictures of
Watermelon on the White House Lawn, or images of Barack and Michelle Obama
dressed as a Pimp and Ho?
And were supposed to believe - Seriously - that NONE OF THAT is Racial? It just doesn't pass the sniff test.
The second problem is that their so-called "legitimate opposition" to Obamacare is completely illegitimate. There are no Death Panels in the law, yet still to this day there are Republicans who continue to claim there are. There was no Death Spiral due to lack of participation. The Enrollment numbers were not skewed or cooked. Very few people have faced "Rate Shock" from increased costs, and most have actually been granted more freedom and more choices at better prices than they ever had before. Almost every claim they make about Obamcare is Dead Wrong, so after a while you have to think that the things they continue to claim as their motivation and justification for opposing Obamacare is nothing but a Smoke Screen for Something Else that most of them don't have the guts to admit.
That something could be the fear as expressed by Charles Krauthhammer that if Obamacare succeeds, and people begin to grow trust in the ability of the Government to provide useful and effective benefits for people that private industry can't and/or won't provide - that's pretty much the beginning of GAME OVER for the Republican Party who believe that would "Turn us into Europe". Because clearly, whatever happens to be good for the American people is bad for the Republican Party. And conversely if Obamacare fails, that would be bad for Liberals and good for Republicans.
"I'll give you one example: Obamacare would be the singular achievement of the Obama administration, the capstone of 100 years of American liberalism, and would bring us very close to the kind of government intrusion, regulation, domination that you find in the social democracies of Europe.
Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/...
Yes, because Europe and Canada and every other industrialized, advanced
Country on Earth is just dying to get rid of their Universal Health Care and adopt the (Previous) American System which was
more than twice as expensive and at least 20% less effective than ALL OF THEM. Or not.
So there's that motive, and then there's also simple, plain Racism.
And the simple fact is - as Greg Sargent points out - that "Yes, Race is a part of the Opposition to ObamaCare" because this issue has been studied - by professionals.
- “Using a nationally representative experiment over two waves, I induced several emotions to elicit anger, fear, enthusiasm, or relaxation. The results show that anger uniquely pushes racial conservatives to be more opposing of health care reform while it triggers more support among racial liberals.” [paper here]
- “Controlling for explicit prejudice, implicit prejudice predicted a reluctance to vote for Obama, opposition to his health care reform plan, and endorsement of specific concerns about the plan. In an experiment, the association between implicit prejudice and opposition to health care reform replicated when the plan was attributed to Obama, but not to Bill Clinton — suggesting that individuals high in anti-Black prejudice tended to oppose Obama at least in part because they dislike him as a Black person. In sum, our data support the notion that racial prejudice is one factor driving opposition to Obama and his policies.” [paper here]
- “This study argues that President Obama’s strong association with an issue like health care should polarize public opinion by racial attitudes and race. Consistent with that hypothesis, racial attitudes had a significantly larger impact on health care opinions in fall 2009 than they had in cross-sectional surveys from the past two decades and in panel data collected before Obama became the face of the policy. Moreover, the experiments embedded in one of those reinterview surveys found health care policies were significantly more racialized when attributed to President Obama than they were when these same proposals were framed as President Clinton’s 1993 reform efforts.” [paper here]
- “This study investigates the relationship between individual-level support for the 2010 Affordable Care Act and nativism, the perception that a traditional American culture and way of life needs to be protected against foreign influence. The results of an analysis of a 2011 public opinion survey demonstrate that nativism was an independent and significant predictor of opposition to health care reform and that this effect held for both Republicans as well as Democrats, although the relationship is stronger for Republicans.” [Paper Here]
What this demonstrates is that when we approach a policy issue, none of us looks at it in a vacuum. We bring to it the ideas and opinions we associate with the people and parties advocating the various positions, among other things. Now add to that the fact that since Barack Obama took office in 2009, conservatives have been told, over and over and over again, that Barack Obama is coming to do them harm precisely because of their race.
Going far beyond anecdotal and incidental evidence from people like Limbaugh, Williams or Gringrich - there are detailed studies specifically
linking Racial Animus to Opposition to Obamacare showing that what Sen. Rockefeller stated - besides being blatantly obvious - is empirically true.
And neither Ron Johnson's selective personal umbrage over it [but not Racial comments from Limbaugh, or Gingrich or Williams], nor Joe Scarborough's ridiculous denials that such a thing is even possible because he's too blind to see it, changes that fact.
Vyan
3:25 PM PT: Ok, now that I've had a chance to review the entire segment - not just what TPM provided -I think Scarborough's statement is even more astonishing because it came after both Ezra Klein and Eugene Robinson backed-up Rockefeller's essential point, since they've received racist anti-Obamacare Emails and Tweets too. It's not just Rockefeller whose noticed this. Scarborough just made light of it, "we've all occasionally heard from the marginalized fringes" and claimed he wanted to see proof. "I want to see those emails that Senator Rockefeller received...", which is just classic after what Klein and Robinson had just said - do you need them to prove it too?. I just did it above, does that help? How many emails, posters, and assholish public comments is it going to take exactly? 10? 20? 30,000? Besides Robinson didn't just say he's gotten those email to respond to Joe, he's been saying that in his columns for years now. Yet for some reason he seems to be on eggshells when facing up against Scarborough. He's tentative, half of what he say is "...uh...", which is weird for a Pulitzer Prize Winner and maybe displays more about the internal tension and dynamic of how Joe runs his show. He's clearly kept Myka on a short chain for quite a long time.
The other issue is how Johnson clearly distorted what Rockefeller said. He didn't say "All" or "Most" of the opposition to Obamacare was racial, only that some of it was, nor that Ron Johnson personally was Racist for opposing the law. That's not even in the same solar system of what Rockefeller said, which in fact, was pretty mild and pretty damn obvious. I think people like Johnson over protest on this, and Scarborough flatly denies it as even a possibility because they both know it's true - but both of them are politically savvy enough to know if the GOP opposition gets even partially tarred with that brush - they're functionally finished.