Jimmy ain't backin' down

following on to a previous post, here's an excerpt from jimmy carter speaking at a town hall meeting at emory university...

When a radical fringe element of demonstrators, and others, begin to attack the President of the United States of America as an animal, or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, or when they wave signs in the air that say we should have buried Obama with Kennedy, those kind of things are beyond the bounds of the way Presidents have been accepted, even with people who disagree, and I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced by a major degree by a belief that he should not be President, because he happens to be African-American. It's a racist attitude... My expectation is, that in the future, both Democratic leaders and Republican leaders will take the initiative in condemning that kind of unprecedented attack on the President of the United States.

carter is rapidly becoming my hero... he has emerged as one of the leading truthtellers in this spin-besotted, pandering world of ours... i'm sure he also sees himself as having seen too much, being too old and having too little time left to do anything less...



ok, it's not ALL racism, but i do believe that some of those who are making the most strident attacks are driven to such lengths by an underlying belief in the status of black people as lesser human beings... i honestly think that there's little else that could produce such vehemence...

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Jimmy Carter: Many white people believe "that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country" [UPDATE]

jimmy carter via msnbc...

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man," Carter said. "I live in the South, and I've seen the South come a long way, and I've seen the rest of the country that share the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African Americans."

Carter continued, "And that racism inclination still exists. And I think it's bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It's an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply."

there are those of us who are becoming seriously disillusioned with obama for things that have nothing to do with his race, but i see a much larger group of people, all of them white, who are attacking obama for things that are stunningly wrong-headed, many if not most of which are very thin cover for inherently racist sentiment... and, as i've said before, jimmy carter may be one of our most precious national treasures...

[UPDATE]

i don't get why the white house feels it necessary to comment on this at all, much less to dismiss it... it is an act of patent denial to say that criticism of obama has no basis in racism... is ALL of the criticism based on racism...? of course not, as i attempted to point out above... however, i do believe it is an unfortunate use of blinders to claim that none of it is... i have zero doubt that there are racist views out there on the right AND the left and we claim they don't exist at our peril...

US President Barack Obama does not believe current criticism of his policies is based on the colour of his skin, the White House has said.

It was responding to comments by former President Jimmy Carter that much of the vitriol against Mr Obama's health and spending plans was "based on racism".

[...]

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Mr Obama "does not believe that the criticism comes based on the colour of his skin".

"We understand that people have disagreements with some of the decisions that we've made and some of the extraordinary actions that had to be undertaken by this administration," Mr Gibbs said.

i can certainly see why the obama folks wouldn't want to come out in SUPPORT of carter's remarks but i do wish they'd just kept their damn mouths shut... (yeah, yeah, i know... silence = consent, but i'm getting damn sick and tired of this blind, pollyanna-ish devotion to high-mindedness and bipartisanship...)

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A powerful essay from Bill Moyers on Wright, Hagee, Falwell, Robertson, the media feeding frenzy, and the politics of race

exceptionally worthwhile...

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Obama's speech

yep... he finally sucked me in...



now, hillary, will you PLEASE GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY...?

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Glenn Greenwald discovers the REAL Bill Clinton

and about damn time, too...

I've thought most of the criticisms of the Clintons' campaign, including the role played by Bill, have been overblown. Given the standard level of campaign rhetoric, and particularly considering the bile that will be launched towards Obama from the currently pro-Obama right-wing noise machine if he's the nominee, most of the "controversial" comments have been rather mild, standard election fare, generating interest primarily because it was coming from the Clintons.

Beyond that, it seemed most of the efforts to inject dramatic racial conflict into the contest were media-driven rather than an intentional Clinton strategy. And all of the grave concern over how Bill Clinton is sullying the majestic glory of his status as an ex-president -- all because he is, as anyone would, actively and aggressively campaigning for his spouse -- has struck me as silly and slightly pompous.

But the last few days have changed my view on those matters substantially. The Clintons' strategy has become increasingly trashy, even ugly, and yesterday's remarks by Bill Clinton -- in which he pointedly compared Obama's candidacy to Jesse Jackson's and thus implicitly (though clearly) dismissed South Carolina as a state where the "black candidate" wins, followed up by the Clinton campaign's anonymous branding of Obama as "the black candidate" -- reeked of desperation.

when bill clinton was running for his first term, i had an immediate and visceral gut reaction when he first began to appear as a strong candidate on the national scene, and it was not a positive reaction... to this day, i still can't put it into words or make real sense out of it... terms like "slick willy," and "too smooth" come to mind, but still don't really capture it... however, i was convinced by my first cousin's husband, an accomplished attorney and a southern democrat, that clinton was the man to support, and i reluctantly jumped on the bandwagon...

life during the 8 years of bill's reign was at least ok, if not great, but i remained uncomfortable and there remained a strong underlying suspicion that, at some level, the american people were being sold out just as effectively as we were under george h.w., altho', in grand democratic tradition and in contrast to the r's, there was at least no sand in the vaseline...

hindsight is a wonderful thing... as i look back on bill's tenure, i now see clearly the many ways that he took america to the cleaners, from nafta to the quiet and inexorable seizing of ever more executive power... i see how we were craftily led down the economic and financial rabbit hole, a descent that is paying its horrible dividends today... and, as if to cement my concerns, i've watched in fascinated horror at the blooming, but, i suspect, far from new, love fest between bill and george h.w...

given bill's role in his wife's campaign, and given his wife's noxious roll of national security and foreign policy advisors, to say nothing of her despicable campaign manager, mark penn, i believe the only thing worse for the united states than a hillary presidency would be another republican president... bill and hillary are a team aligned with dark forces and, as a country, we are long overdue in recognizing that fact...

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Rosa Brooks: "Oh, my gosh, Hillary Clinton is female! Barack Obama is, uh, black!"

finally, a voice of reason...

The media just can't stop gushing and clucking and gasping about it all. Oh, my gosh, Hillary Clinton is female! Barack Obama is, uh, black! Will American voters accept a female candidate? A black candidate? Are voters more sexist or more racist? What's a bigger problem in America today, sexism or racism?

Snore.

These questions are tedious and inane. Simplistic efforts to evaluate whether racism or sexism is "worse" are inherently meaningless. Racism and sexism operate in complex and different ways. We should reflect on the ways in which racism and sexism have marred our history and cast shadows over our future, but let's not turn it into a parlor game about who's got it worse, women or blacks.

Increasingly, the media obsession with whether Americans will be less likely to vote for a black man or for a woman is also beside the point -- because to an emerging generation of younger voters, the very terms in which the questions have been framed no longer make much sense.

snore indeed...! when my youngest, my daughter, was in high school, i was both surprised and extremely gratified to discover that she and her group of friends included guys, gays, and people of color, and that they thought absolutely nothing about it... they chose each other because they all had many interests in many things - movies, books, issues, music, interesting facts - none of which had anything to do with sexual orientation, gender, or color of skin... while i'm from the high school generation of the early 60s, my high school, a small school (450 in grades 9-12) in a small city (100,000) along the front range of the rockies, featured a noticeable percentage of blacks and hispanics, and we, too, thought nothing of it... (gay...? we hadn't a clue, unfortunately...) anyway, i was delighted to see my daughter and her friends blithely carrying on as if none of those things mattered, which, of course, they don't...

rosa brooks is spot-on... voting for a black man or a woman is a non-issue, and anybody of any generation who has two brain cells to rub together knows and accepts that... to have our national media talking heads go on, and on, AND ON, endlessly, about these non-issues is nothing more or less than all those salacious and suggestive television ads, craftily designed to stimulate our sexual desire, sprinkled liberally between news stories about the societal benefits of abstinence as the only approved form of sex education... in short, it's total crap...

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Still more on Fore

the more you know...

A Wellesley College trustee’s remark that blacks preferred pushing drugs to working in a factory has precipitated an emotional debate on this bucolic campus already grappling with charges of racial insensitivity

The trustee, Henrietta Holsman, a 1970 graduate of Wellesley who runs a manufacturing concern in Los Angeles, resigned from the board last weekend after apologizing for her comments, which also cast aspersions on the work ethic of Hispanic and white employees. But in a letter to the college newspaper, Ms. Holsman reiterated her statement that she had trouble keeping black assembly-line workers from going “back to the street to earn more money” selling drugs

In her lecture, Ms. Holsman also said she had found Hispanic workers to be lazy, white workers resentful of having to work with machines, and Asians, while very productive, likely to move on to professional or management jobs.

she-eeeeee-it... you gotta believe it takes some damn hard work to come up with people like this...

(thanks to think progress...)

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