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Destroying the libelous claim that “Trump supporters are racist”

March 28, 2016 by Bookworm 27 Comments

Illegal immigrants crossing into US Readers know that I hold no brief for Donald Trump, whom I view as a media-created Big Government demagogue, whose politics have half-tones of both Left and Right ideology, but whose dominant top-note is pure self-interest. The fact that I dislike Trump, though, does not mean that I dislike or disrespect the majority Americans who support him. I understand the frustration driving them, although I believe that they’ve put their faith in a false Messiah. Few things, therefore, make me go more ballistic than having Leftists smugly claim that the majority of Trump supporters are racist white men.

It’s true that the majority of Trump supporters are white men, although a lot of other people support him too. But about that racist bit? Let’s dig into that more deeply, because it’s a slander by which Leftists manage to avoid looking at their own appalling racism.

Let’s start with racism on the Right side of America’s political spectrum because the media and academia are so excited about tracking it. It’s true that there are small pockets of old-fashioned white supremacists still wandering around America. These are people who openly express their belief that any racial or religious groups other than white Christians are inferior and should be isolated, banished, or even killed.

Thankfully, in addition to being disgusting in attitude, these white supremacists are small in number. Out of an American population of roughly 318,000,000, the high estimate for “hate groups” is only 892 such groups. This number comes from the Southern Poverty Law Center which memorably, and entirely inaccurately, characterized the entire Tea Party movement as a “hate” group.

While it loves counting “hate” groups, the SPLC is coy about how big these groups are. I’d be very surprised if any of the listed groups boasted a thousand active members. I suspect most have a few hundred at best. Still, even if you assume that high of 1,000 active members, you’re still looking at fewer than 1,000,000 hardcore, old-fashioned KKK-type racists — or less than three-tenths of one percent of the American population.

The Left likes to claim that these groups vote Republican because Republican candidates keep “dog whistling” racism. This is a ludicrous claim to make given that the field, before being winnowed down, had blacks, East Asians, and Hispanics. It’s the Democrats who have no one to offer other than old white people. Still, the Democrats sneeringly ask, if Republicans aren’t selling racism, why do the David Duke’s of this world vote Republican? You have to go back a few decades to figure out the story.

Once upon a time, right up until the early 1960s, the Democrat Party was the openly racist party (more on that later). However, when the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and LBJ’s electoral strategy (more on that later too) meant that the Democrat Party started courting blacks, rather than actively discriminating against them, the white supremacist groups needed to find a new political home.

After 1964, government could no longer be the supremacists’ ally — and do remember that it was Southern government that gave Jim Crow its control in the South. The supremacists therefore concluded that their best bet was small government. They reasoned that small government would mean less welfare, and less welfare would harm the black population (I’ll get to that later, too). That’s why so many such groups came out of the woodwork when Ronald Reagan was elected — and became even more excited when Ron Paul, a solid libertarian, tied himself to the Republican party. With white supremacists having discovered the virtues of limited government, the Republican Party unwillingly had its minute population of fringe racists and the Democrats had their narrative: “Republicans are racist.”

What’s really funny, of course, is that the really racist political party in America is the Democrat Party. Worse, among Democrats, the racism isn’t confined to a minute fringe (less than 3/10 of 1% out of the American population) as the case with the Republicans. Instead, institutional racism is front and center in every Democrat Party policy.

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Novels that changed the way Americans viewed slavery and the South UPDATED

July 28, 2015 by Bookworm 56 Comments

Ken Burns’ epic Civil War documentary came out in 1990. That was during my years as a lawyer in a very big firm and as a single gal enjoying life. My lifestyle then matters because it explains why, back in 1990, I managed to watch only the first episode of the 9-part series.

Now that we’ve been to some of the Civil War’s most famous battlefields — Gettysburg, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Bull Run — my husband and I are taking the time, finally, to watch the Civil War series in full. There’s something about having seen the battlefields, even though they are now green and peaceful places, that makes the series reach me at a visceral level in a way that could never have happened when I was a flighty young thing. The series moves me deeply.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin appears in the very first episode, of course. As Lincoln allegedly said to the author of this phenomenal bestseller, “So you’re little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”

If he did indeed say it, it was not an exaggeration. While the abolitionist movement had been agitating for around one hundred years by the time the war started, it was Stowe’s book that took the abolitionists from being a fringe religious movement to one that galvanized the general public. In the North, slavery was suddenly no longer just a peripheral issue that troubled people’s consciences; instead, it was a central issue that drove the South out of the union (“How dare those arrogant Yankees tell us what to do?”), triggering the biggest conflagration in American history.

I don’t know how many of you have read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but I have. It is not a literary masterpiece. Stowe’s prose is the modern equivalent of a dime store novel — but that’s completely irrelevant. What matters is that she is a writer of marvelous narrative power. The characters may be hackneyed, but they are vivid and the slaves’ travails reach out and grab you by the throat. This is especially true for an audience that wasn’t made callous by Jerry Springer and Oprah, and that wasn’t exposed to every image known to man thanks to television and the internet. Mid-19th century Americans carried their true emotions quite close to the surface.

Ironically enough, just as Stowe’s book initiated the fervor that led to a war that left more than 600,000 American dead in its wake, I think it was another woman’s book that helped keep Jim Crow alive by creating across America a passion for the romance and gallantry of the old South. I speak, of course, of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, which was published in 1936, and then kept alive for generations of Americans thanks to one of the best movies ever made in Hollywood.

I first read GWTW when I was 12, and probably read it annually for the next six or seven years. I read so often because, at least to my adolescent self, it was one of the greatest, and most tragic. romances ever written.

Scarlett O’Hara is a deeply flawed character who ought to be despicable because of her grasping, greedy, self-centered ways. That she is not — that she is peculiarly compelling and that her valiant spirit causes us to feel for her even at her worst — makes her something of a metaphor for the pre-war South itself, at least as Mitchell wrote both the character and the culture. While Southern culture may have been wedded, selfishly, to an utterly evil institution, Mitchell brought to that society the same fire, charm, courage that Scarlett had herself. Her characterization of a lost time touched many people who still had enough moral center to condemn slavery.

Scarlett’s travails — which are also the travails of a war-torn South (and it’s worth remembering that, barring the foray into Gettysburg and some skirmishes out West, Union soil and towns saw no battles) and a Reconstruction South — inevitably elicit sympathy. How can they not? Even though Scarlett and the South were in the wrong, their sufferings were very real and their attempts to cope with that suffering had a peculiar courage.

Moreover, Margaret Mitchell, unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe, was a good writer. GWTW may not be great literature, but it’s damn good writing, so the reader inevitably begins to empathize with the lead characters — and the South itself is the true lead in this grand tragedy.

GWTW taught a generation of Americans who had no memory of the actual war that the South was gracious, genteel, mannered, gallant, valiant, brave and, when defeated, as heroic in defeat as it was during the War. (Ken Burns’ Civil War makes it very clear that the South had a much better military than did the North. A few brilliant generals with a fairly small cadre of committed troops saw victories far in excess of what their materiels and numbers should have allowed.)

autant en emporte le ventgone with the wind1939réal : Victor FlemingVivien LeighHattie Mc DanielCollection Christophel

GWTW also taught a generation of Americans who had little contact with black people that blacks were a fundamentally childish race and therefore were always at their best when they had good whites to look up to and take care of them. Certainly, when I was a child, the romanticized world of GWTW’s beloved house slaves (especially Mammy) seemed infinitely preferable to the realities of South Central LA, Watts, or other major American slums. My immature mind concluded that anyone with half a brain could see that it was nicer to wear clean, bright clothes, and scold spoiled Southern heiresses while lacing them tightly than it was to live in a modern American housing development.

It was actually quite a while before I was able to understand that slavery is so intrinsically evil, and so at odds with core concepts of human individualism and liberty, that it can never be accounted a good thing, no matter how superficially pleasant it may appear. I think it was this eventual understanding — when I cast off the last shackles of “Gone-With-The-Wind-ness” — that also enabled me to understand that a welfare state is just another form of slavery.

And when I say “welfare state,” please understand that I am not referring to a moral country that cares for its old and weak, its helpless and frail. Instead, I am referring to a country that systematically tells vast swaths of its citizens that they are better off living the most marginal existence possible at the government’s expense, than they would be were they to strike out on their own. The only difference in modern slavery is that the slaves are instructed not to work (“white privilege owes you”), than being instructed to work (“you owe white privilege”). Either way, the new slaves have been deprived of the ability to learn the skills and make the decisions that are the hallmarks of a free people.

I’m a more bookish person than most, but I am quite convinced that Margaret Mitchell’s powerful, romantic, tragic, gilded view of the South before, during, and after the Civil War allowed Jim Crow and other depredations against blacks to continue long after they should have died a natural death. Just as Stowe brought a generation of Americans to realize the horrors of slavery, Mitchell made a whole new generation see the beauty of a society built upon slaves’ backs and to believe that this society was as good for the slaves as it was for their masters.

Your opinion?

UPDATE: Patrick O’Hannigan offers a typically insightful and thoughtful challenge to my post, arguing that a much more powerful book, by a much greater American writer, helped offset any message she created.

The Left is wrong about AZ’s proposed law, but religious freedom supporters might have to boycott the Super Bowl to make that point

February 26, 2014 by Bookworm 7 Comments

I’ve mentioned gay marriage once already today as the latest non-issue to roil the left even as the world around us crumbles (a la the 1930s), the American military is reduced (a la the 1930s), and tyrannies are rattling their sabres (a la the 1930s). Overnight, the same liberal who have been remarkably quiet about the Obamacare debacle, uprisings in Ukraine and Venezuela, the flat economy, etc., have found a new cause: Arizona, they scream, is poised to enact the next generation of Jim Crow laws, in the form of Senate Bill 1062, an amendment to Arizona’s existing Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

This Jim Crow claim, which gained instant traction amongst America’s Progressive class, is flat-out wrong as a matter of law and fact. Nevertheless, presumably in the foolish hope that it can appease the Left into backing off from its ongoing effort to destroy football, the Super Bowl committee is using economic blackmail against Gov. Jan Brewer, promising to pull the upcoming Super Bowl from Arizona if she signs the bill. To the extent that the Left is using the Super Bowl as a cudgel against religious freedom, it may be time for supporters of traditional marriage to use their own economic pressure against the Super Bowl.

Better people than I have examined the proposed law, so I won’t rehash it. Without addressing the proposed law’s specifics, though, it’s still possible to show the falsity of the Jim Crow comparison.

First, no mainstream American religion has ever had racial discrimination as a core religious doctrine. All traditional religions, however, have heterosexual marriage as a central tenet of the faith. To the extent Southern racists claimed Christianity as their justification for separating the races, all that they could point to was their own twisted interpretations of the Bible, a document that never concerned itself with racial discrimination.

Heterosexual marriage, however, is something quite different. The Catholic Church elevates it to one of the seven sacraments, and all other traditional religions enshrine marriage between a man and a woman (or several women). What this means is that the Southerners in times past who asserted their right to Jim Crow laws had no protected First Amendment right. The contrary is true today: Those people who will benefit from the proposed Arizona law have a strong First Amendment right that cannot simply be thrown aside.

Second, the Jim Crow laws were actual laws, relying on the state’s coercive power. In other words, they represented government action discriminating against American citizens. The Arizona law, however, does not advocate any type of segregation or discrimination. It simply says that Arizona’s government cannot use economic coercion, not to mention the threat of imprisonment, to force Arizona citizens to engage in religiously offensive activity. There are also safeguards is the act: The protesting citizen must show that he is acting consistently with his faith and that he has a track record of being faithful.

Jim Crow laws meant that the government was discriminatory and coercive in a matter that did not implicate religion. By contrast, the proposed Arizona law narrows the range of situations in which the government can be discriminatory and coercive against people of faith.

Third, the Jim Crow laws mandated that Southern citizens refrain from providing goods, services, or jobs to blacks, or they mandated that those goods, services, or jobs, if provided, must be provided in the most limited, demeaning way possible. The proposed Arizona law not only does not mandate any conduct, it’s also extremely narrow in scope. It says only that genuinely religious people cannot be forced to participate actively in a specific event that clashes with their faith. It’s worth keeping in mind here, as Eidolon so beautifully explained, that up until just a few years ago, every mainstream Democrat politician in America (including Obama and the Clintons) rejected gay marriage, a position consistent with all known human history.

I have no doubt that Gov. Brewer is going to cave to Leftist pressure because of the economic risk that the Super Bowl will pull out of Arizona. That seems to be the ultimate leverage, right? But supporters of traditional marriage — or supporters of a religious individual’s right not to participate in a ceremony that mocks his beliefs — actually have an even bigger stick than the Super Bowl. Just as the Super Bowl can boycott Arizona, believers in religious freedom can boycott the Super Bowl. I mean, it’s a great game, but sometimes we have to subordinate pleasure to principle.

Obamacare: Come join the welfare state

October 13, 2013 by Bookworm 9 Comments

When I read John McWhorter’s superb Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, I learned something I hadn’t known before. Outside of the Jim Crow South, in the years leading up to the Civil Rights movement, black people were very slowly, but still steadily, moving into the middle class. They had stable nuclear families, with working fathers. The Civil Rights movement should have accelerated this trend by removing barriers to black employment.

But something happened at the same time as the Civil Rights movement, and that “something” was Johnson’s Great Society. Burdened by white guilt, and holding welfare checks, well-meaning whites fanned out through black communities and told black men to stop working. Black men had been slaves for too long, they said, and it was time for the government to pay them back. When the men spoke of pride, and manliness, and responsibility, they were told not to let their pride stand in the way of getting what was “owed” them.

The result was inevitable: black men quickly became useful only for sex and procreation. The government stepped in as the family breadwinner. Women with children didn’t have to rely on a man who might do everything from drinking and beating her to leaving the toilet seat up, and men were able to get sex without the burden of fatherhood. Blacks became the only minority group in America that was perpetually mired in the lowest societal echelons. This was not the case for other, equally reviled groups, such as Irish Catholics, Jews, Italians, Asians, or the first generation of Hispanics. (It is somewhat true for the current generation of Hispanics, who have also been seduced into believing that the state should be the pater familias.) Asians who immigrated after the 1960s probably avoided the welfare trap only because they came from Communist countries and had experienced a surfeit of government “largesse.”

If you want to see the end result of the hard-driving government effort to place blacks on welfare, you need only see this video (which I call “All attitude; no gratitude”):

Now that I’ve given you some background into the scourge of a government’s unconstrained push to get citizens onto welfare, you are ready to read Zombie’s article about the advice the San Francisco Comical, er, Chronicle, offers to people trying to figure out how to deal with Obamacare. It’s time to be very, very afraid for America.

The Democrats’ “Taming of the Shrew” strategy for American blacks

September 21, 2013 by Bookworm 15 Comments

It’s all good, guys. I’ve finally figured out what’s been going on. We’ve just been reading history dead wrong. The operating historic premise is that the KKK and the Democrat party parted ways during the Civil Rights movement. When the KKK guys realized that northern Democrats who supported civil rights now owned the Democrat party, they walked out en masse and became Republicans. That way, they were free to indulge openly in their hateful racism.

What really happened is something much more subtle. The KKK guys became sleepers in the Democrat party. Instead of attacking blacks head on with burning crosses and lynchings, they decided to use a mainstream political party as the engine by which they destroyed blacks. As Petruchio did in The Taming of the Shrew, they set out to kill the blacks with kindness. The degradation of American blacks under fifty years of ostensibly well-meaning Democrat social and economic policies isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

(Bear with me here, ’cause I’m on a roll.)

Despite the horrors of the Jim Crow South, not to mention the pervasive racism across America, blacks in America were actually showing steady, albeit slow, upward mobility. When the government left them alone, blacks started colleges, grew businesses, got married, and had families. Although they were poorer than whites, had more out-of-wedlock children than whites, and had more run-ins with the law than whites, they were moving towards a middle class model. Undoubtedly, this trend could have continued and even accelerated with the passage of civil rights laws that banned discrimination. (And it’s worth remember that the Civil Rights Act didn’t require affirmative federal action; it only banned discrimination.)

Whenever they were left alone, blacks in America proved that Frederick Douglas was right all along when he insisted that the best thing that America could do for blacks would be to leave them alone.

Here’s the interesting thing, though. The moment that the Civil Rights movement seemed to have defeated Jim Crow, the Democrat party swung into action — and refused to leave blacks alone. It gave them affirmative action, which meant that, for fifty years, blacks have been placed in jobs and schools where they cannot perform at the same level as other people (both whites and minorities) who achieved those positions on merit. This gave blacks an inferiority complex, and created in non-blacks the false belief that blacks cannot achieve without a sizable handicap.

The Democrat party also did everything it could to ensure that blacks got government handouts, whether or not they wanted them. Instead of being free people, blacks became junkies dependent on ostensibly “free” money. It sapped initiative and pride.

Worse, welfare made men unnecessary. Black women got a better deal from Uncle Sam, especially if they had lots of children. Black men were reduced to the status of sperm donors. (For many women, men who don’t bring in money are burdensome creatures who leave dirty laundry on the floor and forget to put down the toilet seat.)

With the new welfare status quo, sex for black men was easy, but their entire sense of their manhood was reduced to a biological level dependent on a single organ in their bodies. They were no longer judged by their accomplishments, their earning ability, their status as community role models, or as helpmates and companion. Black men were denied the opportunity to develop honor, loyalty, and morality. Instead, instead, in the hierarchical world of men (and all men are, to a greater or lesser extent, hierarchical in how they view the world), the only measurements by which to judge black men was to look for the biggest gun, whether the man carried it gun in a holster or tuck it into his Calvin Klein whitey-tighties.

So we have a generation of black men who have been cheated of an education and a well-fitting job, whose children and family no longer need them as support, and whose lives revolve around their firing power. It was inevitable that these socially and economically disenfranchised — men disenfranchised by a Democrat-enacted policy — would create a culture centered on themselves and their instant gratification. The engines for achieving these ends have been alcohol, sex, drugs, and violence. These are manly pursuits untempered by the steadying influence of women and children or by a culture that values men.

And what did the Democrats do when black men, as a result of Democrat policies, devolved into a lowest-common denominator culture? They “forgave” them. Instead of exhorting them to rise up, to embrace morality, decency, family, stability, work, accomplishments, and education, the Democrats assured the black men that what they were doing was okay. “Oh, black men,” said the Democrats, “you are not masters of your destiny and captains of your fate. You are the helpless flotsam and jetsam floating about aimlessly on the great ocean of Republican racism. You can’t do anything about your lives and therefore you are not responsible for the harm you do, whether to yourselves, your families, your children, your community, or your country.”

It is a terrible thing that Democrats have done to blacks — and all ostensibly in the name of love.

And that’s when I realized what’s really been going on for all these decades: the Democrats have achieved what the KKK set out to do. Just like Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, they have succeeded in killing American blacks by kindness:

That is, to watch her, as we watch these kites

That bate and beat and will not be obedient.

She ate no meat today, nor none shall eat.

Last night she slept not, nor tonight she shall not.

As with the meat, some undeservèd fault

I’ll find about the making of the bed,

And here I’ll fling the pillow, there the bolster,

This way the coverlet, another way the sheets.

Ay, and amid this hurly I intend

That all is done in reverend care of her.

And, in conclusion, she shall watch all night,

And if she chance to nod I’ll rail and brawl,

And with the clamor keep her still awake.

This is a way to kill a wife with kindness,

And thus I’ll curb her mad and headstrong humor.

He that knows better how to tame a shrew,

Now let him speak; ’tis charity to show.

The Taming of the Shrew is a delightful and witty comedy. We know that Kate and Petruchio are two headstrong people who must inevitably love one another, and we know too that Kate has lost control of herself and must be brought to heel, not just for her family’s well-being, but for her own. That’s why we forgive the way Petruchio browbeats her under the guise of love and solicitude.

American blacks, however, are not Kate: They are not women in the 16th century who must marry to survive and who must therefore be tamed. It is unforgivable that the Democrat party has sought to kill them by kindness, not to uplift them and bring them to full equality, but instead to degrade and demoralize them. This is not the act of a political party that welcomes blacks to the brotherhood of man. This is the act of people who loathe blacks and want to ensure their continued poverty and debasement — which was pretty much the KKK’s plan from the get-go.

Elbert Guillory explains why he is a Republican — and they are words that EVERY American should hear

June 18, 2013 by Bookworm 9 Comments

I’ve already admitted to my crush on Elbert Guillory, a crush that formed when he was still a Democrat, although he must already have been planning to leave that party. My political crush has just deepened into a full-blown, out-and-out case of political passion. If you haven’t yet watched this short video Guillory made to explain why he switched parties, you must. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it’s one of the most important videos I’ve ever seen. The only thing that saddens me about it is that it won’t be run on MSNBC, or ABC, or CBS, or NBC, or NPR, or on any other major media outlet. I think everyone should see this video, no matter their race, creed, country of national origin, or gender identity. It’s that good:

I don’t know about you, but I’m still cheering.

“The Help” — could there be more cliches in one movie? UPDATED

April 3, 2012 by Bookworm 23 Comments

Subject to a very few exceptions, I don’t see movies during their first runs in movie theaters. Instead, I see them when they’re released on DVD. That’s why I’m only watching The Help now. (The Help is a movie about black maids in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi.)

Before I go any further with this post, I have to tell you that I was predisposed to dislike it. To begin with, I think most of what comes out of Hollywood nowadays is poorly done, insofar as movies are charmless and heavy-handed. I also looked at the few big names in the cast (Allison Janney, Sissy Spacek, Cicely Tyson, and Mary Steenburgen) and assumed that the movie’s viewpoint would be hostile to some aspect of America. Lastly, I knew that a movie about black and white relations in the 1950s would be in its approach . . . well . . . black and white.

So far, I’ve struggled through the first half of The Help and am bored out of my mind. It’s like being buried knee deep in cliches. In a way, the movie is hampered by a historical truth, which is that the Jim Crow South, especially deep in Mississippi, was a miserable hellhole for blacks. Southern whites had a single-minded focus, which was to maintain a status quo that saw blacks at the bottom of the pecking order. Blacks were dehumanized, physically abused, legally insulted, and whatever else the Dixie-crats could think of to ensure that they didn’t have to look black people in the eye and see their common humanity.

These historic truisms handicap the movie, because the only way it can deal with them is to make the whites horrifically bad and the blacks angelically good. In other words, the characters are one-dimensional and quite boring. The lead “good” white girl is blandly good; while the lead “bad” white girl is a caricature of evil, with a touch of Hannah Arendt-style banality thrown in. The black women are plaster saints, whether heroically working to send their kids to college, heroically suffering after a child dies, or heroically using an indoor bathroom. The single “outsider” is a New York Jewish female editor, who sees the Civil Rights movement as something akin to a fashion trend. (In that, the movie does a disservice to the many Northern Jews who were fanatic in their devotion to the Civil Rights cause. Just as the blacks did, they believed defeating Jim Crow was akin to the Jews’ struggle to escape Pharaoh’s clutches, and that belief added a spiritual element to their approach that overrode mere faddism.)

There’s no room for nuance in this movie. It’s a polemic, pure and simple and, as such, artistically dull. That could change in the movie’s second half, which I’ll watch tonight, but I’m not optimistic.

There is one thing about the movie that does stand out — there are no men. So far, one black man has appeared off screen (we hear only his voice) to beat his wife; while another black man has given a short sermon about Moses’ courage. The white men are equally invisible and ineffectual. They are either hen-pecked or absent altogether. I’ve just reached the point in the movie where the lead white girl (whose name I can’t remember because she’s such a nonentity) charms a blind date by being rude to him. Or at least, I think that’s what she did. One other problem I have with the movie is that the actors got a little carried away with their down-home Southern accents. As often as not, they’re unintelligible. It may add an air of authenticity to the movie, but it makes it hard to follow.

I’ll get back to you tomorrow about part 2 of the movie. So far, I’m not impressed.

UPDATE: Last night turned into homework central, so my TV watching was limited to catching up with Jay Leno doing “Headlines.” Part II of The Help will have to wait another day.

But we stood by them in Selma!

February 13, 2008 by Bookworm 7 Comments

My post title imagines what I bet a lot of the older generation of Jewish Americans will think when they learn about the latest campaign tactics from the party that knows how to do identity politics. Steve Cohen, whose name is a giveaway as to his Jewishness, is running for reelection in Tennessee’s 9th District. His opponent is Nikki Tinker, whose name is not a dead giveaway but who is in fact black. An African-American minister who does not reside in the 9th District has decided to become involved in the campaign. Here’s his campaign poster, a copy of which ended up mailed to Cohen himself:

Truly, I don’t think either Hitler or Torquemada or the Mufti of Jerusalem or Father Coughlin could have done any better than that in terms of sheer, old-fashioned appeals to antisemitism as a way to manipulate the masses. It is a disgusting piece of work. More than that, Tinker, who is clearly no belle, isn’t lifting a finger to disassociate herself from this vile garbage:

What does Nikki Tinker think about anti-Semitic literature being circulated that might help her unseat 9th District Congressman Steve Cohen in the Democratic primary next August?

A fair question, which Tinker declined to answer this week after a flier stating that “Steve Cohen and the Jews Hate Jesus” began circulating in Memphis.

The question goes to the character of the woman who wants to represent the 9th District, and 9th District voters deserve an answer. But Tinker declined to return a phone call about the flier.

“Of course we wouldn’t have anything to do with that,” said Tinker spokesman Cornell Belcher, referring to a flier that has been denounced by the Anti-Defamation League.

” … We’d be interested in denouncing this sort of nonsense as well but, again, we haven’t seen it.”

That’s a great excuse, isn’t it? “I can’t comment on antisemitism as a tool in the political race because I haven’t actually touched the piece of paper on which the antisemitic sentiments are written.” Clearly, this is a woman who takes personal responsibility seriously (and that was meant to be snide, not straight).

This same editorial notes that this is not the first time that Cohen’s not-blackness has been used against him, although it is the first time the antisemitic card has been played in this way:

Inciting tension between African-Americans and Cohen was the aim of several members of the Black Baptist Ministerial Association who took Cohen to task last summer for his support of federal hate crimes legislation. The real motive behind the attack was revealed in later comments by at least one of those involved.

“He’s not black,” said Rev. Robert Poindexter of Mt. Moriah Baptist Church, “and he can’t represent me, that’s just the bottom line.”

My first thought when reading this, which is reflected in my post’s title, is that when I was growing up, Jews took very personally the antisemitic sentiments that, I am sorry to say, have long permeated large segments of the African-American community. And they take it very personally for a specific reason, and it’s not because all of us (blacks and Jews alike) are minorities together. It’s because Jews feel that, when blacks began to agitate against Jim Crow, once one got outside of the black Christian communities, it was Jews who took up that banner just about as aggressively as anyone could. Jews threw themselves into the Civil Rights movement and it pains them beyond belief that those whom they view as the beneficiaries of their efforts and sacrifices have turned on them in such an exceptionally nasty way.

Aside from being visible evidence of the black/Jewish schism in American, one that continues to mystify Jews, the flyer also shows the reductio ad absurdem of identity politics. Although we do not live in a theocracy or a race-ocracy, that’s precisely how this Democratic race is being played out. If you’re black, don’t bother your pretty little head with difficult thoughts about Tinker’s politics, beliefs and capabilities, as opposed to Cohen’s. Instead, rest easy and vote for Tinker because she’s black and Christian and against Cohen because he’s white and Jewish.

This type of electioneering tactic is not only disgusting, it’s demeaning to the African-Americans who are the intended recipients of this type of garbage, since it circumvents any appeals to their higher reasoning. It’s also unsurprising and, in that regard, the Captain sums it up about as well as can be said:

Once again, the Democrats find themselves in the position of playing racial, ethnic, and now anti-Semitic politics. We have seen it at the grassroots level now, and at the highest levels of the party, especially from the Clinton campaign. Small wonder that a relatively low-level officeseeker feels comfortable in using these tactics in 2008, given the example Bill Clinton has provided already this year.

We’ve [meaning “conservatives” listened to insults from Democrats for years for far less than this.

What I have to say is that, if you select chickens solely by the color of their feathers, and without regard to their egg-laying capabilities, when those chickens come home to roost, you’re going to end up with a visually impressive coop that produces nothing but chicken poop.