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The most graceful and dignified indictment of the U.S. media you’ll see in 2016
By Peter Daou | SEPTEMBER 16, 2016
With some notable exceptions (David Fahrenthold comes to mind) the national political media have failed America in 2016. There is overwhelming, objective evidence that they are tipping the scales in favor of Donald Trump, offering cursory coverage of his myriad transgressions while obsessing over Hillary Clinton's every word. As a result, trust in the mass media is at an all time low.
On a day when Donald Trump has again invoked the assassination of Hillary Clinton, this response, from Kierna Mayo, is stunning in its simplicity and power: Time is winding down and most of the 2016 race is in the rear view mirror. The view is ugly. Hillary Clinton’s emails have been covered by major media outlets for 451 consecutive days (and 558 out of the past 562 days). Her every mistake is magnified and turned into a massive controversy. Even her cough is analyzed by pundits. She is scowled at while recovering from pneumonia and treated with dripping disdain at a Commander-in-Chief forum. Meanwhile, Trump coasts along, leaving a trail of filth behind him. He mocks the press, toys with them, teases them. And they ask for more. Studies come out that confirm he gets better coverage. And they give him more. Clinton is saddled with the Romney-esque 47% label for speaking the truth (inelegantly) about some of Trump’s supporters, while Trump is given a free pass for actually adding 3 points to Romney and calling 50% of the country lazy freeloaders. Brian Beutler of the New Republic sums it up: Whether you have a short or long view, you’ve seen enough to say authoritatively that Trump is different from all major party nominees in living memory. It is not normal in modern times for a major party nominee to be an erratic, racist demagogue; and it is almost definitionally abnormal for a major party nominee to be described as such by leading members of his own party. These are the cardinal facts of this election. They should be the dominant upshot of any significant increment of news coverage and analysis—the thing that reaches and sticks with casual news consumers, in the same way that even musical dilettantes can hum the leitmotif of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. For several weeks now—including since Labor Day, when most Americans truly began paying attention to the campaigns—these truths, which we all took for granted six months ago, have not been communicated to glancing news consumers. They’ve receded from most article leads, headlines, front pages, and A-block TV segments. That development is the product of many collective choices and thousands of individual ones. It is an institutional failure, and as such, a major and abrupt course correction seems highly unlikely. But that doesn’t absolve reporters, editors, producers or anyone else who is part of the system. There will be a reckoning when this race is over, a moment of truth for the mass media. And it is unclear whether they can ever recover from the damage they’ve done to their own credibility.
LEMON: Yes. Is that something to be proud of to make the president produce his birth certificate and then be wrong about him not, you know, being born somewhere else? BASH: I mean, I don't expect him to say anything different. If he's going to make this conclusion that the president was born in the United States, he's Donald Trump, of course he's going to go through the record of how it happened, that the president did go to great lengths to release his long birth certificate. We all remember that happening. Now, he didn't... (CROSSTALK) LEMON: If we could find that sound bite it would be great of the president saying, you know, we don't have time for this when he produced his birth certificate, I would like to play that moment. (CROSSTALK) BASH: Yes, but he didn't put... LEMON: And also -- there's also -- there's also a moment where he's saying you wouldn't believe what -- it was an interview, I forget who -- don't know if it was Katy. I forget who is he is with. No, it was Meredith Vieira, Meredith Vieira, where he says you won't believe I had my investigators, you know, over in Africa and then Hawaii and you won't believe what I'm finding out. So, -- and then he goes on to say, "Mr. Trump did a great service to the president and to the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised." They brought the Hillary Clinton thing up again. "Inarguably, Donald Trump is a closer, having successfully obtained President Obama's birth certificate when others could not. Mr. Trump believes the president -- that President Obama was born in the United States." I have to give it to Jason Miller. I mean, it was, this is a pretty interesting read. PRESTON: Here's thing that you have to ask yourself too about the whole issue for the Republican Party. And let me defend the Republican Party in this. Almost every republican official in Washington, I think just about every one of them, believes that Barack Obama was born in the United States. LEMON: Republican officials, but not most republicans, I believe, especially Donald Trump supporters. PRESTON: Look, I think it's like 20 percent of people who were at national polls... LEMON: Born outside of the United States and he's Muslim. PRESTON: Think he was born -- you know, by the way, they all don't have to be republicans. Some of those could be very conservative democrats, they could be independents. LEMON: Or just people who are divorced from reality. PRESTON: Correct. I mean, they don't even need a political affiliation. But the fact is that this issue should have been put to bed a long time ago. Hillary Clinton's e-mail issue should have never happened, these medical records that we got in the last 24 hours should have been put together... LEMON: Donald Trump shouldn't release his tax... PRESTON: The tax issue should have been released a long time ago. I mean, this is another line of transparency that we're not seeing from either candidates. LEMON: Yes. Dana, "Mr. Trump is now totally focused on bringing jobs back to American, defeating radical Islamic terrorism, taking care of our veterans, introducing choice of school, opportunities, and rebuilding and making our inner cities safe again." End of story. It's done. This issue is over. BASH: Well, that's what he hopes. When I was talking to the senior aide who I talked to in the commercial break who gave us the breaking news that we reported that this statement was coming, that was my first question, why now? And the answer was, so he can focus on other things, the things in that statement. Before when we were trying to figure out why he wasn't just saying, OK, fine, the president was born in the United States, you, Don, were saying well, maybe he's waiting for the debate. Our colleague, David Chalian just e-mailed me something that's of course smart, which is all David Chalian says are smart things, and this is it's because he wants off the table before the debate, because this is not something that... PRESTON: Of course. BASH: ... he wants to be even a nanosecond of a focus during the debate. And you know just from the way Hillary Clinton jumped on it tonight, the fact that Washington Post interview went online with Trump, you know, sort of declining to say that the president was born in the United States. I think it was maybe five minutes between then. And when Hillary Clinton added to that her prepared remarks in her speech this evening. So, they knew that this was going to be a potential issue. And again, remember, take a step back, this at this point, it is about Donald Trump being really close in a lot of these battleground states and to get over the line to the -- to the v-column, he has to expand his supporters, expand his base. LEMON: Yes. BASH: He's got those people. He needs to appeal to others. LEMON: Phillip, we're going to talk and I know you want to get in and I promise you we'll get into it. The interesting thing is is that you have to give them -- him credit for at least now he's admitted it, I mean somewhat. You give him some credit for that. Though, I see other people in the studio saying no it took him way too long to do it. But, the interesting thing is is that why does it take so long for the campaign to admit? Why are they so tone deaf sometimes to admit that there are issues especially when we were all sitting here, when the night that he gave his speech in Milwaukee and we said why is he giving the speech to a mostly white crowd and the night before the campaign manager just was completely floored by, what are you talking about. So I think on this one issue, they were tone deaf, now they're trying to make up for it.
Too bad The GOP created the environment in which Donald Trump is now tearing the Republicans apart by being the least productive Congress ever only because they wanted to spite President Obama. So sad is it that the Republican party (GOP) is in such disarray that they cannot seem to pull themselves together. There seems to be nothing but false talking points, smokescreens, lies and distractions in the form of attacks on Hillary Clinton and President Obama. Why are the Republicans in their current state of political disorientation? First, they have this tendency to judge and condemn harshly certain groups like liberals, those who are pro-choice, immigrants. As well, they tend to alienate women and African-Americans. It is no secret that the GOP base consist mostly of uneducated bigots and racist that Republican politician pander to during elections. They call it firing up the base. They use certain phrases and terminology that generally contain racist overtones and/or are well within the realm of bigotry. "Let's take back our country" is one of their battle cries. To prove my point let us take a trip down memory lane. To understand where we are now we should know a little about the Republican Party (GOP) and it's history concern African-Americans/Blacks. In 1968, Richard Nixon realized he could not become president unless he made a deeply cynical move: convincing southern racists to vote Republican. The trouble was, they hadn't done that since the Republican Abe Lincoln freed the slaves. But Nixon calculated that the Democratic "Solid South" could now be broken open: after the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and '64, and the Voting Rights Act of '65, racists, feeling betrayed and furious, were looking for a new home. So, in what became known as the Southern Strategy, Nixon invited racists into the GOP. Ever since, the racists have been essential to the party's "winning coalition," the collection of targeted groups that can add up to electoral victory. Not all Republicans are racists, of course. But without racists, I don't think the GOP can win elections. Not the kind of thing you want to talk about openly, though. So Republican politicians have become fluent in a kind of code, which they use to communicate with the ugly part of their base without offending polite society. In 1981, GOP consultant Lee Atwater offered a guide in an interview: 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. More recent examples: "taking back our country," voter ID, border security and birtherism. But now, along comes a cartoon racist like Donald Trump, who ignores the code and drops the veil from the GOP's structural racism. In response, Republican politicians pronounce themselves shocked to see such blatant bigotry, naked and unashamed. It's a tough sell. The GOP has been doing a racist strip tease for decades now, and Trump is just skipping the tease. Only a few years ago, Senator Lindsey Graham could safely flirt with anti-immigrant racism on Fox News. Now, he's forced to go on CNN and publicly disown Trump's very similar comments, calling him a "wrecking ball for the future of the Republican Party with the Hispanic community." So embarrassing. But it may point to a possible upside. Thanks to gauche clowns like Trump -- not to mention Cliven Bundy, Steve King and others -- the GOP, like the Democratic Party of the 60s, might be forced to reform itself, if only to end the pain.
Because the party is finally experiencing the agony of racism in a form it can't ignore: bad PR. ~from The Huff Post article by Spencer Critchley "Trump Has Exposed GOP Racism" Posted: 07/13/2015 4:03 pm EDT Updated: 07/13/2015 4:59 pm EDT~ To further drive my point home is another article from the The Huffington Post ByJackson Connor entitled "MSNBC's Chris Matthews Accuses GOP Of Keeping Jim Crow Alive In 21st Century"
The thought of Chris Matthews railing against Republicans isn't anything new. But during the final segment of "Hardball" Thursday night, the MSNBC host seemed particularly riled up, accusing the GOP of ushering in a new era of Jim Crow with their treatment of the country's first black president. Matthews said he believes Americans will see Barack Obama's time in the White House in "sharper contrast” in years to come, taking into account the antics he's had to endure from his conservative foes since taking office. According to Matthews, the GOP's primary goal has been to make sure the president "accomplishes nothing" and "gets booted from office as quickly as possible.” The host pointed to numerous examples of Republican temper tantrums, listing Sen. Tom Cotton's (R-Ark.) recent letter to Iran, subverting Obama's ongoing nuclear negotiations, and Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) shouting “You lie,” during the president's 2009 health care speech, among the most egregious. “They will read all this and wonder, 'What was it that made this Republican opposition so all out contemptuous of an American president?'” Matthews said. “'What made it treat him as below respect, below the dignity historically accorded his office?'” The answer, Matthews suggested (and it's been suggested before), stems from President Obama's race. "They will then look at a picture of this president, a picture of this man," Matthews said, "and perhaps get the idea that the age of Jim Crow managed to find a new habitat in the early 21st century Republican Party.” H/T Mediaite
As a reply to people calling the Republicans out for their racism they say that it is the Democrats who are the real racist. Some of the facts concerning this are laid out in the following article: "Democrats are the real racists!: Inside the GOP’s pathetic & insulting response to charges of bigotry" If you're a Republican, how exactly do you explain away Donald Trump's hideous comments about Mexicans? by HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
If there is a more fatuous right wing trope than “Martin Luther King was a Republican” it has to be the utterly nonsensical line that Democrats are the true racists because they were the southern party during Jim Crow. Inevitably, in any discussion of race, some smart-aleck troll smugly interjects the irrelevant fact that the departed Democratic Senator Robert Byrd was a member of the KKK and some very clever boy or girl shares the astonishingly obvious fact that Republican Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Case closed, Democrats are the racists and the Republicans are the African Americans’ true allies. I’m not going to go over the same tired ground that hundreds of others have covered to refute this foolishness. Even the trolls know that many millions of people who used to vote for Democrats switched parties after the various civil rights acts were passed in the ’60s under a Democratic majority. While they deny there was ever such a thing as the “Southern Strategy,” and pretend that racist appeals for votes never happened, that’s also a documented fact and they know that too. But just because conservatives are clearly playing games, it doesn’t lessen the insult to African Americans when they make these inane claims. After all, if Democrats are the “real racists,” then 95 percent are African Americans must be very dumb indeed. Here’s one of conservatives’ more “entertaining” strategies for proving their specious argument, from a chain email I received some time back, a painfully awkward attempt at satirizing the voice of a supposedly Democratic racist: REWARD! CAPTURE and RETURN RUNAWAYS from the Democratic Party’s LIBERAL PLANTATION. Any Person of Color claiming to be Republican, Conservative or a member of the Tea Party is suspect and should be berated, insulted, abused and returned. BE ON THE LOOK-OUT Runaways often speaking in an uppity manner about right the individual, personal responsibility an greatness of America and other such nonsense. THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY THE PARTY OF JIM CROW THE PARTY OF BULL CONNOR in the not so distant past would lynch People of Color for voting Republican. Then we learned it’s far better to just buy their votes using taxpayer money and for over forty years that’s what we have done! WE OWN THEM. *Amount of cash reward pending results of our fund-raising efforts. You didn’t expect us to use our own money, did you? Those are words on a widely trafficked chain email, based upon real runaway slave posters. And it is disgusting, not only for the revolting imagery, but for making a mockery of the horror of slavery itself. After all, what this is is saying is that the vast majority of African Americans are “owned” by the Democratic Party, not because they’ve been bought but because they’ve been “bought-off,” and by implication have no sense of personal responsibility or belief in the “greatness of America.” Again, this is a truly specious line of argument. They are saying that Black people vote Democratic because they’ve been “bought off” with all that generous welfare and food stamp money. The only “good” Black people, therefore, are the “runaways” who vote Republican. (Could they be any more contemptuous of the people they are supposed to be defending?) This “liberal plantation” concept, while not always as crudely expressed as in the aforementioned email, is pervasive among right wingers. And truthfully, this argument is often deployed by African American conservatives who obviously have a claim to use the imagery even though their message is insulting to the vast number of fellow African Americans who vote Democratic. The question of why Black Americans vote for Democrats is not a mystery and it has nothing to do with being “bought (off).” As everyone surely knows, when they were allowed to do it at all, black Americans traditionally voted for the party of Abraham Lincoln for many years. This was for obvious reasons — he was the man who freed the slaves. But as this article in the Washington Post points out, African Americans started voting for Democrats long before they allegedly started chasing all that free government money: [The] Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies pulled data from independent research, Gallup polling, exit polls, professional polling firms and their own surveys to put together a look at the partisan makeup of black voters since the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. That the data start in 1936 and not, say, with the emancipation of slaves after the Civil War — thanks largely to a Republican president — is because the ability of black Americans to vote was regularly restricted and uneven. In the decade before 1948, black Americans identified as Democrats about as often as they did Republicans. In 1948, as Real Clear Politics’ Jay Cost wrote a few years ago, Democrat Harry Truman made an explicit appeal for new civil rights measures from Congress, including voter protections, a federal ban on lynching and bolstering existing civil rights laws. That year, the number of blacks identifying as Democrats increased. The second big jump is the one that you likely thought of first: The Civil Rights Act of 1964. Its passage in July of that year was the culmination of a long political struggle that played out on Capitol Hill. When he signed the bill, President Lyndon Johnson reportedly said that Democrats would, as a result, lose the South for a generation. It’s been longer than that.[…] It’s worth [looking at the] Democratic vote in the heart of the South, including Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. The average support for the Democratic candidate each year has slipped downward, but plummeted in 1948 and 1964. In the latter year, those states backed Barry Goldwater. In the former, they largely backed the States Rights party candidate, Strom Thurmond. Black Americans have many reason to vote Democratic. But it was two Democratic presidents proposing civil rights legislation that made them leave the Republican Party in large numbers. Likewise, it was that same movement for civil rights that made many of those white Southern Democrats switch to the GOP. And the Republican party is still having a problem dealing with the fallout. As Brian Beutler points out in this piece at The New Republic: [S]ince the 2012 election Republicans have been engaged in a quiet and unresolved debate amongst themselves over which of the following three strategic reforms to pursue: 1) Making genuine, substantive concessions to minority voters. 2) Making symbolic and rhetorical concessions to minority voters, without making significant changes to the GOP’s substantive agenda. 3) Making no concessions to minority voters whatsoever, while working to increase the GOP’s already impressive margins among white voters. Two developments in the past month—the mass killing of black worshippers by a white supremacist at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, and the launch of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—have thrown into stark relief how badly option one lost out to options two and three. The ongoing Republican presidential primary has become a contest to determine which of the latter two models the party will adopt in the 2016 election. The hesitancy of the GOP presidential candidates to step up in the wake of the Charleston massacre says everything about their “outreach” to African Americans. The popularity of Donald Trump’s crude nativism among the base likewise illuminates their difficulty in attracting Latinos in sufficient numbers to win a national election. They are stuck. But what can they expect? When you have people constantly spewing vacuous nonsense about the Democrats being the party of racism even as you are insulting African Americans to their faces, it’s hard to make a case for minorities voting for your party. Calling immigrants a bunch of rapists and criminals and rising dramatically in the GOP primary polls isn’t exactly a friendly gesture of inclusion. Whether they like it or not, it is a historical fact that many people who were once members of the Democratic Party switched their affiliation to the GOP when the Democrats voted for civil rights legislation and Democratic presidents signed it. This is not a debatable point. That so many Republicans choose to pretend this isn’t so is either a sign that they are arguing in bad faith or they are living in denial. Either way, it won’t solve their problem: they just have no idea what to do about all the resentful white voters they’ve been opportunistically coaxing into their coalition for the last few decades. They can try to prevent people from voting and they can pretend that “illegal immigrants” are stealing elections. But it won’t change the fundamental reality that they are on the wrong side of history and have been for a very long time. Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.
Bernie Sanders Rips Donald Trump While Calling Out The Bigoted Billionaire’s Racism
By: Jason Easley
Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) ripped Donald Trump at a Latino roundtable in Iowa. Sanders stood up to the
Republican bully by calling out Trump’s racism.
According to the Sanders campaign: In a statement, Sanders said: “This country has experienced racism for hundreds of years. I would have hoped that by the year 2015 leading candidates for president like Mr. Trump would campaign on their ideas as to how they can address our serious problems, and not by trying to divide the country with racist and demagogic appeals. Clearly Trump is scapegoating the Hispanic community. Immigrants are not responsible,” Sanders stressed, “for the disappearing American middle class, the Wall Street collapse brought on by huge financial institutions’ greed and illegal behavior, the war in Iraq, income inequality or climate change.” At the roundtable discussion, Sanders called Trump’s comments “mean” and “denigrating” to an entire group of people and accused him of using Latinos as “whipping boys” to distract attention from real problems confronting the country. He called it “absurd, racist and wrong” to blame immigrants for the nation’s problems. “That is absolutely unacceptable,” the senator added during the roundtable discussion at the Muscatine County Boxing Club. “That kind of discourse should be removed from our politics.” Sen. Sanders was correct. Donald Trump is scapegoating the Hispanic community, but Trump is merely building on the precedent that has been set by his party. The Republican Party has been trying to distract the country from their unpopular policies by playing up their imaginary immigration menace for nearly a decade. Trump has brought the thinly veiled racial dog whistles that Republicans have been using out the open by being extremely blunt and direct about his bigotry. Bernie Sanders has integrity and courage, which is why he directly confronted Trump and ripped him for his racist tactics. The “campaign strategy” is that Donald Trump is using should have been roundly condemned by the Republican Party. Instead of doing the decent thing, Republican presidential candidates have scrambled to follow Trump’s lead and cater to the bigots among their voters. Since Republicans are too afraid to stand up to the bully, Bernie Sanders has risen to knock Trump down.
The GOP isn’t in trouble because of their racist base, they’re in trouble because they’re assholes
