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The So-Called ‘War On Whites’ Is A Fight The GOP Can’t Win

The So-Called ‘War On Whites’ Is A Fight The GOP Can’t Win

At this point, you really have to wonder: Is it still news when a Republican says something asinine?

On the off chance it is, let us spend a few moments pondering the strange case of Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, who said last week that the Democratic Party is waging a “War on Whites.”

Yeah, he actually said that. You can look it up if you want.

Brooks was responding to radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, who had asked him to comment on a remark from National Journal columnist Ron Fournier to the effect that the GOP cannot continue to be competitive in national elections if it continues to alienate voters of color. This is a truth so self-evident as to have been adopted by the GOP itself in its “autopsy” report after the 2012 election.

Yet here is what Brooks said in response: “This is a part of the war on whites that is being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else. It’s a part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things.”

“A War on Whites.” Yet it’s President Obama who is guilty of racially inflammatory rhetoric?

Brooks’ words so alarmed Ingraham that she suggested his rhetoric was “a little out there.” This woman belches fire on all things conservative; for her to suggest you’ve gone too far is like Charlie Sheen telling you to cut back on hookers and cigarettes.

But Brooks doubled down, repeating the claim in an interview with a website, AL.com: “What the Democrats are doing with their dividing America by race is they are waging a war on whites and I find that repugnant.”

OK, so let’s say the obvious first. There’s something surreal and absurd about this lecture, coming as it does from a member of the party that invented the Southern strategy and birtherism and whose voters were last seen standing at the border screaming at terrified Guatemalan kids.

But it’s not the ridiculousness of Brooks’ words that should be of greatest concern. You see, Fournier is right. If something does not arrest its present trajectory, the GOP seems destined to shrink into a regional party with appeal only to older white voters. It will be irrelevant in a nation where white voters will soon cease to be a majority — no group will be a majority — and appeals to racial and cultural resentments have less power to sway elections.

That should concern the GOP brain trust. It should concern us all. As a practical matter, this country has only two political parties; if one ceases to be competitive, we become a de facto single party system. That is not democracy. No ideology has a monopoly on good ideas. So America needs a healthy Republican Party.

Yet for every Rand Paul trying — albeit in a fumbling and deeply flawed manner — to reach constituencies the party has written off and driven off, or to engage on issues it has disregarded, there seem to be five Mo Brookses doubling down on the politics of resentment and fear.

His party needs to realize once and for all that that day is done. It is critical for the GOP to wean itself from the cowardly belief that simply to discuss race and culture, to acknowledge disparity in treatment and outcomes, to put forward ways of addressing those things, constitutes “playing the race card” or “race baiting” or fighting a “war on whites.”

That idea was always wrongheaded and dumb. Very soon it will become electorally untenable as well. So the GOP must learn to speak a language it has shunned to people it has ignored.

Because its biggest threat is not the Democratic Party but demographic reality. And right now, that reality is winning, hands down.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132. Readers may contact him via email at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

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This Week In Crazy: Ebola Is Obama’s Master Plan, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

This Week In Crazy: Ebola Is Obama’s Master Plan, And The Rest Of The Worst Of The Right

Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the wildest attacks, conspiracy theories, and other loony behavior from the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:

5. Bryan Fischer

American Family Association mouthpiece Bryan Fischer kicks things off at number five, for his deeply confused new criticism of the Obama administration.

During one of his standard rants about President Obama’s tyrannical reign of terror, Fischer noted that “he’s got an activist attorney general, Eric Holder, who said, ‘Look, I’m an activist attorney general. I make no bones about that. I’m proud to be identified as an activist attorney general. I am not going to prosecute a single case where a white person is the victim. If a white person is the victim I don’t care if they get justice, that’s no concern of mine. The only cases I am going to prosecute are where blacks are the victims.'”

“That makes him a racist,” Fischer fumed. “Martin Luther King lost his life campaigning against that kind of racist attitude.”

I don’t remember a speech in which Eric Holder declared that he will never prosecute any white person ever. Is it possible that Bryan Fischer is lying to me?

As it turns out, yes. Less than one minute after calling Attorney General Holder a racist, Fischer informed us that anyone who accuses someone of being racist is a liar.

“I thought Juan Williams was better than this,” he said of the Fox News commentator who recently noted the racial undertones in the GOP’s opposition to the president. “It is just disappointing to me to see him slide into the gutter of playing the race card because that is the card you play when you are out of ammunition, when you don’t have an argument, when the truth is not on your side, when the facts are not on your side, when logic is not on your side, when the Constitution is not on your side, when the law is not on your side, that is when you start accusing people and calling people names.”

Of course, Fischer probably doesn’t realize that he’s admitted that truth, facts, and logic are not on his side. But at least irony will never abandon him.

4. Cliven Bundy

Screenshot: YouTube

Screenshot: YouTube

Obvious con man and right-wing hero Cliven Bundy returned to the news this week, when he told Salt Lake City radio station KUER that the Second Amendment doesn’t actually apply to those who work for the federal government.

How does he know? God told him.

“I have no idea what God wants done, but he did inspire me to have the sheriffs across the United States take away these weapons, disarm these bureaucracies, and he also gave me a little inspiration on what would happen if they didn’t do that,” Bundy said, as reported by the Salt Lake Tribune. “It was indicated that ‘this is our chance, America, to straighten this problem up. If we don’t solve this problem this way, we will face these same guns in a civil war.'”

That’s probably news to the hundreds of armed militiamen who flocked to Bundy’s ranch during his standoff with the Bureau of Land Management, many of whom were ostensibly there to defend the right to bear arms.

But in fairness to Bundy, if anyone would know what causes a civil war, it’s the guy who thinks that “the Negro” was better off under slavery.

3. NRA News

NRA News/YouTube

NRA News/YouTube

Last January, Stevie Wonder mused that he may purchase a firearm to illustrate the absurdity of America’s gun laws.

“Imagine me with a gun,” he said at the time. “It’s just crazy.”

Unfortunately, NRA News decided to take him up on his challenge.

In the latest offering from the National Rifle Association’s video channel, commentator Dom Raso managed to come up with an even worse idea than mandatory guns for schoolkids: Arming the blind!

“Every law abiding, blind individual should be able to have whatever guns they want,” Raso declared. “And if you disagree with that statement or you haven’t thought it all the way through, you don’t take your rights seriously enough.”

“Do you think because they’re blind, they’re going to start shooting in every direction and kill everyone?” Raso asks.

“Do you think you need to see where you’re shooting if someone’s on top of you trying to kill or rape you while their hands are slowly squeezing your neck and they’re yelling, ‘I’m going to kill you’?”

If you think that the answer is “yes,” then you clearly haven’t seen the movie Daredevil.

“Fact is, it’s been proven that people that lack vision have an increased awareness of their hearing and spatial surroundings,” Raso explains. So now the NRA is all about science.

This is, of course, completely crazy. So crazy, in fact, that even the NRA recognizes the insanity; it pulled the video from YouTube and its website on Thursday.
2. Mo Brooks

Mo Brooks

U.S. Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) checks in at number four, for finally standing up for the real victims of racial intolerance in the United States: White people.

During a Monday interview with right-wing pundit Laura Ingraham, Congressman Brooks accused Democrats of waging a “war on whites” to divide the country.

“This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else,” Brooks explained. “It’s part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things. Well that’s not true.”

Ingraham responded that Brooks’ theory is “a little out there,” which should have been a wailing Drudge siren of a warning sign (you never want to be too far out there for this lady) ,But Brooks was undeterred.

He reiterated his theory the next day in an interview with USA Today, opining, “if you look at current federal law, there is only one skin color that you can lawfully discriminate against. That’s Caucasians — whites.” And then, just in case you still weren’t feeling sorry for the downtrodden white majority, he pitched the argument once more time in an interview with Newsmax’s Steve Malzberg.

“Look at what the Democrats do on a daily basis,” Brooks said. “They appeal to specific racial groups, saying we will protect you, that racial group. And who are they talking about protecting them from? They’re talking about protecting them from Republicans. But at the same time, what do they say about those Republicans? That they’re whites.”

That’s right: Democrats are racist for telling minorities that they will protect them from discrimination — and when will someone finally help white people get ahead in this country?

That GOP rebrand is going swimmingly.

If it’s any consolation to Congressman Brooks, if there is a “war on whites,” his side is winning in a landslide.

1. Rick Wiles

Screenshot/Youtube

Screenshot: YouTube

As the Ebola outbreak continues to wreak havoc in western Africa and raise fears in the United States, it was only a matter of time before someone blamed it — like all things in life — on President Obama.

This week’s “winner,” conspiracy theorist Rick Wiles, won the race to the bottom.

Wiles, who holds the impressive distinction of being to the right of Allen West, suggested on the Monday edition of his radio show that the president may forcefully inject Americans with the Ebola virus, probably to make it easier to herd them into FEMA camps.

“Listen, if it’s an Ebola vaccine then the Ebola virus in in the vaccine,” Wiles said. “Are you going to go down to your local government office and have them inject some Ebola virus in you?”

“Obama would claim executive powers to mandate that every human being in the United States be vaccinated,” he continued. “They could use the panic to stampede hundreds of millions of people in this country to be vaccinated, in fact billions worldwide, they could stampede the world to receive to a vaccine against a deadly virus and nobody knows what is in the vaccine.”

The next day, however, Wiles suggested that an Ebola outbreak might not be such a bad thing — if it kills off some gays and atheists.

“Now this Ebola epidemic can become a global pandemic and that’s another name for plague. It may be the great attitude adjustment that I believe is coming,” Wiles explained. “Ebola could solve America’s problems with atheism, homosexuality, sexual promiscuity, pornography and abortion.”

“If Ebola becomes a global plague, you better make sure the blood of Jesus is upon you, you better make sure you have been marked by the angels so that you are protected by God,” he added. “If not, you may be a candidate to meet the Grim Reaper.”

Sure, millions of people would die. But at least it would solve our super gay Nazi problem.

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!

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