What was for most Americans a moment of inspiration — the ascent of Sen. Kamala Harris, a woman of African and Indian descent, to a national party ticket — has instead provoked paranoia and rage on the Republican right. Along with the usual petty insults spat by President Donald Trump, his minions in the media are returning to their habitual obsessions of nativism, racism and misogyny.
It is a repellent and buffoonish spectacle, but it is unlikely to make any impression on voters who don't already share Trump's narrow, delusional worldview.
In the barrage of confused attacks on Harris, there is much to be learned about the psychopathology of the far right. So-called conservatives have little interest in the senator's actual record in public office or views on substantive issues, only in assaults on her background and character. Somehow, they miss the irony of calling her "nasty" while they launch hundreds of these vicious broadsides.
From Rush Limbaugh and Joe Pagliarulo, we hear the insinuation that Harris somehow used her sexuality to rise to the political pinnacle she now occupies. They're just "putting it out there," as Pagliarulo smarmily intoned, but why bother? Only someone very stupid would believe that a romantic relationship that concluded decades ago elevated Harris from the district attorney's office to statewide office in California, a seat in the United States Senate, and then her party's vice presidential nomination. Life and politics obviously don't work that way.
The only reason to "put it out there" is to detract from Harris' impressive achievements, with the kind of innuendo that is never inflicted on men. These Trump toadies dismiss the Access Hollywood tape, the Jeffrey Epstein photos, the Stormy Daniels affair, and the multiple credible rape and assault allegations against their idol -- yet they're troubled by those dates that Kamala Harris once had with the mayor of San Francisco. (Let's not even delve into Limbaugh's own problematic personal life, which is colorful in all the wrong ways.)
From former George W. Bush administration flack Ari Fleischer, and sundry other self-styled white experts on African American affairs, comes the suggestion that Harris is somehow not truly Black (or at least not Black enough). Those old racial dog whistles were blown when Barack Obama first ran for president, too, because his mother was white and he grew up in the home of his white grandparents. Does anyone believe that Fleischer — a ludicrous figure on his best days — knows what will "excite" Black female voters, as he put it?
African Americans supposedly won't embrace Harris because her father was from Jamaica and her mother from India. Indeed, according to the pardoned felon and provocateur Dinesh D'Souza, Harris is really white because one of her ancestors was a white slaveholder.
Again, this is a profoundly idiotic jape. Where would Kamala Harris' paternal forebears have originated other than Africa? She is an American of African descent. And how many other Black Americans, like Harris, have a white slaveholder somewhere in their ancestry? Many millions, surely, and like them, that fraction of her lineage is tiny.
The plain truth is that like so many Americans, Harris is proud of the ethnic variety in her background. And like many Black Americans of mixed heritage, she has chosen to identify strongly with the Black community throughout her life. It isn't a contradiction but represents what David Dinkins, the first Black mayor of New York City, likes to call "the gorgeous mosaic."
The unappetizing tableau of Republican race baiting wouldn't be complete without a reversion to "birtherism" — in this case, fake concern over Harris' eligibility for the presidency based on her parents' immigration status at the time of her birth. Desperate for clicks, Newsweek dredged up a right-wing law professor to claim that she just might not pass constitutional muster. It's a feeble argument, fully consistent with the professor's unimpressive, highly ideological resume. But is anybody surprised that the falsehoods flung at Obama for years are now aimed at the next person of color nominated for national office?
I'm not.
To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
Just when you thought the far-right fringe couldn’t possibly connect abortion with the stock market, or equate the LGBT Pride flag with a white supremacist symbol, they just, well, go ahead and do that. It’s “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the shameful, racist, and hateful speech of the increasingly illogical right wing. Starting with one of our regulars:
5. Pat Robertson
Sure, Pat Robertson, an organization that provides women’s reproductive health services is to blame for the recent stock market slide. The conservative televangelist said this week that “Black Monday” was God’s punishment for legal abortion and the federal government’s funding of Planned Parenthood. As anyone who watches Robertson’s The 700 Club (or who reads“This Week In Crazy”) knows, the host typically blames any negative incident, natural disaster, or preventable tragedy on abortion, same-sex marriage, or the LGBT community in general. In his usual fire-and-brimstone style, Robertson said:
We will pay dearly as a nation for this thing going on…. And possibly if we were to stop all this slaughter the judgment of God might be lifted from us. But it’s coming, ladies and gentlemen. We just had a little taste of it in terms of the financial system, but it’s going to be shaken to its core in the next few months, years or however long it takes and it will hurt every one of us.
I’m no economist, but I’m pretty sure Monday’s selloff had something to do with the cyclical nature of capitalism and China’s devaluing of its currency, which caused instability in global markets. Planned Parenthood has been accused of some vile things, but manipulating currency is not one of them.
No matter to Robertson, who likes to play financial advisor, warning viewers that troubled times are ahead. “You don’t know where to go, there is no place to hide financially except in the Lord,” he said. “The Lord is the ultimate refuge.”
Continuing his heated rivalry with Spanish-language news network Univision, Donald Trump had reporter Jorge Ramos booted from a campaign event in Iowa on Tuesday. The reason? Ramos asked Trump a question about immigration — out of turn.
The Donald’s reply: “Go back to Univision.”
Putting aside the fact that this is far from Trump’s first press conference, so he should be used to pushy reporters firing questions at him, his comment about Ramos showed the Republican presidential candidate’s true bigoted colors. (“Go back to Univision.” = “Go back to Mexico.”)
After the incident, Trump tried to portray Ramos as hysterical. “Certainly he was not chosen … he just stands up and starts screaming, so maybe he’s at fault also,” Trump said, adding, “He’s obviously a very emotional person.”
This coming from the man running for President of the United States, yet has a fit every time a reporter asks a challenging question, has gotten to second base with a flagpole, and has people touch his hair to show it’s his own.
Trump is not just “emotional” and vain, but he can be a bully, especially when provoked on his core campaign issue, and God forbid, asked to answer a direct question directly. At the campaign event, he repeatedly tells Ramos to “sit down” as the reporter continues speaking and reminding Trump that he has the right to ask a question.
The legendary Univision broadcaster is still hoping to land an interview with Trump.
Fox News commentator and psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow sounds like the last person who should be sharing “expertise” on gun control and mental health issues. In a Fox segment this week, Ablow charged President Obama with “inflaming racial discord.”
As strange as the allegation was, delivered as an afterthought that sounded more like a rehearsed jab at the president, Ablow’s comment was typical of the right’s urge to blame the guy in the White House, with little evidence, for everything. Ablow echoed a conservative meme: The problem isn’t guns but lack of mental health care — which means “hands off our guns; blame the crazies.”
Sensible people can agree that individuals with mental health problems, as well as many others, should not have access to firearms. But Ablow’s claim that mentally ill people are the problem and guns are not is rebutted by many studies that show people living with mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.
More ridiculous is how Ablow concluded the segment, seeming to place blame on the president because a black man who protested against alleged job discrimination just killed two white people: “There are some people who are unhinged out there who actually think [Obama is] right when he’s just trying to fan the flames of racial disharmony,” Ablow said.
What does Ablow mean when he says Obama has inflamed racial discord? Perhaps that the president has spoken in support of civil rights, voting rights and, repeatedly, about gun violence.
According to Ablow, that’s the real problem: “It would be helpful if President Obama, frankly, would stop tweeting … about gun control and get serious about attacking mental health care.” Again, the pundit blames a small segment of the population of people who commit violent crimes, instead of the policies and lawmakers that allow guns into the hands of far too many unstable people.
The county clerk from Kentucky who continues to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage is apparently willing to allow his homophobia to take him to an early grave. Casey Davis, no relation to his fellow “religious freedom fighter” Kim Davis, said this week that marriage equality is “a war on Christianity” and that he is willing to fight, even if it kills him. He told a West Virginia radio show:
If it takes it, I will go to jail over — if it takes my life, I will die for because I believe I owe that to the people that fought so I can have the freedom that I have, I owe that to them today, and you do, we all do. They fought and died so we could have this freedom and I’m going to fight and die [so] my kids and your kids can keep it.
Incoherent and manic as he is, Davis continues to argue that issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples would violate his right to religious freedom. He talks a lot about God, freedom, and fighting for what he believes in, but says much less about his responsibilities as a government employee, the freedom of LGBT people to marry, and the long struggle of gay people to legally marry those they love. Then there is his misunderstanding of the U.S. Constitution:
There is a travesty taking place with that Supreme Court ruling was completely unconstitutional, completely unconstitutional. They have no right to tell us, the state of Kentucky, that our law that was voted with what was 70 percent of the people that it was wrong; they had no right.
Actually, as the Supreme Court, they have every right under the Constitution to find state laws in violation of constitutional rights. That’s part of the High Court’s mandate. Davis, on the other hand, has no right to deny LGBT people their right to marry. To borrow a semantic framework that conservatives love, if Davis doesn’t like same-sex marriage, he should move to Russia. [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/221002493″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /] ViaRight Wing Watch
We’ve saved the worst for last. Following the tragic televised killing of two journalists in Virginia this week, D’Souza took to Twitter to point out supposed progressive hypocrisy on gun violence, race and ideology.
The leftists who sought to ban the Confederate flag after a shooting now attack me for urging the takedown of the rainbow flag #Hypocrites
D’Souza suggested that because the murderer was a gay black man, officials should demand the removal of the LGBT pride flag from public spaces, as occurred with the Confederate flag following the killing of nine black people in a Charleston, South Carolina, church by a white supremacist.
The key difference, of course, is what each flag represents and the killers’ motives in the shootings. The Confederate flag symbolizes white supremacy, or as its defenders argue, Southern “heritage not hate.” Except that the heritage of the South involves a long history of slavery, KKK lynchings, voter disenfranchisement, and other human rights violations perpetrated against black people. The rainbow flag’s history has no such violent or hateful meaning.
Consider D’Souza’s latest odious, trolling tweets, in which he blames President Obama for what is yet another example of gun violence resulting from unregulated access to firearms, illogically equates love with hate, and confuses healthy pride in your culture with dangerous pride in a racist ideology.
Please, Obama, don’t tell us the poor #VirginiaShooter didn’t get his “fair share” of reporting assignments — Dinesh D’Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 26, 2015
DEPT OF SINGLE STANDARDS: Hey after the #VirginiaShooting is it time to take down those rainbow flags we see all over the place?
Bad news for right-wing gadfly Dinesh D’Souza: Even though he’s been released from his confinement at a halfway house, he’s still got a lot more community service ahead of him.
New York-based District Judge Richard Berman on Monday ordered D’Souza to put in eight hours of community service each week, for the next four years of his probation. Judge Berman also cited a court-appointed psychologist who said D’Souza was “arrogant” and “intolerant of others’ feelings,” the New York Post reports.
D’Souza pleaded guilty last year to having funneled $10,000 in campaign contributions to Wendy Long, an old friend of his who was running as the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from New York in the 2012 election. Through a practice known as “straw donors,” D’Souza reimbursed others to make donations in their own names, so D’Souza could circumvent the legal limit.
“I’m not singling out Mr. D’Souza to pick on him,” Judge Berman said. “A requirement for psychological counseling often comes up in my hearings in cases where I find it hard to understand why someone did what they did.”
He continued: “That Mr. D’Souza committed this crime involves a colossal failure of insight and introspection. The case notes also say Mr. D’Souza has weaknesses in controlling his own impulses and that he is prone to anger in reaction to criticism.”
D’Souza, a longtime fixture of conservative media and activism, has spent a considerable portion of the Obama years marketing books and films alleging that President Obama is an “anti-colonialist” animated by foreign ideology, and bent on taking down American power in the world. This was an interesting shift from his 2007 book, The Enemy At Home, in which he sympathized with radical Islamists around the world, and called upon conservatives to reach out to them as allies in the fight against feminism, gay rights, and other causes of cultural liberalism.
He’s back: Right-wing gadfly Dinesh D’Souza is preparing for the next phase of his career in public life, as detailed in a new profile in Vanity Fair — as soon as he finishes his sentence of mandatory nighttime confinement, stemming from his guilty plea for campaign-finance fraud.
Click above to watch D’Souza in all his megalomaniacal glory — along with his claims to have learned something about how the other half lives — then share this video!
