On Christmas Day, Face The Nation broadcast John Dickerson’s annual interview with Stephen Colbert — an amusing and very thoughtful look backward at a troubled year and forward into a new era of uncertainty.
The Late Show host tries to find a brighter side as the nation approaches inauguration 2017. He explains the simple secret of writing jokes about Donald Trump. And he offers a reading list for the president-elect — including the U.S. Constitution and Trump’s own book The Art of the Deal, implying that Trump has read neither — while confessing that he strains to remain respectful of the man as well as the office.
As a realist, Colbert keeps that reading list short — indeed, his final recommendation is very short: only four words.
Appearing on Face The Nation Sunday morning, Jamelle Bouie, CBS political analyst and Slate’s chief political correspondent, broke down the numbers behind Hillary Clinton’s semi-gaffe at a private fundraiser on Friday, where she said half of Trump’s supporters belonged in a “basket of deplorables” — that is, the “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” elements of his base.
Clinton followed that remark by telling the room about the “other basket of people,” “who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.”
Though the Democratic nominee has since walked back the “half” part of her original statement, Bouie explained Sunday that Clinton wasn’t far off: 65-75 percent of registered Republican voters believe President Obama is either a Muslim or was not born in America. More than 40 percent of Republicans agree with statements like “blacks are more violent,” and an even greater share of Trump supporters specifically would say that.
To whichever “half” of Trump’s supporters — around 30 million people — Clinton was referring, she has accurately included a great many millions of people who hold explicitly prejudiced and bigoted beliefs.
Whether or not these voters “are not America,” as Clinton claimed, is another story. Donald Trump’s continued success seems to say otherwise.
This morning, Rudy Giuliani returned to a cable talk show to defend his allegation, on another talk show, that the Black Lives Matter movement was “inherently racist.”
In case you missed Giuliani’s Sunday comments on Face the Nation: The former New York City mayor appeared on the CBS show and criticized the phrase “black lives matter” as “anti-American and […] racist,” since he said it was divisive, ignored deaths of individuals of other races, and underplayed the deaths of African-Americans at the hands of other African-Americans.
As the show’s host, John Dickerson, and CBS This Morning host Gayle King mentioned earlier today, though, Giuliani’s argument rests on a tenuous perception that the Black Lives Matter movement is promulgating a view of black lives as more important than the lives of others.
“Anybody in the Black Lives Matter movement has never said that ‘black lives matter more than yours.’ No one’s ever said that,” King said. “They’re just trying to bring attention to the cause that a lot of black unarmed men are being shot by white police officers.”
This morning, Giuliani took to Fox & Friends to defend his remarks, repeating his statements and saying that in his term as mayor he helped protect African-Americans by decreasing the murder rate. “I believe I saved a lot more black lives than Black Lives Matter,” he added, reiterating his oft-repeated claim that 90 percent of black homicide victims are killed by other black people.
As the Washington Post “Fact Checker” column has already shown, though, this claim is misleading. While the approximately 90-percent figure is accurate, it ignores that 84 percent of white homicide victims are killed by whites. The figure basically implies that homicide victims are most often killed by people they know, and that most Americans’ social worlds are mostly made up of people of similar racial backgrounds.
And while Giuliani is correct that homicides did decrease during his mayoral tenure, from 1994 to 2001, he said that he left office with “500 plus murders” — the real figure is actually 649, according to the New York Police Department. In fact, the drop in New York City murders parallels the nationwide drop in the homicide rate from seven per 100,000 people in 1993 to around four per 100,000 in 2001.
On CBS’s Face The Nation Sunday, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings explained how Texas’ open carry laws affected last week’s Dallas shootings. Civilians armed with rifles, body armor, and camo gear took law enforcement’s “eye off the ball for a moment,” he said.
As Dallas police searched for a hidden shooter at a large protest against police brutality, Texans carrying legal rifles immediately became suspects; some of them were taken and questioned by police, wasting valuable time. One man carrying a rifle was mistakenly identified as a “person of interest” and had his picture spread all over social media, instantly becoming the most-wanted man in the country.
“That is one of the real issues with the gun right issues that we face, that in the middle of a firefight, it’s hard to pick out the good guys and the bad guys,” Rawlings said.
