John McCain is "absolutely" proud of this:

The Republican National Committee is distributing a mail piece that says "Terrorists" on the front and opens to a big picture of Barack saying "Not Who You Think He Is."

John McCain -- who promised to run a respectful campaign -- said that he was "absolutely" proud of it.



John McCain is trying to win this election by scaring voters with truly vile attacks.

With less than two weeks to go, you can provide this campaign with the resources we need to push back in the final stretch.

We cannot let McCain take the low road all the way to the White House.

Please help fight these vicious smears and dozens of others. CLICK HERE.

Related:

• McCain 'Categorically' Proud of Hateful Rally Attendees | Video | AlterNet


• Unacceptable GOP Mailing Projects Racist Stereotypes on Obama | AlterNet


• 'Robocalls' for McCain Epitome of Cowardice | AlterNet


• The Media Consortium: Rollin' With the Hate Talk ExpressMcCain | NewsLadder


• Judge rejects Montco lawyer's bid to have Obama removed from ballot | Philadelphia Daily News | 10/25/2008


• Christian right intensifies attacks on Obama:

  "'It looks like, walks like, talks like and smells like desperation to me,' said the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell of Houston, an Obama supporter who backed President Bush in the past two elections. The Methodist pastor called the 2012 letter 'false and ridiculous.' He said it showed that some Christian conservative leaders fear that Obama's faith-based appeals to voters are working.
  
  Like other political advocacy groups, Christian right groups often raise worries about an election's consequences to mobilize voters. In the early 1980s, for example, direct mail from the Moral Majority warned that Congress would turn a blind eye to 'smut peddlers' dangling pornography to children.
  
  'Everyone uses fear in the last part of a campaign, but evangelicals are especially theologically prone to those sorts of arguments,' said Clyde Wilcox, a Georgetown University political scientist. 'There's a long tradition of predicting doom and gloom.'
  
  But the tone this election year is sharper than usual and the volume has turned up as Nov. 4"

• McCain's Robocalls Have Parents Worried About Their Kids; Palin Criticizes Tactic


• Racist Obama Effigy Hung In Ohio (VIDEO)


• RNC Mailer: What Does Obama Want From Islamic Terrorists?


• Hate You Can Believe In: ACORN Deluged with Threatening and Racist Voicemails and Emails | Right Wing Watch:

  "It’s bad enough that the employees of ACORN have had to endure days of baseless and outlandish attacks by John McCain and the RNC. But after McCain outrageously claimed before a national audience on Wednesday night that ACORN was “maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy,” the group came under attack, literally. In the following days, ACORN’s Boston and Seattle offices were vandalized and at least one employee received a death threat.
  
  And for nearly two weeks, ACORN offices across the nation have been subjected to an onslaught of racist and threatening voicemails and emails. We have secured copies of some of the most disturbing and offensive messages and have reproduced them below in order to show the very real consequences of the Right Wing’s overheated and misplaced “voter fraud” rhetoric.
  
  Warning: the emails and voicemails below are highly explicit and have only been edited to remove personally identifying information. Please also note that, where relevant, the proper authorities have been notified...."

• GOP Group Running Anti-Obama Push Poll


• McCain Defends Robocalls


• William Friedkin: Right-Wing Intimidation Hits Home


• U.S. rabbis: McCain attacks on Obama creeping toward 'hate speech' - Haaretz - Israel News:

  "A group of liberal American rabbis have denounced Republican presidential candidate John McCain's campaign as leaning toward 'hate speech' in its treatment of Democratic rival Barack Obama.
  
  'The manner in which Senator McCain, Governor [Sarah] Palin and their supporters refer to Senator Obama is creeping toward hate speech,' Rabbis for Obama said in a statement on Thursday.
  
  'As leaders of the Jewish community we are well aware of the dangers of using inflammatory political language to marginalize individuals and groups."

Technorati tags: Slime politics, politics of fear, hate speech, hate mongering, fear mongering, John McCain, Barack Obama, 2008, Presidential Campaign

ACT NOW! Tell John McCain and Sarah Palin to Reject the Politics of Division

ColorOfChange.org:



The Republican nominees are increasingly relying on a strategy of race-baiting and fear-mongering to win this election. It's completely unacceptable and it has to stop.

— Click here to see the email we sent to our members. —

Watch the video from Brave New Films showing the McCain/Palin campaign and its supporters in action. Then, please sign the open letter demanding that they reject the politics of division and fear. We'll publicize the letter and make the sure the McCain campaign has to respond.

When you're done, please pass the video and the letter on to your friends and family and ask them to do the same.

Add your voice, now!

This is the open letter we're publishing and sending to to the McCain/Palin campaign.

Dear Senator McCain and Governor Palin,

Time and again in America, people of all races and backgrounds have overcome division and fear, and come together to uplift the country and create a more equal and just society. It's part of what makes this country great.

With an African-American nominee running on a major party ticket and a woman on the Republican ticket for the first time in history, this campaign has seen Americans--men and women of all races--inspired to continue that great tradition, coming together to bridge the gaps that history has set between us in service of our national progress.

But let us be clear: while we have made great strides in this country when it comes to racial equality, we are not finished. Now, more than ever, we need leadership that understands that we live in complex times where too many are quick to judge another by the complexion of their skin or the sound of their name.

In the last few weeks, Senator McCain and Governor Palin, rhetoric at your campaign events has taken an increasingly dangerous tone that seems to ignore the precarious state of our progress when it comes to race and ethnicity.

Supporters at your rallies and other events have used hateful language and called for violence against Sen. Obama yelling "kill him!" "off with his head!" and "bomb Obama."

For the most part, you have stood by in silence. In addition, you have also repeatedly made statements that somehow connect Senator Obama with terrorism. Your surrogates have emphasized his middle name. This is problematic and dangerous, and we believe helps create the conditions that have given rise to these incidents of violent rhetoric from some of your supporters.

Today, we're standing together as Americans of all political persuasions to express our deep concern that the decisions of your campaign are contributing to a dangerous atmosphere of paranoia, division, and hate that, as we have already seen, has the potential to seriously harm our country and its progress.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

In these trying times, candidates seeking the highest offices in the land must call on the best in each of us, and call off the worst.

We urge you to join people of conscience from all races and backgrounds to reject the politics of division and fear, and come together to uplift the country and create a more equal and just society.

-- The undersigned --

Technorati tags: media, John McCain, Sarah Palin, activism, hate mongering, hate speech, robo calls, smear campaign

Demand McCain-Palin End Hate Mongering Robo Calls!

The robo calls from the McCain campaign are very, very ugly. They are using these calls to encourage fear and hate. They call Obama everything from a terrorist to a baby killer.

202-863-8500 is the number of the Republican National Committee. Other GOP contact numbers are here. Please call and express your disgust. Also, call all your local and national politicians.

Call your local media and express your disgust. We do not have to tolerate this fear and hate mongering. It is time for Americans to stand up and say "Enough!"

Thank you!

Olbermann "Special Comment" On Violent Rhetoric At McCain-Palin Rallies

Once again, Keith Olbermann takes the thoughts out of my head and crafts them into words with impact:

(For transcript: Click Here.)

What if things were switched around?

What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, following the debate, including a three month-old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?

What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?

What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his college graduating class?

What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was divorced?

What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?

What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?

What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?

What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five?(The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

What if Obama couldn't read from a teleprompter?

What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?

What if Obama was the one who was known to publicly display a serious anger management problem?

What if Michelle Obama's family had made their money from beer distribution?

You could easily add to this list. If these questions reflected a reality, if the tables were turned, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are? This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative characteristics in another when there is a color difference.

And, think of this: the candidates' educational backgrounds:

Barack Obama:

Columbia University - B.A. Political Science with a Specialization innternational Relations.
Harvard - Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude

Joseph Biden:

University of Delaware - B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
Syracuse University College of Law - Juris Doctor (J.D.)

John McCain:

United States Naval Academy - Class rank: 894 of 899

Sarah Palin:

Hawaii Pacific University - 1 semester
North Idaho College - 2 semesters - general study
University of Idaho - 2 semesters - journalism
Matanuska-Susitna College - 1 semester
University of Idaho - 3 semesters - B.A. in Journalism

Education isn't everything, but this is about the two highest offices in the land as well as our standing in the world.

You make the call.

(Thanks to rdny P. hedgehogg who passed this email to me.)

Barack Speaks on the 40th Anniversary of the Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Speaking in Fort Wayne, Indiana, this morning Barack commemorated the 40th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination, calling on Americans to continue King's lifelong pursuit of social and economic justice.



Trouble viewing this video? Click Here.

For a transcript of Senator Obama's words as prepared for delivery, click here.

Technorati tags: Barack Obama, Fort Wayne, Indiana, Speech, 40th Anniversary, Martin Luther King Jr., video, youtube

Barack Obama : "A More Perfect Union"

Barack Obama delivered a historic speech today in Philadelphia, laying out a fundamental path by which America can work together to pursue a better future.

Historically, the greatest leaders have had the vision to help us transcend our differences and act on the basis of our shared hopes and dreams -- for the benefit of all. Barack Obama is proving daily that he has the potential to be just such a leader. The question is, do we deserve the faith he has put in us to get beyond our differences in order to realize our common dreams. Or do we choose the divisive, pessimistic, petty-politics of the past offered by Hillary Clinton?



For a complete transcript of Senator Obama's speech Click here.

Also See:

• Reactions to Barack's Speech in Philadelphia


• More Reactions to Barack's Speech


• Mr. Obama’s Profile in Courage | New York Times Editorial Board:

  "There are moments — increasingly rare in risk-abhorrent modern campaigns — when politicians are called upon to bare their fundamental beliefs. In the best of these moments, the speaker does not just salve the current political wound, but also illuminates larger, troubling issues that the nation is wrestling with...."

• Black, White & Gray | Maureen Dowd | New York Times

  "...Overriding aides who objected to putting race center stage, Barack Obama addressed a painful, difficult subject straightforwardly with a subtlety and decency rare in American politics...."

• Obama Race Speech Reaction | The Huffington Post

Technorati tags: Barack Obama, Race, Racism, Discrimination, Blacks, Whites, speech, Philadelphia, 2008 Presidential Election

The Black Vote

While I agree with Bob Herbert in today's Times column (see below), it will take more than voting to change things for Blacks in this country.

The evidence is clear in the last three elections that vote fraud and the intentional disenfranchisement of voters, particularly students and blacks, was rampant. Until we -- all Americans of all colors -- demand secure elections and votes that can be counted and recounted accurately (a paper trail for every vote and every voter) and prosecute those who maliciously attempt to disenfranchise voters -- nothing will change.

Further, Blacks and others who have been intentionally marginalized in our society rightfully must question the importance of their vote -- even if counted. Although the Democrats have a better record on Black issues, when in power they haven't done nearly enough. Both sides of the aisle pay lip service to Black causes in political debates -- and then forget all about their promises once elected. The resulting voter cynicism is both understandable and reasonable. Neither party has a vision to change foreign policy in this country (with the exception of Kucinich) so that we can stop pouring billions of dollars into our obscenely bloated military budget and start using those billions to take care of our own people and our own country. Until that happens, nothing will change.

I had such hope for Barack Obama, but the more I listen to him, the more disingenuous he seems. His platform lacks boldness; it's stuck in the middle-ground, baby-step politics of today. We need a Martin Luther King. A JFK. A truly heroic and courageous leader with real vision and real ideas and a genuine desire to implement them. Where is that leader? Dennis Kucinich could fill the bill -- but people dismiss him and chuckle when he talks of a US Department of Peace, as if "Peace" was a dirty word and "War" idyllic. He's not photogenic or charismatic enough for the CNN or MSNBC crowd, and he's much too wimpy for the violent, macho American electorate.

It is evident that the strategy of the Bush administration has been to decimate education in this country in order to assure that fewer young people will have the ability to get a decent education. Why would they do that? Because an uneducated populace -- a people incapable of critical thinking -- can be all the more easily manipulated by the politicians; they can be easily convinced to vote against their best interests, to believe the political propaganda, to swallow poisonous lies whole without questioning their venom.

The problem for Blacks, the poor, and others who have been forgotten in America is a particularly vicious circle that cannot be solved as simply as Herbert implies. Would only that it were so simple....

When Is Enough Enough?
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Chances are you didn’t hear it, but on Thursday night Senator Hillary Clinton said, “If H.I.V./AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country.”

Her comment came on the same day that a malevolent majority on the U.S. Supreme Court threw a brick through the window of voluntary school integration efforts.

There comes a time when people are supposed to get angry. The rights and interests of black people in the U.S. have been under assault for the longest time, and in the absence of an effective counterforce, that assault has only grown more brutal.

Have you looked at the public schools lately? Have you looked at the prisons? Have you looked at the legions of unemployed blacks roaming the neighborhoods of big cities across the country? These jobless African-Americans, so many of them men, are so marginal in the view of the wider society, so insignificant, so invisible, they aren’t even counted in the government’s official jobless statistics.

And now this new majority on the Supreme Court seems committed to a legal trajectory that would hurl blacks back to the bad old days of the Jim Crow era.

Where’s the outcry? Where’s the line in the sand that the prejudiced portion of the population is not allowed to cross?

Mrs. Clinton’s comment was made at a forum of Democratic presidential candidates at Howard University that was put together by Tavis Smiley, the radio and television personality, and broadcast nationally by PBS. The idea was to focus on issues of particular concern to African-Americans.

It’s discouraging that some of the biggest issues confronting blacks — the spread of AIDS, chronic joblessness and racial discrimination, for example — are not considered mainstream issues.

Senator John Edwards offered a disturbingly bleak but accurate picture of the lives of many young blacks: “When you have young African-American men who are completely convinced that they’re either going to die or go to prison and see absolutely no hope in their lives; when they live in an environment where the people around them don’t earn a decent wage; when they go to schools that are second-class schools compared to the wealthy suburban areas — they don’t see anything getting better.”

The difficult lives and often tragic fates of such young men are not much on the minds of so-called mainstream Americans, or the political and corporate elites who run the country. More noise needs to be made. There’s something very wrong with a passive acceptance of the degraded state in which so many African-Americans continue to live.

Mr. Smiley is also organizing a forum of Republican candidates to be held in September. I wholeheartedly applaud his efforts. But if black people were more angry, and if they could channel that anger into political activism — first and foremost by voting as though their lives and the lives of their children depended on it — there would not be a need to have separate political forums to address their concerns.

If black people could find a way to come together in sky-high turnouts on Election Day, if they showed up at polling booths in numbers close to the maximum possible turnout, if they could set the example for all other Americans about the importance of exercising the franchise, the politicians would not dare to ignore their concerns.

For black people, especially, the current composition of the Supreme Court should be the ultimate lesson in the importance of voting in a presidential election. No branch of the government has been more crucial than the judiciary in securing the rights and improving the lives of blacks over the past five or six decades.

George W. Bush, in a little more than six years, has tilted the court so radically that it is now, like the administration itself, relentlessly hostile to the interests of black people. That never would have happened if blacks had managed significantly more muscular turnouts in the 2000 and 2004 elections. (The war in Iraq would not have happened, either.)

There are, of course, many people, black and white, who are working on a vast array of important issues. But much, much more needs to be done. And blacks, in particular, need to intervene more directly in the public policy matters that concern them.

In the 1960s, there were radicals running around screaming about black power. But the real power in this country has always been the power of the vote. Black Americans have not come close to maximizing that power.

It’s not too late.

Photo Credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Bob Herbert, New York Times, Blacks, 2008 Presidential Election, Supreme Court, Politics, Government, news, commentary, op ed

Quote of the Day

Bush's Chief Domestic Policy Adviser: "I Am Never Going To Hire Another Woman Because They Just Get Pregnant and Leave."

Photo: Karl Zinsmeister. (whitehouse.gov)

Technorati tags: Mother Jones, Bush Administration, Domestic Policy Advisor, Karl Zinsmeister, Discrimination, news

Change the Subject

While I like Bob Herbert's columns in general and agree with most of what he says in todays Times op ed, there is not much new he adds to the conversation.

More important, it is time to start reporting the NEWS, Bob. This story continues to be beaten to death all over the media. You've added your two cents.

Now, kindly start writing about why the Bush administration must be impeached before they decide to declare marshall law and turn this country into an official dictatorship, at which point you and I will no longer be free to write critically about anything.

Take it from Alec Baldwin: Imus is Just a Distraction. Which is exactly what I said yesterday in reference to Frank Rich's column.

Signs of Infection
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

People in positions of great power are the ones who define those who are relatively lacking in power. So when Don Imus, a very powerful radio personality, dropped his disgusting verbal bomb on the members of the Rutgers women’s basketball team, he sent a powerful message across the airwaves: that the young women on the team (the black ones, at least) were crude, ugly and genetically inferior, and that all of the women were whores.

That message, which Mr. Imus insisted was meant to be funny, reinforced views already widely held in our society, which is why I could get the following e-mail from a reader:

“Who woulda thunk that the Imus idiocy and the Duke Debacle would hit home on the same day. Both stories bring to mind what my father told me 60 years ago: Stay away from colored women.”

The attention surrounding Mr. Imus’s very public self-immolation is an opportunity for Americans to acknowledge that we have a problem. Not only is the society still permeated by racism and sexism and the stereotypes they spawn, but we have allowed a debased and profoundly immature culture to emerge in which the coarsest, most socially destructive images and language are an integral part of the everyday discourse.

Gangsta rappers trapped in the throes of the Stockholm syndrome have spent years encouraging black people to see themselves as niggers and all women as whores. Michael Savage, one of the most prominent figures in talk radio, with an audience substantially larger than Don Imus’s, has called Diane Sawyer a “lying whore” and Barbara Walters a “double-talking slut,” according to Media Matters for America, a group that monitors some of the excesses of talk radio.

The culture that has given us such wonders as jazz, blues, baseball, Hollywood, the Broadway musical theater, rock ’n’ roll, and on and on, is now specializing in too many instances in language and entertainment fit only for the gutter or a sewer.

Something has gone completely haywire when young American boys and girls are listening to songs like “Can You Control Yo Hoe” and “Break a Bitch Til I Die,” by Snoop Dogg, formerly Snoop Doggy Dogg, formerly Cordozar Calvin Broadus.

“It’s gotten pretty savage out there,” said Tom Brokaw of NBC News during an on-air discussion of the Imus situation.

Mr. Brokaw, who believes that firing Mr. Imus was the right thing to do, said: “There’s been an absence of civility in public discourse for some time now. The use of language across the racial spectrum, and across the political spectrum, and across the cultural spectrum, has been, in any way you want to describe it, debased to a certain degree.

“The words that you hear used commonly on the street, or on the air, or on radio, or in rap lyrics, are words that in the worst days of segregation in this country, in the worst segregated parts of this country, you would not have heard on radio. Now you hear them commonly.”

The language, of course, is just a symptom. Mr. Brokaw went on to mention, in a tone that sounded a bit sad and somewhat resigned, that Americans had steadfastly refused to face the race issue honestly and head-on. “I had hoped,” he said, “I guess somewhat naïvely 20 years ago, that we would be in a far different place than we are now.”

We should also be in a better place in the way that women are viewed and portrayed in the culture. And one of the first steps in a conversation about how to honestly address these issues should be a discussion of how to get more more blacks, other ethnic minorities and women into positions of real authority in the major news and entertainment outlets.

Another part of the conversation should deal with why the bullying and degradation of other human beings is such a staple of popular entertainment in this country. One of the Rutgers players expressed astonishment Thursday night when Mr. Imus told her that making fun of people was how he’d made his living for many years.

The people who fought back against the racism and misogyny of the “Imus in the Morning” program need to keep the momentum going. Keep the pressure on the companies that sponsor this garbage. Keep the matter before the media.

Imus, Snoop Dogg, Michael Savage — it doesn’t matter where the bigotry is coming from. What’s important is to find the integrity and the strength to see it for what it is — a loathsome, soul-destroying disease — and then to respond accordingly.

Technorati tags: Bob Herbert, New York Times, Don Imus, Racism, discrimination, news, commentary, op ed

Politics of Diversion

"In the wake of Don Imus's racist and sexist comments," Frank Rich points out in today's Times op ed, "there's been an astounding display of hypocrisy, sanctimony and self-congratulation from all sides."

I agree. I also think there has been an astounding and unconscionable display of diversionary politics exhibited by MSNBC, CNN, and other mainstream news outlets who have harped on this one story nearly 24/7 to the detriment of far more important news -- like a whole bunch of "missing" e-mails from the White House; or like Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and President Bush-it-for-Brains illegally using RNC emails to discuss the people's business; or like the rapidly escalating violence and deteriorating situation in Iraq -- to name just a few.

After the press initially ignored the warnings of cooked intelligence leading up to the Iraq war, after their profuse apologies and admissions of failing the people and their journalistic obligations, after all of that -- here we are once again listening to never-ending stories about Anna Nicole Smith and her infant daughter, the tornado or snow storm of the week, and Don Imus' disgusting remarks.

As the Rutger's women's basketball team has said, it is time to move on from Imus.

More importantly, it is way past time for the news media to move away from political hackdom and start reporting the news -- like the George Bush White House's blatant and continuing abuse of power -- before the neo-cons succeed in their goal of turning the USA into a theocratic, dictatorship we heretofore could only imagine in our darkest nightmares. If that happens, Don Imus and his comments will hardly matter; all free speech will be a thing of the past.

How hard is it for a News Director to distinguish which story ought to be front and center? Let's see: Continued White House lies, lawlessness and abuse of power that rise to the level of impeachment? Or Don Imus used the "ho" word? Hmmm. A real toughie....

All I can say is, thank God for the blogosphere.

Everybody Hates Don Imus
By Frank Rich
The New York Times

FAMILIAR as I am with the warp speed of media, I was still taken aback by the velocity of Don Imus’s fall after he uttered an indefensible racist and sexist slur about the Rutgers women’s basketball team. Even in that short span, there’s been an astounding display of hypocrisy, sanctimony and self-congratulation from nearly every side of the debate, starting with Al Sharpton, who has yet to apologize for his leading role in the Tawana Brawley case, the 1980s racial melee prompted by unproven charges much like those that soiled the Duke lacrosse players.

It’s possible that the only people in this whole sorry story who are not hypocrites are the Rutgers teammates and their coach, C. Vivian Stringer. And perhaps even Don Imus himself, who, while talking way too much about black people he has known and ill children he has helped, took full responsibility for his own catastrophic remarks and didn’t try to blame the ensuing media lynching on the press, bloggers or YouTube. Unlike Mel Gibson, Michael Richards and Isaiah Washington, to take just three entertainers who have recently delivered loud religious, racial or sexual slurs, Imus didn’t hire a P.R. crisis manager and ostentatiously enter rehab or undergo psychiatric counseling. “I dished it out for a long time,” he said on his show last week, “and now it’s my time to take it.”

Among the hypocrites surrounding Imus, I’ll include myself. I’ve been a guest on his show many times since he first invited me in the early 1990s, when I was a theater critic. I’ve almost always considered him among the smarter and more authentic conversationalists I’ve encountered as an interviewee. As a book author, I could always use the publicity.

Of course I was aware of many of his obnoxious comments about minority groups, including my own, Jews. Sometimes he aimed invective at me personally. I wasn’t seriously bothered by much of it, even when it was unfunny or made me wince, because I saw him as equally offensive to everyone. The show’s crudest interludes struck me as burlesque.

I do not know Imus off the air and have no idea whether he is a good person, any more than I know whether Jerry Lewis, another entertainer who raises millions for sick children, is a good person. But as a listener and sometime guest, I didn’t judge Imus to be a bigot. Perhaps I felt this way in part because Imus vehemently inveighed against racism in real life, most recently in decrying the political ads in last year’s Senate campaign linking a black Tennessee congressman, Harold Ford, to white women. Perhaps I gave Imus a pass because the insults were almost always aimed at people in the public eye, whether politicians, celebrities or journalists — targets with the forums to defend themselves.

And perhaps I was kidding myself. What Imus said about the Rutgers team landed differently, not least because his slur was aimed at young women who had no standing in the world of celebrity, and who had done nothing in public except behave as exemplary student athletes. The spectacle of a media star verbally assaulting them, and with a creepy, dismissive laugh, as if the whole thing were merely a disposable joke, was ugly. You couldn’t watch it without feeling that some kind of crime had been committed. That was true even before the world met his victims. So while I still don’t know whether Imus is a bigot, there was an inhuman contempt in the moment that sounded like hate to me. You can see it and hear it in the video clip in a way that isn’t conveyed by his words alone.

Does that mean he should be silenced? The Rutgers team pointedly never asked for that, and I don’t think the punishment fits the crime. First, as a longtime Imus listener rather than someone who tuned in for the first time last week, I heard not only hate in his wisecrack but also honesty in his repeated vows to learn from it. Second, as a free-speech near-absolutist, I don’t believe that even Mel Gibson, to me an unambiguous anti-Semite, should be deprived of his right to say whatever the hell he wants to say. The answer to his free speech is more free speech — mine and yours. Let Bill O’Reilly talk about “wetbacks” or Rush Limbaugh accuse Michael J. Fox of exaggerating his Parkinson’s symptoms, and let the rest of us answer back.

Liberals are kidding themselves if they think the Imus firing won’t have a potentially chilling effect on comics who push the line. Let’s not forget that Bill Maher, an Imus defender last week, was dropped by FedEx, Sears, ABC affiliates and eventually ABC itself after he broke the P.C. code of 9/11. Conservatives are kidding themselves if they think the Imus execution won’t impede Ann Coulter’s nasty invective on the public airwaves. As Al Franken pointed out to Larry King on Wednesday night, CNN harbors Glenn Beck, who has insinuated that the first Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, is a terrorist (and who has also declared that “faggot” is nothing more than “a naughty name”). Will Time Warner and its advertisers be called to account? Already in the Imus aftermath, the born-again blogger Tom DeLay has called for the firing of Rosie O’Donnell because of her “hateful” views on Chinese-Americans, conservative Christians and President Bush.

That said, corporations, whether television or radio networks or movie studios or commercial sponsors, are free to edit or cancel any content. No one has an inalienable right to be broadcast or published or given a movie or music contract. Whether MSNBC and CBS acted out of genuine principle or economic necessity is a debate already raging. Just as Imus’s show defied easy political definition — he has both kissed up to Dick Cheney as a guest and called him a war criminal — so does the chatter about what happened over the past week. MSNBC, forever unsure of its identity, seems to have found a new calling by turning that debate into a running series, and I say, go for it.

The biggest cliché of the debate so far is the constant reiteration that this will be a moment for a national “conversation” about race and sex and culture. Do people really want to have this conversation, or just talk about having it? If they really want to, it means we have to ask ourselves why this debacle has given permission to talking heads on television to repeat Imus’s offensive words so insistently that cable news could hardly take time out to note the shocking bombing in the Baghdad Green Zone. Some even upped the ante: Donna Brazile managed to drag “jigaboo” into Wolf Blitzer’s sedate “Situation Room” on CNN.

If we really want to have this conversation, it also means we have to have a nonposturing talk about hip-hop lyrics, “Borat,” “South Park” and maybe Larry David, too. As James Poniewozik pointed out in his smart cover article for Time last week, an important question emerged from an Imus on-air soliloquy as he tried to defend himself: “This phrase that I use, it originated in the black community. That didn’t give me a right to use it, but that’s where it originated. Who calls who that and why? We need to know that. I need to know that.”

My 22-year-old son, a humor writer who finds Imus an anachronistic and unfunny throwback to the racial-insult humor of the Frank Sinatra-Sammy Davis Jr. Rat Pack ilk, raises a complementary issue. He argues that when Sacha Baron Cohen makes fun of Jews and gays, he can do so because he’s not doing it as himself but as a fictional character. But try telling that to the Anti-Defamation League, which criticized Mr. Baron Cohen, an observant Jew, for making sport of a real country (Kazakhstan) and worried that the “Borat” audience “may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke, and that some may even find it reinforcing their bigotry.”

So if we really want to have this national “conversation” about race and culture and all the rest of it that everyone keeps telling us that this incident has prompted, let’s get it on, no holds barred. And the fewer moralizing pundits and politicians, the better. Hillary Clinton, an Imus denouncer who has also called for federal regulation of violent television and video games, counts among her Hollywood fat cats Haim Saban, who made his fortune from “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.”

Listening to Les Moonves of CBS speak with such apparent sincerity of how his network was helping to change the culture by firing Imus, I couldn’t help but remember that one of CBS’s own cultural gifts to America has been “Big Brother,” the reality game show that cloisters a dozen or so strangers in a house for weeks to see how they get along. Maybe Mr. Moonves could put his prime-time schedule where his mouth is and stop milking that format merely for the fun of humiliation, voyeurism and sexual high jinks. If locking Imus and his team in a house with Coach Stringer and her team 24/7 isn’t must-see TV that moves this conversation forward, then I don’t know what is.

Photo Credit: Frank Rich. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Graphic: www.subservientpresident.net

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• Media Matters - It's not just Imus

Technorati tags: Frank Rich, The New York Times, Don Imus, Politics, Race, Rutgers, Racism, news, commentary, op ed

Paying the Price

Paying the Price
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

You knew something was up early in the day. As soon as I told executives at MSNBC that I was going to write about the “60 Minutes” piece, which was already in pretty wide circulation, they began acting very weird. We’ll get back to you, they said.

In a “60 Minutes” interview with Don Imus broadcast in July 1998, Mike Wallace said of the “Imus in the Morning” program, “It’s dirty and sometimes racist.”

Mr. Imus then said: “Give me an example. Give me one example of one racist incident.” To which Mr. Wallace replied, “You told Tom Anderson, the producer, in your car, coming home, that Bernard McGuirk is there to do nigger jokes.”

Mr. Imus said, “Well, I’ve nev — I never use that word.”

Mr. Wallace then turned to Mr. Anderson, his producer. “Tom,” he said.

“I’m right here,” said Mr. Anderson.

Mr. Imus then said to Mr. Anderson, “Did I use that word?”

Mr. Anderson said, “I recall you using that word.”

“Oh, O.K.,” said Mr. Imus. “Well, then I used that word. But I mean — of course, that was an off-the-record conversation. But ——”

“The hell it was,” said Mr. Wallace.

The transcript was pure poison. A source very close to Don Imus told me last night, “They did not want to wait for your piece to come out.”

For MSNBC, Mr. Imus’s “nappy-headed ho’s” comment about the Rutgers women’s basketball team was bad enough. Putting the word “nigger” into the so-called I-man’s mouth was beyond the pale.

The roof was caving in on Mr. Imus. More advertisers were pulling the plug. And Bruce Gordon, a member of the CBS Corp. board of directors and former head of the N.A.A.C.P., said publicly that Mr. Imus should be fired.

But some of the most telling and persuasive criticism came from an unlikely source — internally at the network that televised Mr. Imus’s program. Women, especially, were angry and upset. Powerful statements were made during in-house meetings by women at NBC and MSNBC — about how black women are devalued in this country, how they are demeaned by white men and black men.

White and black women spoke emotionally about the way black women are frequently trashed in the popular culture, especially in music, and about the way news outlets give far more attention to stories about white women in trouble.

Phil Griffin, a senior vice president at NBC News who oversaw the Imus show for MSNBC, told me yesterday, “It touched a huge nerve.”

Whether or not Mr. McGuirk was hired for the specific noxious purpose referred to in the “60 Minutes” interview, he has pretty much lived up to that job description. He’s a minstrel, a white man who has gleefully led the Imus pack into some of the most disgusting, degrading attempts at racial (not to mention sexist) humor that it’s possible to imagine.

Blacks were jigaboos, Sambos and Brilloheads. Women were bitches and, above all else, an endless variety of ever-ready sexual vessels, born to be degraded.

The question now is how long the “Imus in the Morning” radio show will last. Just last month, in a reference to a speech by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in Selma, Ala., Mr. McGuirk called Mrs. Clinton a bitch and predicted she would “have cornrows and gold teeth” by the time her presidential primary campaign against Senator Barack Obama is over.

Way back in 1994, a friend of mine, the late Lars-Erik Nelson, a terrific reporter and columnist at The Daily News and Newsday, mentioned an Imus segment that offered a “satirical” rap song that gave advice to President Clinton on what to do about Paula Jones: “Pimp-slap the ho.” Mr. Nelson also wrote that there was a song on the program dealing with Hillary Clinton’s menstrual cycle.

So this hateful garbage has been going on for a long, long time. There was nothing new about the tone or the intent of Mr. Imus’s “nappy-headed ho’s” comment. As Bryan Monroe, president of the National Association of Black Journalists told me the other night, “It’s a long pattern of behavior, and at some point somebody has to say enough is enough.”

The crucial issue goes well beyond Don Imus’s pathetically infantile behavior. The real question is whether this controversy is loud enough to shock Americans at long last into the realization of just how profoundly racist and sexist the culture is.

It appears that on this issue the general public, and the women at Mr. Imus’s former network, are far ahead of the establishment figures, the politicians and the media biggies, who were always so anxious to appear on the show and to defend Mr. Imus.

That is a very good sign.

Photo Credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Bob Herbert, New York Times, media, Racism, op ed, MSNBC

Only in America ...

Every day Gary Tyler sits in jail for a murder he most probably did not commit, every day he is denied a new, fair trial -- the shame mounts, and the weight of that shame crushes the dream that could have been America ....

'They Beat Gary So Bad'
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

ST. ROSE, La.

Juanita Tyler lives in a neat one-story house that sits behind a glistening magnolia tree that dominates the small front lawn.

She is 74 now and unfailingly gracious, but she admits to being tired from a lifetime of hard work and trouble. I went to see her to talk about her son, Gary.

The Tylers are black. In 1974, when Gary was 16, he was accused of murdering a 13-year-old white boy outside the high school that they attended in nearby Destrehan. The boy was shot to death in the midst of turmoil over school integration, which the local whites were resisting violently.

The case against young Tyler — who was on a bus with other black students that was attacked by about 200 whites — was built on bogus evidence and coerced testimony. But that was enough to get him convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to die in the electric chair. His life was spared when the Louisiana death penalty was ruled unconstitutional, but he is serving out a life sentence with no chance of parole in the state penitentiary at Angola.

Ms. Tyler’s sharpest memory of the day Gary was arrested was of sitting in a room at a sheriff’s station, listening to deputies in the next room savagely beating her son.

“They beat Gary so bad,” she said. “My poor child. I couldn’t do nothing. They wouldn’t let me in there. I saw who went in there. They were like older men. They didn’t care that I was there. They didn’t care who was there. They beat Gary something awful, and I could hear him hollering and moaning. All I could say was, ‘Oh Jesus, have mercy.’

“One of the deputies had a strap and they whipped him with that. It was terrible. Finally, when they let me go in there, Gary was just trembling. He was frightened to death. He was trembling and rocking back and forth. They had kicked him all in his privates. He said, ‘Mama, they kicked me. One kicked me in the front and one kicked in the back.’ He said that over and over.

“I couldn’t believe what they had done to my baby.”

The deputies had tried to get Gary to confess, but he wouldn’t. Ms. Tyler (like so many people who have looked closely at this case) was scornful of the evidence the authorities came up with.

“It was ridiculous,” she said. “Where was he gonna get that big ol’ police gun they said he used? It was a great big ol’ gun. And he had on those tight-fitting clothes and nobody saw it?”

The gun that investigators produced as the murder weapon was indeed a large, heavy weapon — a government-issued Colt .45 that had been stolen from a firing range used by the sheriff’s department. Deputies who saw Gary before the shooting and those who searched him (and the rest of the black students on the bus) immediately afterward did not see any gun.

“I don’t know where the police got that gun from,” said Ms. Tyler. “But they didn’t get it from my son, that’s for sure.”

Ms. Tyler worked for many years as a domestic while raising 11 children. Her husband, Uylos, a maintenance worker who often held three jobs at a time, died in 1989. “He had a bad heart,” Ms. Tyler said.

She shifted in her chair in the living room of the small house, and was quiet for several minutes. Then she asked, “Do you know what it’s like to lose a child?”

I shook my head.

“I always felt sorry for that woman whose son was killed,” she said. “That was a terrible time. I remember it clear, like it was yesterday. But what happened was wrong. The white people, they didn’t want no black children in that school. So there was a lot of tension. And my son has paid a terrible price for that.

“They didn’t have no kind of proof against him, but they beat him bad anyway, and then they sentenced him to the electric chair.”

Ms. Tyler visits Gary at Angola regularly, the last time a few weeks ago. “He’s doing well,” she said. “And I’m glad that he’s able to cope. He tries to help the young ones out when they come in there. He always tells me, ‘My dear, you have to stay strong so I can stay strong.’ So then I just try to hold my head up and keep on going.”

She looked for a moment as if she was going to cry, but she didn’t.

“It’s just sad,” she said. “I wonder if he’ll ever be able to come out. I wonder will I live long enough to see him out.”

Photo Credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)

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Technorati tags: Bob Herbert, New York Times, Racism, Descrimination, Criminal Sentences, Justice System, Trials and Verdicts, Gary Tyler, Louisiana, news, commentary, op ed

All You Need to Know About Racial Justice in The South

Think racism in America is largely a thing of the past? Think again.

Gary Tyler's Lost Decades
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Destrehan, La.

The term “time warp” could have been coined for this rural town of 11,000 residents that sits beside, and just a little below, the Mississippi River. A remnant of the sugar-plantation era, the region’s racially troubled past is always here, seldom spoken about but inescapable, like the murk in the air of a perpetually stalled weather front.

The Harry Hurst Middle School is on the site of the old Destrehan High School, which was the scene of violent protests during the integration period of the 1970s. Local residents have tried to blot out the murder case that made Destrehan High notorious three decades ago, but there’s a big problem with that collective effort to forget. The black teenager who was railroaded into prison (and almost into the electric chair) for the murder of a white student in 1974 is still in prison all these many years later. He’s middle-aged now, still suffering through a life sentence without any chance for parole in the notorious state penitentiary at Angola.

There is no longer any doubt that the case against the teenager, Gary Tyler, was a travesty. A federal appeals court ruled unequivocally that he did not receive a fair trial. The Louisiana Board of Pardons issued rulings on three occasions that would have allowed Mr. Tyler to be freed.

But this is the South and Mr. Tyler was a black person convicted of killing a white. It didn’t matter that the case was built on bogus evidence and coerced witnesses, or that the trial was, in the words of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, “fundamentally unfair.” Mr. Tyler was never given a new trial and the pardon board recommendations were rejected by two governors.

(Lurking in the background as the case unfolded was David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who was very active politically in Louisiana and always ready to inject his poison into the public issues of the day. If you drive around Destrehan and nearby communities today you will still see some of the old blue-and-white campaign signs for Duke.)

Mr. Tyler, a sophomore at Destrehan High, was on a bus filled with black students that was attacked on Oct. 7, 1974, by a white mob enraged over school integration. A shot was fired and a 13-year-old white boy standing outside the bus collapsed, mortally wounded. Mr. Tyler was arrested on a charge of disturbing the peace after he talked back to a sheriff’s deputy.

Although the bus and its passengers were searched and no weapon was found, Mr. Tyler was taken into custody, savagely beaten and accused of committing the murder. A gun was “found” during a subsequent search of the bus and witnesses were rounded up to testify against Mr. Tyler. It turned out that the gun (which has since disappeared) had been stolen from a firing range used by officers of the sheriff’s department. All of the witnesses who fingered Mr. Tyler would eventually recant, saying they had been terrorized into testifying falsely by the authorities.

Mr. Tyler was represented at trial by a white sole practitioner who had never handled a murder case, much less a death penalty case. He kept his meetings with his client to a minimum and would later complain about the money he was paid.

The outcome was predictable. Mr. Tyler was convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair by an all-white jury. At 17, he was the youngest prisoner on death row in the country. He almost certainly would have been executed if the U.S. Supreme Court had not ruled the Louisiana death penalty unconstitutional.

The Fifth Circuit ruling in 1981 said that an improper charge to the jury had denied Mr. Tyler the presumption of innocence at his trial. “It is folly,” the court said, “to argue that the erroneous charge did not affect the central determination of guilt or innocence.”

What was folly was any expectation that Mr. Tyler would be treated fairly at any point. Despite the appeals court ruling, he was denied a new trial on a technicality.

Now consider this, because it will tell you all you need to know about racial justice in the South. A 19-year-old black man named Richard Dunn was shotgunned to death as he was heading home from a benefit dance in support of Mr. Tyler at Southern University in New Orleans in 1976. A white man, Anthony Mart, was arrested and convicted of shooting Mr. Dunn from a passing car.

Gary Tyler’s current attorney, Mary Howell, ruefully explained what happened to Mr. Mart for the cold-blooded killing of a black stranger: He was sent to prison for life but was pardoned and freed after serving about 10 years.

Photo Credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Bob Herbert, New York Times, Racism, Discrimination, Criminal Sentences, Justice System, Trials and Verdicts, Gary Tyler, Louisiana, news, commentary, op ed

How Not to Get the Job Done

The New York Times reports that the "Labor Department has relieved new federal contractors of the obligation to have a plan for hiring minorities, women, Vietnam veterans and disabled people on Katrina-related projects...."