Monday, June 15, 2009

Just STOP It Already!

[UPDATE]:

Apparently Goforth just “feels sick” about sending the e-mail to the wrong list:
When I asked her if she understood the controversial nature of the photo, Goforth would only say she felt very bad about accidentally sending it to the wrong list. When I gave her a second chance to address the controversial nature of the email, she again repeated that she only felt bad about sending it to the wrong list of people.

They just don't get it. And Goforth will keep her job. Figures.

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I’m still fuming over Newscoma’s post.

That anyone thought e-mailing that photo was funny, cute, clever, or anything close to appropriate boggles the mind. That it was a staffer for State Senator Diane Black, chair of the Senate Republican Caucus, well, what can I say. Tennessee is the state of Chip “Barack the Magic Negro” Saltsman; it seems the problem is endemic to the TNGOP. I hope Sen. Black does the right thing and puts her house in order.

But it's not just Tennessee. Today I saw this news on CNN:

A South Carolina GOP state activist has apologized for calling a gorilla an "ancestor" of first lady Michelle Obama. Affiliate WIS reports.

WTF?!!

This shit matters, people. Frank Rich gave a rundown of some of the racist, inflammatory, offensive rhetoric that regularly passes for public discourse from conservatives toward President Obama and I have to say I’m shocked and ashamed:

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.

[...]

Obama’s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of “Treason!” It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging “in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.” He claimed that the president — a lifelong Christian — “may still be” a Muslim and is aligned with “the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.” Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic “charities” that “have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.”

If this isn’t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned.

Indeed. There was a time when entertainers like Limbaugh, Savage and Coulter were seen as the circus sideshow to the national discourse; now the corporate media treats them like legitimate pundits, and their brand of vitriol spills over into the real world. Politicians now think nothing of saying the most outrageous things. Conservatives love to ridicule "political correctness" but some of y'all need some manners or you shouldn't be in office.

So stop it. Cut it out now. Do not emulate the yakkers who should be exiled to the far edges of the talk radio dial. And if someone on your staff sends this out under the banner "Historical Keepsake Photo," I hope you show them--and others--that it's inappropriate and there are consequences.

And the photo: