The Plot to Get Rush ... And Every Other Conservative Talker

By Jeffrey Lord on 3.27.12 @ 6:09AM

Hannity, Palin next targets: Who is Angelo Carusone?

It was a set up.

From start to finish.

A quite specific, quite detailed plot to get Rush Limbaugh, ruin his career, and drive him off the air.

Next targets? Sean Hannity and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

Lots to cover here.

Let's start with Mr. Angelo Carusone.

Who is Angelo Carusone? Today he is now the "Director of Online Strategy for Media Matters for America."

But a few years back? He was just your basic left-wing law student with a standard left-wing passion. That passion? Totalitarian-style censorship.

Let's stop here for a moment for a brief bit of historical background -- not a detour but a very necessary context.

It is a big mistake -- a really big mistake -- to dismiss what's being done to Rush Limbaugh as just some crazy guys at Media Matters.

When we work our way through what Angelo Carusone and his Media Matters comrades and others are doing when they target Rush, or went after Glenn Beck, or plan to do in targeting Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin and who knows who after that (Levin? Laura?) remember: this is the way the Left -- the global left throughout history, not simply the American Left today -- has always behaved. A fanatical intolerance is part of the leftist DNA.

The late Austrian free-market economist Ludwig von Mises described the leftist method of operation as "fanatical and intolerant." It works, he said, this way:

Socialism… works on the emotions…to stifle the voice of reason by awakening primitive instincts.

Primitive instincts.

And that most primitive of human instincts? You got it. 

Fear.

The skillful, clever use of fear (not to mention hate) is the defining trait of leftists throughout history. Fear is the primitive emotion the left feeds on like a junkie needs drugs. It is a trait repeatedly manifested in history by the use of intimidation or bully-boy tactics to assert raw power. It is the vividly identifiable scarlet thread of intolerance that has shown itself in one leftist movement after another on down through the centuries, regardless of nationality.

Leftist French Revolutionaries launched the "Reign of Terror," dragging terrified opponents to the guillotine. The moment Lenin's triumphant Communists overwhelmed Russia, notes The Black Book of Communism, the triumphant left "institutionalized the notion of 'enemy of the people.'" People so identified were to be "arrested immediately," charged with "crimes" like "abuse of one's position" -- essentially the American left's charge right now about Rush Limbaugh. In short order, millions of Soviet citizens in the new order were shot outright when not sent to the Gulag. In the 1930s the newly powerful National Socialists of Germany -- aka the Nazis -- began sending storm troopers to terrify Jews by painting crude yellow signs reading "Not for Aryans" on the windows of Jewish shopkeepers. Eventually, Jews were forced to wear a yellow patch in the shape of the Star of David, bearing a single word Jude -- Jew. In Mao's China, this leftist fanaticism appeared as the "Cultural Revolution," which targeted all manner of dissenters with both psychological intimidation as well as physical violence. One of the favorite weapons of Mao's Red Guards was "Chinese Roulette." The game? A group of dissenters would be rounded up and delivered to a firing squad -- but at the last minute only a random few would be pulled from the group and shot. The rest who had survived were said to have suffered something worse than death: a "bullet" of fear and repression inside the brain.

In America, the leftists beneath the hoods of the Ku Klux Klan lynched terrified blacks at night while running America's Democratic Party by day. No less than future president Ronald Reagan was threatened with having acid tossed in his face if he didn't cease fighting the infiltration of Communists in Hollywood. Today SEIU thugs are captured on video beating up those who dissent on Obamacare, calling their victim the "n--word".

Fear. Intimidation. Bullying. Racism. Hatred of the "other." Without these tactics, the left is naked in the war of ideas. By coincidence, R. Emmett Tyrrell, the founder and editor-in-chief of The American Spectator has a book coming out in May titled The Death of Liberalism.

There could in fact be no better sign of that death than the behavior of the left -- the typical behavior -- as evidenced in this entire episode. The Happy Warrior "politics of joy" of that cheerful liberal's liberal Hubert Humphrey is long, long gone.

So.

You thought the business of getting Rush Limbaugh off the air was because of a bad word choice about Sandra Fluke?

Think again.

The starting date for this latest in a long line of fear-inducing leftists --was, according to Angelo Carusone himself, "late 2009 and early 2010."

Got that?

In other words, a full two-plus years before Sandra Fluke ever appeared on the anti-religious liberty scene, Commissar Carusone (what other title is more fitting for a self-styled free speech monitor?) was hatching the plot to "Stop Rush." In the world of Internet domains, Carusone even had it registered as "Stop Rush.org."

Modeled after Carusone's earlier successful campaign to… yes, indeed… Stop Beck.

Take a gander here at Legal Insurrection, here at the Blaze, and here at the Village Voice to see how Carusone quite candidly goes about his self-appointed task as one of the revolutionary guards in the American Left's Political Police.

How does Carusone's storm trooper game work?

What does Media Matters do?

Remember. Angelo Carusone was going after Glenn Beck several years ago as a free-lancing leftist law student. His activities caught the attention of Media Matters, where Commissar Carusone is now officially ensconced as the group's "Director of Online Strategy."

Let's carefully comb through the record of Mr. Carusone in these various stories -- plus this Carusone interview here at a site called Raw Story. In which, on June 2, 2010, distinctly unknown in the national media at the time, the then-law student describes in detail what he is up to.

And let's add something else into this mix. Commissar Carusone, as noted, is now officially a direct employee of Media Matters. Recently the Daily Caller did a highly illuminating series on Media Matters. A series that revealed an out-of-control leftist machine filled with gazillions of leftist Big Money, headed by a man described as exhibiting "volatile and erratic" behavior who "struggles with mental illness" while parading around with the security entourage worthy "of a Third World dictator."

So let's add 2 plus 2 and see what 4 equals, shall we?

We will carefully list the tactics admitted to by Commissar Carusone himself. And add what the Daily Caller has reported about Media Matters. Remembering that the Commissar now works for Media Matters.

Here we go.

• Disrupt relationships with sponsors: Not unlike "Chinese Roulette," the object is to put a bullet of fear in the minds of the target's advertisers. Or, as a Chinese official was quoted in the Economist only last January in a story with a section titled "Chinese Roulette," give people (advertisers in the case of Rush) the sense they are "playing pass the parcel with a time bomb."

This was what Commissar Carusone did with Glenn Beck's advertisers. Now the target is Rush Limbaugh, with Carusone openly admitting he has talk radio host and Fox star Hannity and Fox commentator Palin in his sights.

So how, according to Commissar Carusone himself, does he go about his self-assigned task of putting that bullet of fear in the minds of advertisers? How precisely did he terrorize Rush Limbaugh's advertisers into believing they were "playing pass the parcel with a time bomb" -- and they, the advertisers in question, were about to lose?

First, the Commissar listens to a "supersized" batch of his target's broadcasts.

Then he selects something that offends him in broadcast X.

Next the Commissar "dispatches a letter or e-mail to corporate executives asking them if they are aware that their ads are running in an hour" when Beck or (fill in the blank…Rush, Hannity, Palin) said Y. "Y" standing for "insert newest offensive sound bite"…which is to say, words offensive to left-winger Carusone.

When did this happen in the Rush episode? When exactly did Carusone aim his weapon at the heads of advertisers and pull the trigger? When precisely did the latest leftist out to intimidate shoot his bullet of fear? Remember: Rush never said a word about Sandra Fluke until a Wednesday. Says Commissar Carusone in his Village Voice interview:

"I started talking to advertisers on Thursday, and got a lot of feedback on Friday, and I knew a lot of movement was taking place. This was important to think about from a business perspective."

Get it? The very next day -- Thursday -- the Commissar was at work instilling fear into Rush's sponsors. Result?

One of the advertisers on the receiving end of this kind of garbage was businessman Mark Stevens. As seen in this interview yesterday with Fox's Megyn Kelly -- and make a point of listening to it if you can -- Stevens had the guts to say he was the target of what he called "internal American terrorism" because he refused to drop his local ads that appear on the Limbaugh show in the New York market. Stevens pulled no punches. He understood exactly what was happening to him and had the guts to stand up to the bullies. And while he wouldn't say who was doing it -- he clearly knows. So too does Rush –--who cites Media Matters by name. So do we all.

And by the way, Stevens recognized exactly that what was happening to him and the people in his company -- one woman in particular -- was nothing less than an attempt to "invoke fear." In other words, Chinese Roulette had come to America. And Mark Stevens was being told he had to live with the bullet of fear in his head everyday -- and Mark Stevens boldly refused.

But not every advertiser has Mark Stevens' courage -- something Commissar Carusone understands full well.

Says the Raw Story article of Carusone's tactics: "Many times, that [is] enough to make advertisers pull their commercials, although Carusone admits that by now his reputation for peskiness may help grease the wheels." Thus… seven sponsors departed the Limbaugh show.

But not Mark Stevens.

• Methodically Catalogue Results of Smear and Fear Campaign: Next step? After having sprayed an AK-47's worth of bullets of fear at Rush's advertisers?

Commissar Carusone, Raw Story reports, then "catalogues his activities… which includes one running list of sponsors that have dropped the show and another of those that have not."

Stop right here.

This is the 21st century Americanization of a very old leftist tactic. It is described thusly in The Black Book of Communism, revealing how Stalin's "State Political Directorate" Commissars kept precise lists of exactly who among "enemy" social classes had been arrested, deported, or shot. Or, ominously, who needed to be. Say the authors of the procedure:

The mania for planning and maintaining statistics… was also an important weapon in the arsenal of terror.

This was exactly the Carusone procedure created for dealing with Glenn Beck.

This of course is, what causes Commissar Carusone to say of Rush's view of Fluke that Rush spoke "almost 50 smears for three days" about Fluke. Count 'em. Not 49 "smears". Not 51 "smears." Precisely 50. With not a soul asking: "Who gets to determine what is a smear?" 

Answer: Why, Commissar Carusone, of course.

This is straight from the playbook of Stalin's "State Political Directorate." One of the oldest tricks in the leftist playbook is given new life in 21st century online America. Using a site, found here, that Carusone says was "started… in 2009, 2010."

So if we go to StopRush.org, like clockwork in the evolution of leftist political police, we find what was described in that June 2010 interview. There it is, the "running list of sponsors that have dropped the show and another of those that have not." Indeed, at the very top of the site are sections labeled "Dropped Sponsors" and "Remaining Sponsors."

At the moment, the "Dropped Sponsors" list contains a mere 12, not the over 100 sponsors, as the pliant mainstream media would have you believe after being spoon fed by -- wonder of wonders -- Media Matters. The repeated and grossly inaccurate stories of advertisers fleeing the show a complete -- deliberate -- misrepresentation of how sponsorship in radio works. Seven of the twelve listed on StopRush.org were in fact national Rush sponsors, announced long ago in the first wave of leftist-engineered reaction to Rush's Fluke words. The "remaining sponsors" list is mysteriously empty -- because, says the site, of an update promised for….March 5. Weeks ago.

It makes no mention that Sleep Train, Rush's longtime sponsor, frantically realized -- too late -- that it had been conned and, after a barrage from Rally for Rush fans, sought to come back as a sponsor. An offer Rush refused.

But on the StopRush.org site's home page?

Here we find "Sponsor Updates" -- and it is here that one listing in particular illustrates the totalitarian mindset at work with Carusone and his leftist comrades.

Notice the company listed as "Brighter.com"? Brighter.com is an American entrepreneurial venture designed to provide dental care. It was never a national Rush sponsor à la Sleep Train. But how is it portrayed at StopRush.org?

First, here's this interesting graph posted at StopRush.org:

In a statement emailed to Media Matters, Brighter.com indicated ads on Rush Limbaugh were placed in error and they would take steps to ensure such ads do not air again in the future.

Catch the reference? "In a statement emailed to Media Matters….." And who, now, is Media Matters?

That's right. Media Matters is officially the employer of…Angelo Carusone.

And what follows next? This:

A spokesperson for Brighter.com contacted Media Matters and advised that this Brighter.com ad ran as a result of "inventory being placed indiscriminately by a media buying agency," stressed that Brighter.com did not deliberately advertise on this program, and confirmed that Brighter.com has "taken steps to assure this does not happen in the future." Media Matters will continue to monitor.

Catch that last sentence? "Media Matters will continue to monitor."

There, right there, is "Chinese Roulette" at work. The bullet of fear placed in the minds of Brighter.com's executives that their free market business in making dental care affordable is now on the bully's watch list.

If this were Germany in the early 1930s, the message to Brighter.com is the equivalent of the yellow paint on Jewish shop windows warning "Not for Aryans." It is the Media Matters equivalent of marking someone with that chilling "enemy of the people" stain, resulting in a listing with the State Political Directorate, the list carefully maintained by a Stalin Commissar. 

Right there on the home page of StopRush.org is the descendant of the blunt threat of a lynching, once used by all those progressives under Klan hoods to threaten black Americans (when said progressives took time out from running Democratic Party conventions like this one). Right there on the home page of StopRush.org is the mind set of the "progressives" like those Black Panthers seen here outside a 2008 Philadelphia polling place, one menacingly wielding a nightstick -- following exactly in the steps of the progressive Klan. This is the modern equivalent of the low voice on the phone threatening to throw acid in actor Reagan's face. Let's continue.

• Propagandize the media: Says Commissar Carusone's simpatico "interviewer" in the Village Voice:

"Let me ask you about this: Sandra Fluke was a white, middle class woman. She was a law student…."

Sandra Fluke was much more than that. She was, in point of fact, a "white, middle class woman…law student" -- who was also a considerable leftist activist. Here is her record, as recorded over here and as listed at her respective undergraduate and graduate universities, Cornell and Georgetown Law respectively:

At Cornell, where she graduated with a B.S. in Policy Analysis & Management; Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Sandra Fluke is listed as a participant in: 

• Students Acting for Gender Equality

• Take Back the Night

• Sexual Assault and Violence Indicators

• The Vagina Monologues/V-Day College Campaign

• Cornell Women's Resource Center Volunteer

• Cornell University Student Assembly Committee on Women's Issues

•   Women in Public Policy

At Georgetown, Sandra Fluke is listed as a participant in:

• Women's Legal Alliance

• Law Students for Reproductive Justice

• GULC Anti-Human Trafficking Joint Committee

• Georgetown Human Rights Action

• Amnesty International

•   Innocence Project

• Phi Alpha Delta

• Georgetown Democrats

• National Lawyers Guild

This is the record of an innocent college student?

Of course not. This is the record of a more-than-budding left-wing activist, a feminized version of Angelo Carusone. A Commissarette in training.

So the obvious question. How many news stories were pitched by Fluke's left-wing handlers that both resulted in this public portrait of a demure, guileless school girl? Who pitched 

them? And who swallowed them?

• Use the Social Media: Who needs a firing squad to play Chinese Roulette when you have Twitter?

In that 2010 interview, Carusone was said to have "more than 7,000 followers on Twitter."

So when the national media obligingly spins the yarn of Rush versus Innocent College Girl… Commissar Carusone, now amplified by the millions of dollars in leftist Media Matters money and machinery, had but to tweet and… BANG!

See for yourself right here what is being tweeted from the Commissar to his left-wing legions. This is doubtless only one arena in which, ironically, free speech for some is being used in a plot to deprive others of the same right. Under the guise of attacking corporations and companies -- as if corporations and companies and the people who work in them are not entitled to their own free speech rights, and the right not to fear intimidation for selling soap or clean teeth.

Startled Rush sponsors were instantly receiving a seemingly self-starting barrage of angry anti-Rush tweets, e-mails, calls and snail mail -- many from people who were never customers in the first place. Without a clue that sponsors were -- and are -- on the receiving end of a quite well-tailored leftist tech campaign to frighten them into obeying the will of the Commissar and the free speech Political Police.

• The White House and its tie to Media Matters and Sandra Fluke: What's the difference between the Angelo Carusone the lone leftist law student of yesteryear -- and the Commissar Angelo Carusone of today?

Right. The Commissar works for Media Matters. The very same Media Matters identified in detail by the Daily Caller as having "close coordination with White House and news organizations."

Say again, close coordination with the White House.

And what was one of the notable aspects of the Rush-Sandra Fluke episode? Yes, indeed.

The President of the United States himself picked up the phone and made a highly publicized call to… Sandra Fluke.

And who has Bill O'Reilly reported as representing Sandra Fluke? Yes indeed. That would be ex-Obama White House Communications Director Anita Dunn. And what did the Daily Caller reveal in that story linked above? This:

A group with the ability to shape news coverage is of incalculable value to the politicians it supports, so it's no surprise that Media Matters has been in regular contact with political operatives in the Obama administration. According to visitor logs, on June 16, 2010, Brock and then-Media Matters president Eric Burns traveled to the White House for a meeting with Valerie Jarrett, arguably the president's closest adviser. Recently departed Obama communications director Anita Dunn returned to the White House for the meeting as well.

It's not clear what the four spoke about -- no one in the meeting returned repeated calls for comment -- but the apparent coordination continued. "Anita Dunn became a regular presence at the office," says someone who worked there. Then-president of Media Matters, Eric Burns, "lunched with her, met with her and chatted with her frequently on any number of matters."

In other words: The White House coordinates with Media Matters. Anita Dunn, now departed from the Obama White House, returns for meetings with the Obama White House staff and Media Matters, and is a "regular presence" at the offices of Media Matters. And -- shocker -- it is Anita Dunn who now represents Sandra Fluke. Who is being used by Commissar Carusone and his Media Matters comrades as the reason to launch yet another attack on free speech. Not theirs, of course. Heaven forbid. Just those who are, shall we say, considered to be "enemies of the people" and all of that.

• Media Matters and the $100,000 Secret Donor Campaign to Attack Free Speech: 

Doubtless you've seen this gem. Secret donors putting up $100,000 for Media Matters to run ads in eight cities, asking for Rush to be removed from the airwaves. In other words, a bounty of $100,000 grand to end Rush's career. Here's the story as it first appeared in the Washington Times. Fox's Bill O'Reilly has correctly slammed the campaign as being "very fascist." Mr. O'Reilly is right, and he would know, being a longtime target of Media Matters himself.

But did you notice the source for the Media Matters story that appeared in the Washington Times? Here's two key paragraphs:

Ad time was purchased in Boston; Chicago; Detroit; Seattle; Milwaukee; St. Louis; Macon, Ga.; and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The cities were selected to support active local campaigns against Limbaugh or because of perceptions Limbaugh may be vulnerable in that market, said Angelo Carusone of Media Matters.
"What we're really looking for is a way to demonstrate the persistence of the effort and the fact that it is on a wide scale," Carusone said.

And there he is. Commissar Carusone speaks.

Now…there's more. Much more.

But let's summarize what we have here.

• The Left's Dependence on Fear and Intimidation: 

The left has centuries ago trademarked themselves as history's thugs, the grim, intolerant people with the brass knuckles and more if you get out of line and dare to speak your mind. From the guillotine of 1789 to the lists of enemies of the people in the 1920s to Chinese Roulette in the 1960s. In America it has run the gamut from the lynching of blacks to union thuggery to intimidating sponsors of talk radio in the twittering 21st century. It's all to the same purpose.

• Disrupt Relationships With Sponsors:

 A serious campaign has been underway to disrupt Rush's relationships with his sponsors. An effort launched two years -- two years -- before Sandra Fluke ever appeared on the scene.

• Keep Lists to Intimidate Sponsors:

Ominous lists are kept of sponsors who have been bullied into giving up their First Amendment rights -- and those who have stoutly resisted.

• Propagandize the Media: 

The media is quickly propagandized with a false story. In this case, Sandra Fluke is portrayed as an innocent college girl when she is in fact a 30-year old longtime left-wing activist.

• Social Media: 

Use Twitter to play Chinese Roulette.

• The White House and Media Matters: 

"Close coordination" with the White House.

• The Media Matters $100,000 Secret Donor fund to attack free speech: 

A hundred grand bounty designed to both end Rush's career -- and assault your God-given right to free speech.

And one more thing.

What is it Angelo Carusone is quoted as doing in that 2010 Raw Story interview? A story that was in fact focused on Glenn Beck?

Here's the verbatim.

…Carusone is mounting similar campaigns targeting Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and CNN.

Beck is now off Fox's air.

The Rush campaign is now in progress -- but in spite of all this, in fact precisely because of all this, his audience is sticking -- not to mention getting pretty damn mad.

CNN? What did these poor struggling media mushies do? No idea. But they have somehow offended the sensibilities of Commissar Carusone.

But Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity? They have received their warning.

The Political Police are out there. Commissar Carusone is keeping his lists. The Media Matters secret donors, carefully operating in the shadows, have the bucks to enforce the Commissar.

Is this still America?

Only if we fight back.

Supreme Irony? Top Court Poised To Throw Out Obamacare In Echo Of Case Obama Made Against Hillary Clinton

"We’re not stupid." - Justice Antonin Scalia

 

By Toby Harden

It is a tad unfortunate that just days after the White House embraced the term "Obamacare" - previously regarded on the Left as a pejorative label - a majority of the nine Supreme Court justices have given strong indications they will rule it unconstitutional.
Even more ironic is that the justices, or five of them at least, look like they might force President Barack Obama back to the drawing board partly on the basis of the argument one Senator Obama made against then Senator Hillary Clinton in 2008.

At issue today was the so-called 'individual mandate" - the federal government's act of compelling Americans to buy health insurance. It is the centrepiece of the Affordable Health Care Act - aka Obamacare - which is the signature achievement of Obama's presidency thus far.

But back during the 2008 campaign, Obama argued strenuously against the individual mandate. In a debate in South Carolina, he said: "A mandate means that in some fashion, everybody will be forced to buy health insurance. ... But I believe the problem is not that folks are trying to avoid getting health care. The problem is they can't afford it. And that's why my plan emphasises lowering costs."

In February 2008, he said that you could no more solve the issue of the uninsured with an individual mandate than you could cure homelessness by ordering people to buy a home:

This was one of the policies that allowed him to differentiate himself from Clinton and John Edwards, the serial sleazeball who (believe it or not given what we now know he was up to) had a pretty good shot at winning the Democratic nomination.

Obama felt so strongly about the issue that he even cut an ad attacking Clinton for her support of the individual mandate. "Hillary Clinton's attacking, but what's she not telling you about her health care plan?" the April 2008 ad asked. "It forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can't afford it, and you pay a penalty if you don't."

Once in office, Obama changed his mind, telling CBS in July 2009: "During the campaign I was opposed to this idea because my general attitude was the reason people don't have health insurance is not because they don't want it, it's because they can't afford it. And if you make it affordable, then they'll come. I am now in favour of some sort of individual mandate as long as there's a hardship exemption." This volte face merited a "full flop" rating from Politifact.

Fast forward to today and there were five justices who appeared to be dead set against the idea of an individual mandate. Justice Clarence Thomas hasn't asked a question in the court for six years but as the most conservative lawyer on the court is a safe "no". You can find a transcript of the oral arguments here and audio can be downloaded here.

Justice Antonin Scalia asked the flailing Solicitor General Donald Verrillii: "Could you define the market? Everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli."

Chief Justice John Roberts queried: "So can the government require you to buy a cell phone because that would facilitate responding when you need emergency services?"

Justice Samuel Alito jabbed: "All right, suppose that you and I walked around downtown Washington at lunch hour and we found a couple of healthy young people and we stopped them and we said, 'You know what you're doing? You are financing your burial services right now because eventually you're going to die, and somebody is going to have to pay for it, and if you don't have burial insurance and you haven't saved money for it, you're going to shift the cost to somebody else'. Isn't that a very artificial way of talking about what somebody is doing?"
 
Worst of all for Obamacare supporters, Justice Anthony Kennedy, always viewed as the swing vote on the court, sounded like one of the most sceptical of all. "The reason this is concerning, is because it requires the individual to do an affirmative act," he said at one point. "In the law of torts our tradition, our law, has been that you don't have the duty to rescue someone if that person is in danger.

At other junctures he asked "Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?" and "So the Federal government says everybody has to join an exercise club?"

Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor seemed  on the side of upholding the mandate - though in the case of Sotomayor there was, surprisingly, some doubt. The only hope for liberals appears to be that Roberts, who is known to be leery of the court being seen as overly political, comes down on their side after some of his questions gave them a modicum of encouragement.

If Obamacare is thrown out it is likely to be a political disaster for Obama, and could very well be a nail in the coffin of his re-election hopes. Some Democrats believe such an outcome could allow Obama to run against a right-wing Supreme Court as well as a right-win, do-nothing Congress.

But it would be difficult to portray Justice Kennedy is an obstructionist Republican, just as it will be hard to run against a Congress that is controlled in one chamber by the Democrats. And running as an outsider while living at 1600 Pennsylvania? Good luck with that.

Given Obama's open mic gaffe - "After my election, I have more flexibility" - yesterday, the potential for creating a narrative that the President is a slippery, disingenuous campaigner is very real. American Crossroads, the Republican super PAC, has already been quick off the mark with this web ad on Obama as a health care flip flopper:

But the most fundamental problem for the President is that if the heart of Obamacare is ruled unconstitutional then he will be left empty-handed after spending two years and virtually all his political capital on jamming through the bill without a single Republican vote.
In short, it will make him look like a loser - not a quality Americans value in their presidents. And the fact that the Republican nominee will be able to quote Obama's own criticisms of the individual mandate against him will be the icing on the cake.

Racial Sunset

  

By Walter Russell Mead (My favourite Prog writer)

22 June 2011

 

 

Don’t anybody tell Louis Farrakhan, whose video calling President Obama a murderer is oozing through the web this week, but race is slowly and surely fading away.

The problem of the twentieth century may have been, as W. E. B. Du Bois put it so eloquently, the color line; the twenty-first century is on course to witness the death of race as a significant political and cultural concept.

Whether one looks at the United States or at the wider world, the diminishing salience of race – in politics, culture and economics – is one of the most important though little remarked on facts of our time.


The death of race would be good news for the United States.  Race has always (and appropriately) been the skunk at the American picnic.  The long reign of slavery followed by 80 years of Jim Crow is a horror and a shame in American history that undermines some of our favorite ideas about ourselves.  The existence of a largely Black urban underclass is one of America’s most serious problems and the roots of so much urban and rural poverty and human suffering in that painful history poses policy problems the American mind has trouble addressing.

Martin Luther King and Malcolm X on March 26, 1964 (Wikimedia)

All this remains true, but as time goes by people everywhere seem to care less and less about skin color.  Malcolm X’s call for a union of non-white people against the white oppressors does not resonate like it used to.  Former Brazilian President Lula cast responsibility for the 2008 financial crisis on ‘blond haired people with blue eyes’; that was neither accurate in terms of the demographics of Wall Street nor useful as a political rallying cry.

Internationally, race has already largely disappeared as a viable political idea.  Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese and Koreans are more conscious than ever of what divides them than of some common ‘racial’ destiny; the Vietnamese want to strengthen their ties with the US to help keep China at bay.  Indians and Pakistanis are more interested in religion than in skin color.  The steadfast commitment of the ANC’s leadership to a multiracial vision for South Africa’s future has weakened the importance of racial identity politics throughout Africa, especially given the moral, economic and political bankruptcy of the grandiose socialist/Black Power ideology embraced by early post-colonial regimes.  In any case, sub-Saharan politics today revolves around questions of religion, language and tribe; race can still be a potent political mobilizer but it is much less important to Africans today than it was fifty years ago.

When DuBois wrote, the color line was a real economic and political division.  Only one ‘non-white’ country had modernized its economy; other than Japan all the world’s non-white countries had either been carved up into European or American colonies or (like China, Ethiopia and the Ottoman Empire) struggled to cope with richer and more technologically advanced rivals.  Pre-industrial and pre-modern societies were helpless before the economic and military might of the industrial giants.  A tiny British garrison and an industrious civil service could secure the British Empire in India.  Even a tin-pot monarch like Belgium’s notorious King Leopold could rule an African empire.  As the British poet Hillaire Belloc put it, “Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim gun, and they have not.”

The sharp divergence in the fortunes of white and non-white peoples meshed with poorly understood Darwinian ideas to lead many to believe that races were engaged in a great competition to shape the future of the world.  The ‘weaker’ races, like the original natives of the Americas and Australia, would be pushed to the wall by the ‘stronger’ ones.  The “yellow” and the “white” races were doomed at some future date to a contest for global supremacy.

Outside Minister Farrakhan’s social circle, people don’t think like this anymore.  The collapse of European colonialism in the twenty years after World War Two removed the sense of a common, white enemy that united independence activists across the non-white world.  Over the next thirty years, the success of “capitalist road” developing economies in East Asia and elsewhere combined with the failures of socialism to weaken the belief that the real struggle of world politics was a struggle of the mostly non-white South against the largely white North.

The Third World split up as the twentieth century expired.  Brazil, India, China and South Africa don’t have as much in common with each other – much less with Sudan, Somalia, Myanmar and Bolivia – as they once did.  Struggles in Africa like the Rwandan genocide, the Nigerian civil war and the Sudanese wars eroded any idea that racial solidarity could organize African politics even as the generation of post-colonial Black Power Pan-Africanists (Nkrumah, Kenyatta, Mugabe) failed their countries and disappointed their supporters.  As the human race develops, loosey-goosey categories like “race” matter much less; economics, religion and culture matter more.

Both abroad and in the US, the key factor weakening race and racism has been the success of non-whites.  China, Korea, India, Brazil and Japan are the biggest success stories but there are many others.  Non-white success is both eroding the sense of a global pecking order with white countries at the top, and undermining the belief that whites have created an economic system which depends on the exploitation of everyone else.  Non-white success refutes theories of white supremacy and defuses anti-white bitterness.  In addition to these macro-stories of Asian, Latin and South African success, countless micro-stories of non-white individuals who flourish and succeed in a liberal, competitive environment have helped free the non-white world from any lingering inferiority complex and pulled the rug from under the feet of white supremacists.

The United States has also been transformed by non-white success.  As African Americans became increasingly successful and prominent across the professions, more and more whites found arguments about racial inferiority less compelling.  More, the African American middle class, so painstakingly educated against the odds by courageous leaders like Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver and inspired by the ideas of thinkers like Dubois and Gandhi, was large enough and able enough to provide the leadership that enabled American Blacks to win the civil rights struggle.

Booker T. Washington

Elijah Mohammad and the Nation of Islam used to argue that white hatred of Blacks was so intense and profound that Blacks could never achieve true equality in a white-dominated US.  That argument seemed much stronger in 1960 than in 2010; that Farrakhan is now denouncing an American Black president as a murderer and idolizing the Great Loon of Libya shows us all what happens when an ideology hits the end of the road.

The Normalization of Race?


As the external barriers to Black success in the US gradually diminished, the meaning of ‘blackness’ began a complex and still continuing metamorphosis.  America has always been a nation of shifting boundaries and definitions.  In the nineteenth century the term “race” was often applied to different nationalities in Europe; people spoke of the deep differences between the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin, Celtic, Slavic and Jewish “races”.  Ethnic groups often had to fight decades of prejudice before being considered truly “white”; as  recently as the 1920s, the Ku Kluxers and other white power groups lumped African-Americans, Italian-Americans and Jewish Americans together on its hate list.

More recently, Asian Americans have largely made the shift from being an intimidating and alien racial “other” to being just another ethnic flavor in the great American melting pot.  As intermarriage levels rise and Asian immigrants continue to embrace Christianity (at many elite colleges the children of Asian immigrants are among the most active members of evangelical campus groups), we are already approaching the day when being Asian American is more like being Irish American than anything else — an identity that you choose and define for yourself rather than a collection of stereotypes imposed on you by the wider community.

The American response to ethnic and cultural diversity has been simultaneously to celebrate and to trivialize ethnic roots.  We dye the Chicago River green on St. Patrick’s Day, but to be Irish American rather than German American or even Waspo American means less and less.  For most Euro Americans, their ethnic heritage is a suit of clothes they wear when they want and leave at home when they want — you are no more and no less Irish or Italian or Swedish than you want to be.  Americans can be intensely involved with their ethnic group — belonging to the Dutch Reformed Church or the Italian-Americans War Veterans — or they can ignore their heritage completely.  We celebrate diversity so thoroughly because it means so little; ethnic festivals and roots have become part of the common American identity.

A bright green Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day, 2009 (Wikimedia)

Race had been the great exception to this process, but that is beginning to change.  What has been happening in modern America is that the concept of Black is slowly following the path that concepts like Italian, Irish and Jewish took in the last century.  “Negro” or “colored” was once an all-embracing, all-defining involuntary identity that both public opinion and the state imposed on individuals regardless of their preferences or wishes.  When I was born, the law in South Carolina mandated that a racial classification appear on my birth certificate; that classification determined where I would go to school, what hotels and restaurants I could legally patronize and who I could marry.

Those who broke the written and unwritten laws of race — by dating the wrong person, moving into the wrong neighborhood, sitting at the wrong lunch counter or attempting to enroll in the wrong school – were subject to legal penalties; worse, they were often the targets of mob violence that sometimes climaxed with grisly and sadistic lynching.  For decades government was impotent to protect the victims of these outrageous attacks; race based hatred and fear were stronger forces in much of America than the Constitution and orthodox Christianity combined.  Neither the pulpit nor the judicial bench could tame the demon of racial hatred in this otherwise blessed land.

Things have changed in the last ninety years.  The distinction between racial and ethnic categories is blurring; to be African American in the US today is more like being Italian American or Jewish American in 1920 than it is like being a Negro in that year.  Rates of intermarriage are increasing; racial background is becoming a less accurate predictor of social and economic status and while many Blacks remain both marginalized and poor, the United States now boasts a large and prosperous Black middle class.

Black poverty remains an important social problem in the United States — in many ways the most serious and tragic social problem we have.  It is one of the Obama administration’s greatest failings that the President has not yet found a way to address the needs of the inner city and, as I’ve written in earlier posts, all Americans should be concerned by the many ways in which the ongoing disintegration of the blue social model will affect African Americans and especially the poor.

Intellectuals in America tend to lag behind society in understanding the changes taking place around us; race is no exception.  When race was the great problem and source of evil in American society sixty and seventy years ago, the academy was largely segregated and most academics tended to give the subject a wide berth.  As race has become less important and the risks associated with an anti-racist position declined, academia has jumped all over the issue and for some the question of race has become the central organizing focus for scholarly inquiry and social thought.


The decline of the salience of race has another consequence in American life: the decline in the quality of the leadership of traditional Black organizations.  One hundred years ago, to be a Black doctor, Black lawyer, Black undertaker or Black teacher, you had to work in “colored” institutions and practices.  Black musicians and entertainers were once confined to the “race” market, just as Black athletes had to play in Negro leagues.

Under these conditions the best and the brightest in Black America focused their talents and attention largely on race issues.  Morally, the injustice was so stark and the threat of racial violence was so great, that conscience demanded a race-centric career.  Economically, there was no alternative to a career based on service to the African-American community.  The invisible walls forced all African Americans into a racial ghetto.

Little by little those walls came down.  Athletes and entertainers were among the first to escape.  Professionals soon followed.  Howard loomed less large in the Black mind as Black teachers got tenure at Harvard and as the best African-American students gained access to every college in the country.  The best Black professionals could earn more money, have more power and achieve more by working on Wall Street than by working for historically Black financial institutions; lawyers made more from general practice than from pure civil rights or community focused work.  While some first-rate people continue to choose to work in the world of historically Black institutions or to serve race-focused causes, inevitably the opening of other doors has had its effect.  (In the same way, the end of housing segregation allowed the growing Black middle class to leave inner city ghettos for the suburbs.  The quality of community leadership in the inner city declined even as Blacks generally became more successful.)

This experience is one of the ways in which Black America is becoming more like other ethnic groups and less like a unique outlier.  Early generation immigrant communities from other groups also once stuck together in the way that Blacks did.  Irish and Italian lawyers got jobs working for Irish and Italian clients; Irish and Italian schoolteachers had better luck getting jobs teaching “their own” while discrimination against Catholics and immigrants held them down.  Tightly focused immigrant neighborhoods clustered around Catholic churches and operated a series of parallel institutions (like parochial schools) that offered both education and employment within the ethnic cocoon.  Anti-immigrant feeling in the wider community kept immigrants in the cocoon: Protestant school boards insisted on using the King James Bible in school, meaning that many Catholic parents and teachers could not conscientiously participate.  Many colleges and private firms had barriers (No Irish Need Apply) or quotas to keep “pushy” newcomers out of good jobs.  Over time, the walls of these ethnic ghettos also came down, and the best and the brightest left the ethnic community behind to engage in the larger society around them.

An 1854 New York Times advertisement that reads “No Irish need apply” (Wikimedia)

Both among Blacks and white ethnic groups like the Irish and the Italians, elected local politicians and the clergy seem to be the last professions for whom ethnicity is the focus of professional activity — and in many cases the quality of the people filling these roles has declined as more opportunities appear for young people to build different kinds of careers.

The Black identity has a much longer history in the US than the immigrant identities and its hold is still strong.  Because racism generally is declining but has not yet disappeared, and because the forces that once pushed Blacks together and the pull of communal history and loyalty are so strong, the shift from a racial to a post-racial identity for Black America will be wrenching and slow.

The forces propping up the invisible walls around the race ghetto, paradoxically enough, include the various policies developed over the last fifty years to overcome the legacy of past discrimination.  Affirmative action, minority set-asides, racial gerrymanders, ethnic study departments in universities and other programs and policies encourage and subsidize the existence of a race-focused leadership group.  The African American experience is deep enough, and the consequences of past racism deep enough, that some forms of special social focus on the problems of this group are still needed.  But sooner rather than later the question of reforming these programs to make them both more effective at solving real problems and less costly and intrusive is going to have to be faced.


Today we face a paradox that is going to demand new ways of thinking.  To help poor African Americans we may have to think less about race.  The social problems of the inner city are increasingly human, urban and political problems, and race-based solutions may not help as much as they once did.  Affirmative action can help qualified African Americans compete for jobs in the marketplace; it cannot help a ninth-grade dropout with a drug problem earn a middle class standard of living. We are coming to the point where the well-qualified African American needs affirmative action less and less, while the inner city kid who needs all the help he or she can get doesn’t benefit from it at all.

As race declines in significance globally and nationally, the relationship between race and poverty also changes.  Racial discrimination must be taken into account, historically speaking, for understanding why so much of the American underclass is non-white.  But racial discrimination today (which has by no means vanished and still needs to be fought) is ever less important in explaining the economic and social difficulties of children growing up fatherless in gang-infested, drug-dependent neighborhoods.  That your grandparents’ skin color was black helps provide a historical explanation for why you are stuck in a bombed-out inner city landscape of social devastation; that historical fact may provide an extra reason why society should interest itself in helping you (though there are plenty of other, more immediate ones).  But that history is of very limited use in helping you think about improving your situation — or to society as it tries to think of ways of doing something useful about the problems you face.

Two boys playing in a West Baltimore housing project (Andre Lambertson)

To be morally decent people and to build a stronger society, Americans of all colors cannot forget about our history of racial oppression.  But to continue liquidating the bitter legacy of race, America must move on.

Whatever one thinks about President Obama’s performance in office, his election — and Louis Farrakhan’s bitter reaction to an America changed beyond his imagination — still demonstrates that the United States has turned an important corner.  The color line is now just one of many questions we face, and race is losing its power to warp and diminish American life.