I'll admit that I'm deriving a guilty pleasure from the media firestorm over the evening out at the West Hollywood "Voyeur Club" where bondage and such were featured for the high-ranking members of the RNC in the aftermath of their tough strategy meetings in Honolulu. The pleasure is only partly due to the media's conviction that the $2,000 tab is a story that trumps the $36 million it costs to fire a Predator Drone at a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist in Afghanistan or Pakistan unless we get on of the estimated hundred such bad guys left in that vicinity these days.
No, the irony in all this is that Republicans for a while now have been practicing a politics of "the other" that stigmatizes non-white, non-heterosexual, non-overtly-religious, and non-military folks as somehow failing the "true American" test. This is a party that has not had an African American in Congress since J.C. Watts retired some ten years ago. This is the party that eggs on birthers, tea-baggers, and boneheads who doubt that the President is an American citizen, who last week referred to Barney Frank as a faggot and John Lewis as a n***er. This is the party that carefully put Gay Marriage Iniatives on the ballots of eleven key states in the 2004 election. The same party that went ballistic when George W. Bush sought to introduce decent legislation to deal with the immigration problem in his second term because it would accelerate the process of the demise of the caucasians as the dominant race in the U.S.
Not all Republicans are intolerant, and not all Democrats are. But it's hardly rocket science to figure out why Latinos went so heavily for Obama in '08, and why the photos of Obama as the Joker or with a Hitler mustache show up at anti-healthcare rallies. When Sean Hannity has an Oliver North or another uniformed member of the Armed Services as a guest on his show when accompanied by a liberal, it's pathetic to watch Mr. Hannity fall all over himself referring to the uniformed guest as a "fine American" while the non-Republican guest is hardly treated hospitably.
To be sure, there are differences among us--some of us are sports fans, others are music fans, some are outdoors folks, some are homebodies, some like to hunt with rifles, others like to read for pleasure. But since when in America should it matter whether you're straight or gay, black, brown or white, a Christian evangelical or an atheist? And since when were we unself-conscious about referring to some as "true Americans" and others as seeking to destroy what America stands for?
If we're not better than that or if we're not willing to insist that there's no place for this form of us vs. them in this country, then we will surely pay the inevitable price for failing to heed Elie Wiesel's advice when he said, "All that it takes for evil to triumph in the world is for good people to say or do nothing in the face of those who perpetrate evil."
Surely, all "true Americans" are better than that--no matter their race, religion, sexual orientation, party identification, or positions on issues on which we are bound to reach,in good faith and on grounds of varied yet honorable values, differing positions. In the end, there is a place where the "us vs. them" dichotomy does nothing to enhance our identity as humans who happen to be Americans as well.
And all this from a story about a stupid visit to a strip club in Hollywood by the paid staffers of the party of moral values. Is this a great country or what?!
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Keith says it better than I could. Check it out:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/rubio-will-trade-keith-olbermann-for-immigrants/6ljqwuc
I read a response to Frank Rich's Sunday NYT column from a tea party organizer in Dallas. He chastised Rich for asserting that the tea partiers resemble anti-Civil Righters. Towards the end of his column he made the point that the reason we don't see people of color at these tea party rallies is that people of color don't appreciate limited government.
ReplyDeleteI mean he's right, people of color obviously can't wrap their minds around the virtues of limited government. Or maybe people of color have not seen any benefits, and in fact have been victims of systematic discirmination, because of so-called limited government policies.
The GOP use of its discretionary budget in West Hollywood is backpage news at best, but in our political culture where extending unemployment benefits leads to our "demise by debt", it becomes sad irony. Michael Steele might be an awful Chairman for the party, but the Jim Bunnings have a much greater impact on our nation and are not held accountable for their self-gratifying ideological purist attitudes and actions.
Sam's reference to the tea-bagger's perceptive observation that people of color don't appreciate limited government makes Frank Rich's point: the tea-baggers and the rest of the anti-government crowd don't get it. What difference does it make if someone of modest income faces a small tax bill or a huge increment in the health insurance premium? What is worse: having the wealthy pay slight increases in payroll taxes that are capped now at slightly above $100k or having your credit card, loaning money that was given to it by taxpayers or the Fed at no interest, see rates jacked up to 28% apr, along with a host of small-print fees that make the massive threat to liberty posed by the HCR look like a penny tax on a six-pack?
ReplyDeleteWhat would be hopeful is if some of the more intelligent tea-baggers were to examine how regressive the US tax code has become since Reagan, and how low our total tax burden is relative to those democracies who have a hard time understanding why our defense budget is more than half of the total defense budget of the rest of the total world! It' not limited government when you spend almost a trillion a year to finance 700 military installations outside the borders of the US annually and spend more than a buck of every two spent in the whole world on "defense." That is the understanding that people of color who don't get the tea-baggers get, but the blowhards like Sarah Palin just don't.