Summer’s Last Sail wallpaper – Conservatives Still Own Identity Politics

Summer’s Last Sail wallpaper

Practicing “identity politics” is one of those pseudo-intellectual  epitaphs conservatives like to throw at non-look-aid drinking thinking Americans. It serves two purposes. One is pure projection. To be a conservative one has to pass so many litmus tests the projection serves as a preemptive attack. The other is to pretend the Right does not have lingering racist issues ( this is not to say all conservatives are racists. Racists still tend to flock to conservatism and conservatives tolerate it, just as they do their homophobia because it gets votes.) neither I or The Onion could come up with a better example of conservative identity politics than a right-wing conservative blog called Political Byline. His/her post consists almost entirely of quotes lifted from Democratic websites – Speaking of Racism: Democrats show their true colors

As you know, Herman Cain, who is a very successful businessman and also a black Conservative, won the straw poll in Florida.  As you also know, I just pointed out some serious racism by the left. Well, the democrats are not disappointing; check out some of the racist or “So damned close to being racist without sounding racist” as you can get.

All of these postings are actual blog postings by liberal blogs about Herman Cain and the night is young:

“Update: And it’s official. Pizza King Cain wins the straw poll. By a lot” — The Impolitic  — “Another day in the clown car – Update”

I have also heard Herman Cain referred to as Herman “Greasy Pizza” Cain too; which is just another way of calling him a greasy n-word. I mean, why not just say that?

Apparently, the Republicans are doing one of these stupid Straw Polls in Floridatoday. The problem is, the base hates all the candidates, which makes picking someone in the Straw Poll a bit of a challenge. Byron York speculates that Herman Cain might do better than expected because no one feels like voting for Rick Perry after he called them heartless. This makes sense to me because the most obvious to do if someone calls you out on your heartless hatred of Latinos is to vote for the black guy. ‘See? I’m not a racist who thinks minorities are biting into too much of my paycheck. I’m color blind.’

Can you feel the Cainmentum?  — Booman Tribune

Can you feel the racism?

Florida straw poll voters decided they hate everyone and voted for the only candidate who’s never held public office, Herman Cain. — Crooks and Liars

So what if Herman Cain has never held public office? Why is that a problem to Democrats? I mean, Barack Obama’s time in office was not that great. Why is this an issue? Because Herman Cain is a black Conservative. That my friends is classic Democratic Party racism.

and finally:

I’d say that Republicans couldn’t be crazy enough to nominate Herman Cain … but then again, they also nominated Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, Ken Buck, and, yes, Sarah Palin.

So, why would not the Republicans be crazy to nominate Herman Cain? Because he is black and a Conservative? Racism much John Amato? Just saying…

….and the night is young. If I spot anymore racism, I will post it here.

Update: Wow… Push out a post and find more of it:

Yes, running a chain of pizza parlors is just like running a country. Just yell, and the employees will scamper around and bring those cheese suppliers to heel.

[….]

In a field that might be called Mittens and the Seven Clowns, the base definitely prefers the clowns. — The Mahablog

Out of the block quotes that blog uses to prove liberal racism, only one even mentions that Cain is black. And could someone tell me the day calling someone a greasy pizza or a clown became a racial slur. One news site and several Democratic bloggers use zero racial slurs and that amounts to proof Democrats are racists. The only person guilty of identity politics here is the wing-nut blogger. Democratic bloggers do not like Cain because he appears to be as loony as a bed bug. Cain acting like a pompous authority on the Constitution, quoted from the Declaration of Independence when supposedly quoting from the US Constitution. Cain insisted that the federal government has no role in business bankruptcies, again citing his authoritative knowledge of the Constitution – Yet  According to Article I of the Constitution, “[t]he Congress shall have power . . . [t]o establish a uniform rule of naturalization, and uniform laws on the subject of bankruptcies throughout the United States.” In a convoluted tirade Cain claimed he was more American and less African-American than Obama ( talk about identity politics and racism) –

Herman Cain: Obama ‘Was Raised In Kenya’ | In an interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, surging GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain rejected the term “African-American” as an inappropriate “label.” Cain dismissed “African” as an accurate descriptor because “most of the ancestors that I can trace were born here in the United States Of America. […] I feel more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa.” The term, Cain implied, may be more appropriate for President Obama, who “is more of an international,” he said. “Look, he was raised in Kenya,” Cain said, “his mother was white from Kansas and her family had an influence on him, it’s true, but his dad was Kenyan.” For the record, Obama was born in Hawaii, spent four to five years in Indonesia, then returned to the United States to live with his maternal grandmother.

Imagine a white liberal saying that Cain was less American because he was the ancestor of Africans and then went on to get Cain’s actual birthplace and early history wrong. Unhinged rants like Cain’s are not just factually wrong, they display a contempt for the truth bound up with some morally reprehensible ethnocentrism. Ultimately Cain is making the same argument about Obama that conservative white racists have made – Obama is not one of us. It was another black conservative – Thomas Sowell – who called President Obama a Nazi and a Maoist. These are just two black conservatives and thus not near statistically large enough sample to condemn all black conservatives by any means. Yet it is amazing how these two use the same hyperbolic and ethnocentric labels one would expect from what has become the standard attack on a Democratic president. Apparently the infection of Obama Derangement Syndrome works just the same on black and white conservatives. Democratic bloggers – I should qualify that to the two dozen or so I read regularly – have another reason not to like Cain and once again it has nothing to do with identity politics and everything to do with Cain being your typical right-wing nutbar, Cain Touts 9-9-9 Economic Plan in WSJ Op-Ed

GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain again laid out his plan to revive the economy in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Thursday.

Dubbed the “9-9-9 plan,” Cain’s proposal, which he has been touting for several weeks, would restructure the tax code to include a 9 percent corporate and personal flat tax and a 9 percent national sales tax. Taxes on repatriated profits would also be eliminated along with payroll taxes and the estate tax.

The inspiration, the former businessman said, came from three guiding economic principles: “Production drives the economy. Risk-taking creates growth. Units of measurement must be dependable.”

Cain included in his op-ed the Republican battle cry of reduced spending by the federal government and paying down the country’s debt. In addition, Obama’s health care reform, the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley corporate-governance law, and the Dodd-Frank bank regulation should be repealed, he said. “A dollar must be worth the same tomorrow as it is today.”

Like the vast majority of conservatives, plus a few Democrats, Cain likes to pretend that Bush and a conservative Congress did not run up the largest debts in the nation’s history while also driving the economy off the cliff. Republicans were and are still responsible for the bulk of the national debt. Cain’s 999 plan is based on nothing. It says nothing about the economic consequences for the average American household, the effects on the long-term deficit or pays any notice to how regressive such a plan would be on any American  that has an income under the national median – When Fox’s Chris Wallace said his plan did not add up, Cain would not identify one economist or one study that proved it was viable. Maybe the 999 plan is another Cain joke. He once claimed that as president he would not sign any bill over three pages long. When Jon Stewart satirized Cain’s three page bill pledge, Cain  – here comes more conservative identity politics – said that Stewart was a racist and that any journalist who took the three page pledge seriously was an “idiot”. I will give Cain an admittedly backhanded defense. He is as shallow, fanatical, loony, bullying, misguided, fact challenged racist and religiously bigoted as Cain is, he is no worse than conservative intellectuals such as Newt Gingrich, Bill Kristol, Victor Davis Hanson or conservative populist such as Sarah Palin  and Rick Perry. In that regard one of those Democratic blogs summed it up pretty well, Cain is just another clown in the clown-car.

Tales of conservative judges – Judicial Diva Gone Wild? Chief Judge Jones Tells Judge Dennis to ‘Shut Up’. Jones later apologized, but she does seem a bit iron fisted when it comes to letting any judge who does not tow her ideological line have their say or time for their questioning witnesses/lawyers.

They might hate and fear anyone to the left of Giovanni Gentile, but conservatives deeply fear some of their opponents. Elizabeth Warren is one of those who makes conservatives shake in their jack-boots – Republicans Panic, Desperately Seeking Dirt on Senator Elizabeth Warren

On Tuesday, when the Democratic-affiliated polling firm, Public Policy Polling, reported Warren narrowly leading Brown, 46 to 44 among likely voters, Brown spokesman Colin Reed put out a statement contending that “we have always known that Scott would be the underdog against whichever candidate wins the Democratic primary next September.”

But this past summer, before Warren enjoyed decent name recognition, Republicans were touting early polls showing Brown leading Warren 53-28, and declaring him a winner.

Now Republicans are putting out the word that there was something duplicitous or corrupt about Warren’s leadership of the Congressional Oversight Panel that monitored the Treasury’s Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).

Politico ran a piece this morning headlined, “Warren’s TARP Panel under Scrutiny.” It quotes a Republican congressman alleging that the panel failed to disclose its own budget, including Warren’s own salary; and the authors of the piece rely on undisclosed sources to contend that Warren was cavalier in what she paid her staff.

The same Republicans who audited every penny and listened to ( if they were paying attention) every word Warren had to say related to financial regulation want a full accounting and they want it now.

But in fact, the panel’s budget and expenditures were disclosed to Congress in several reports that are public record, and its staff salaries were capped at the level of congressional staff. Its total outlays in its more-than-two-year life, as Politico reports, were a paltry $10.5 million. All of the records of the panel, which went out of existence earlier this year, are now on file with the Senate Rules Committee and available for public inspection.

So how about before we have another one of those Darrel Issa(R-CA) ghost hunts which flushes time and tax money down the drain, Congressional members read their own damn documentation. Gosh it might even be available on iPad with cartoons in the margins to make it less tedious.