Nope, no racism here

Benen: BLUNT'S CHOICE OF ALLEGORIES....

I try not to be overly sensitive about rhetoric like this, but I'm not sure what Roy Blunt is talking about.

Representative Roy Blunt, the former Republican whip who is giving up his House seat in Missouri to run for the Senate, offered his take on life these days in the nation's capital to those gathered at the conservative Values Voter Summit on Friday.
He told a tale about British soldiers who had built a golf course in India and had to adapt to the game in a whole new way. They didn't anticipate that they'd be joined on the course by monkeys, who would swoop out of the nearby jungle, grab the golf balls and toss them around, he explained.
The golfers had to establish a firm rule. "You have to play the ball where the monkey throws it. And that is the rule in Washington all the time."

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see the relevance of the monkey/golf allegory here. As Blunt described the British golfers' predicament, he noted that the players "tried to eliminate the monkey problem, but they never got it done." Instead, they had to adapt to the monkeys' ball-throwing habits.
Mike Madden added, "Blunt, who's running for Senate in Missouri next year, didn't explain precisely why he chose an analogy about monkeys to illustrate the difficulties posed by the party that opposes the country's first black president. (They both like to screw up the white man's golf game?) Perhaps it was just a really, really stupid parable to choose."
Perhaps. Listening to the audio, though, it's worth noting that the right-wing crowd thought this was hilarious.

 Smooth Like Remy: All Praises Due To The White Man

Thank God every day that your kids do not attend school in Texas.

Posted by sgwhiteinfla

 Benen: THE MEDIA PICKS ITS PREFERRED STORY...

President Obama is making the rounds tomorrow, hitting every mainstream network's Sunday public affairs show, with the obvious goal of promoting health care reform. If the media coverage this morning is any indication, news outlets have a different story they prefer to emphasize.
New York Times: "Obama Rejects Race as Lead Cause of Criticism"

President Obama said Friday that he did not believe his race was the cause of fierce criticism aimed at his administration in the contentious national debate over health care, but rather that the cause was a sense of suspicion and distrust many Americans have in their government.

LA Times: "In media blitz, Obama says vitriol isn't racism-based"

Fear of "big changes" and of the growing role of government -- not racism -- are behind much of the criticism that the White House faces, President Obama said during a sweeping series of television interviews to air Sunday.

Lead story of Time's "The Page" this morning: "Obama: Health Care Anger Not Motivated by Race"

The president tells NBC News the health care criticism is driven by an intense debate over the proper role of government -- and not by racism.

CNN: "Obama: Race not 'overriding issue' in criticism"

In an interview with CNN's John King airing on "State of the Union with John King" this Sunday, Obama acknowledged that racism plays a role in some of the criticism against him, but added that race is "not the overriding issue."

Keep in mind, race is an issue the White House isn't talking about, and would prefer to avoid. The talk is entirely the result of reporters' questions, and this morning, it's the angle news outlets have decided is the most important element of the debate.
Now, in fairness, I can appreciate the fact that the media wants to lead with something provocative. After months of debate, none of these outlets want to run with "Obama: still no death panels" as a headline.
But it seems as if the media has decided that the intersection of race and health care is too exciting to ignore, and they're going to exploit it for all it's worth.

 Bob Herbert (NYT): The Scourge Persists

Did we really need Jimmy Carter to tell us that racism is one of the driving forces behind the relentless and often scurrilous attacks on President Obama? We didn’t know that? As John McEnroe might say, “You can’t be serious.”
“There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president,” said Mr. Carter. I guess he was aiming his remarks at those who contended when Mr. Obama was elected that we had achieved some Pollyannaish postracial society. But it’s hard to imagine, after all the madness and vitriol of the past few months, that anyone still believes that.
For many white Americans, Barack Obama is nothing more than that black guy in the White House, and they want him out of there. (Mr. Carter knows a little something about kowtowing to that crowd. During his presidential campaign in 1976, he blithely let it be known that he had no problem with residents “trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods,” and he tossed around ugly terms like “black intrusion” and “alien groups.” He later apologized.)
More than three decades later we have Sherri Goforth, an aide to a Republican state senator in Tennessee sending out a mass e-mail of a cartoon showing dignified portraits of the first 43 presidents, and then representing the 44th — President Obama — as a spook, a cartoonish pair of white eyes against a black background.
When a gorilla escaped from a zoo in Columbia, S.C., a longtime Republican activist, Rusty DePass, described it on his Facebook page as one of Michelle Obama’s ancestors.
Among the posters at last weekend’s gathering of conservative protesters in Washington was one that said, “The zoo has an African lion and the White House has a lyin’ African.”
These are bits and pieces of an increasingly unrestrained manifestation of racism directed toward Mr. Obama that is being fed by hate-mongers on talk radio and is widely tolerated, if not encouraged, by Republican Party leaders. It’s disgusting, and it’s dangerous. But it’s the same old filthy racism that has been there all along and that has been exploited by the G.O.P. since the 1960s.
I have no patience with those who want to pretend that racism is not an out-and-out big deal in the United States, as it always has been. We may have made progress, and we may have a black president, but the scourge is still with us. And if you needed Jimmy Carter to remind you of that, then you’ve been wandering around with your eyes closed.
Glenn Beck, one of the moronic maestros of right-wing radio and TV, assures us that President Obama “has a deep-seated hatred for white people.” Some years ago, as the watchdog group Media Matters for America points out on its Web site, Beck said he’d like to beat Representative Charles Rangel “to death with a shovel.”
There is nothing new about this racist rhetoric. Back in the 1970s Rush Limbaugh told a black caller: “Take that bone out of your nose and call me back.”
But the fact that a black man is now in the White House has so unsettled much of white America that the lid is coming off the racism that had been simmering at dangerously high temperatures all along. Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow with Media Matters, said, “If someone had told me in February that there would be mainstream allegations that Obama was a racist and a fascist and a communist and a Nazi, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
Republicans have been openly feeding off of race hatred since the days of Dick Nixon. Today’s conservative activists are carrying that banner proudly. What does anybody think is going on when, as Anderson Cooper pointed out on CNN, one of the leaders of the so-called tea party movement, Mark Williams, refers to the president of the United States as an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug, and a racist in chief.
After all these years of race-baiting and stirring the pot of hatred for political gain, it’s too much to ask the leaders of the Republican Party to step forward and denounce this spreading stain of reprehensible conduct. Republicans are trying to ride that dependable steed of bigotry back to power.
But it’s time for other Americans, of whatever persuasion, to take a stand, to say we’re better than this. They should do it because it’s right. But also because we’ve seen so many times what can happen when this garbage gets out of control.
Think about the Oklahoma City bombing, and the assassinations of King and the Kennedys. On Nov. 22, 1963, as they were preparing to fly to Dallas, a hotbed of political insanity, President Kennedy said to Mrs. Kennedy: “We’re heading into nut country today.”