Hillary On Working Class Whites In 1995: "Screw 'Em"

cross-posted to goodCRIMETHINK

Barack Obama is rubber. Hillary Clinton is glue. Everything she says about him bounces back and sticks to her. Everything.

From Huffington Post:

In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate emerged at a retreat at Camp David. Should the administration make overtures to working class white southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party? The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.

"Screw 'em," she told her husband. "You don't owe them a thing, Bill. They're doing nothing for you; you don't have to do anything for them."



...those who were at the event say the 1995 episode fits into her larger political viewpoint. As Harry Boyte, the director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Democracy and Citizenship who was at the retreat, told The Huffington Post: "[Hillary Clinton] sees herself as the champion of the oppressed, but there is always a kind of good guy versus bad guy mentality. The comment before that was that 'the Reagan Democrats are our enemies and they weren't on our side,' and she was agreeing with that comment. She said we should write them off: screw them."

There you have it. Screw them.

Screw those people with values. Screw those hunters. Screw those church-goers. Screw those people whose hypothetical offense I am exploiting for short-term political gain.

It doesn't matter why they might be frustrated. She doesn't try to explain it. She writes them off.

That's just cold.

She's so full of excrement, this one.

The article continues, explaining that after her comments, Bill Clinton stepped in to explain (I've highlighted a few sections for later focus):

I know how you feel. I understand Hillary's sense of outrage. It makes me mad too. Sure, we lost our base in the South; our boys voted for Gingrich. But let me tell you something. I know these boys. I grew up with them. Hardworking, poor, white boys, who feel left out, feel that our reforms always come at their expense. Think about it, every progressive advance our country has made since the Civil War has been on their backs. They're the ones asked to pay the price of progress. Now, we are the party of progress, but let me tell you, until we find a way to include these boys in our programs, until we stop making them pay the whole price of liberty for others, we are never going to unite our party, never really going to have change that sticks.

The HuffPo author seems to think that the above "is remarkably similar to what Obama was trying to convey in his now controversial remarks about small town America."

He's wrong. I bolded a few sections above which caused me to pause. Bill goes far beyond anything Obama was trying to say.

Bill says that "our reforms" came at "their expense" and amazingly claims that they've paid the whole price of liberty for others.

What a paternalistic nincompoop. I'm sure poor Southern white men have suffered the neglect of a corporate-driven system that overlooks them. All poor people have. I'm sure it was painful for many white supremacists in this group to watch women and blacks start working and voting. But to somehow claim that this group paid the whole price of "liberty for others" is stunning. How magnificently twisted of you Mr. Clinton.

Here I am thinking that the liberation of any is the liberation of all, that a society which begins to value the least of us can finally truly value each of us.

Here I am thinking that the "liberty of others" might have been fought for and paid for in blood by those very "others" through marching and lynchings and state-sponsored terrorism, but apparently it was all due to hardworking, poor, white boys.

This sounds similar to Hillary's "it took a president to get it done" comment which sparked so much ugliness in this campaign back in January. It's never the oppressed working hard, fighting and dying for their freedom. It's always somebody else.

Thanks for the clarification, Bill. Now kindly, take your opportunistic, back-stabbing, kamikaze wife and your patriarchal, historically revisionist ass, and shut the fuck up.

Rev. Wright: The Difference Between Wrong And Crazy

There's been a lot of review of Reverend Wright's sermons on the net recently, but I'm not sure that anyone has actually put the reasons why some of his more incorrect assertions were accepted in context. The reason why some of the statements people find so offensive from Wright aren't considered crazy is because there is a measure of precedent for each of them.

Wright's contention that AIDS was invented by white people to afflict blacks is wrong, but it's not exactly crazy. It was, after all, only thirty years ago that the U.S. Government was revealed to have spent 40 years experimenting with black men and syphilis by deliberately leaving them untreated.

Furthermore, HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death for black women age 25-34, and African-Americans comprise half of the people who have contracted HIV in the U.S. Given the stunning indifference of public officials to these facts, that the government has disallowed treatment for "experimentation" purposes in the past, it is a paranoid but not entirely unfounded leap to suggest that the government might be responsible. While the U.S. Government did not "invent" AIDS, it certainly has ignored the magnitude of the problem in the black community, and Wright reads complicity into that indifference. (To believe that the U.S. government invented AIDS is to believe that they thought the best way to infect the black population was to infect gay men and heterosexual intravenous drug users first, which makes no $#@#! sense, sorry Kanye.)

Wrong, yes. Crazy, no.

Likewise, Wright's assertion that the U.S. Government "gives" black men drugs is a paranoid reading of history, but once again there's precedent. Reagan's Iran/Contra scam knowingly provided drug dealers in Central and South America with means to move their product to the United States, sponsored drug dealer Manuel Noriega in various anti-Sandanista military activities, and protecting political allies involved in the drug trade, all in the name of fighting communism. While the Reagan administration was facilitating the drug trade in the United States, black neighborhoods were being devastated by crack cocaine and associated violence.

Did the government "give" black men drugs? No. It just made them readily available, and did little to nothing as drugs became the most affordable, high-yield, short term financial investment in an economy that was losing the kinds of jobs that provided benefits and a living wage. Once again, the issue is indifference: the government may not be directly responsible, but it certainly has done nothing to solve the problem once the gravity of the situation became clear.

At the heart of both of these claims is the perception that white people simply don't care what happens to us, as long as it doesn't affect them. At the heart of Obama's pitch is solving this problem by making "black problems," American problems, so that they can't be approached with the same level of cold indifference that drives so much of Wright's rage in the first place.

I get the impression that many white people have little to no knowledge about how messed up this country's racial history is beyond slavery or Jim Crow. So stuff like the Tuskegee experiments, or what Reagan's reckless exploitation of the drug trade in the fight against communism and what it did to urban communities, the kinds of things old heads teach youngbloods in casual conversation, are completely absent from their education (exaggeration is sometimes included in this form of pedagogy, as in most oral traditions. So that partially explains how horrifying but plausible stuff becomes indefensible conspiracy).

So it sounds crazy to most people when they hear Wright say things like "AIDS is genocide against black people" because they don't know that the government has, in the past, denied sick people treatment because they were black as part of "medical research". It sounds crazy to say the government "gives black people drugs" until you think of Reagan's sponsorship of Columbian cartels.

Wright is wrong, but he's not crazy. And there's a big difference.

*some of the claims in a previous version of this post regarding syphilis were wrong, and they have been corrected.

The Amazing Racism of Pat Buchanan. Be Not Surprised

Many of you have written in or posted comments about Pat Buchanan's crazy ass comments that black Americans should be grateful to white folks for bringing us (via slavery, of course) to America and Jesus and welfare.

Rather than tackle this stupidness, I pass the mic to Ta-Nehisi Coates. Excerpt

There is a lot wrong here, but one central thread of errant logic undergirds it all. Buchanan, like most racists, doesn't actually believe that African-Americans are Americans. This isn't an interpretation, Buchanan's argument that white Americans, in the form of social programs, have done more for black people than any group (including presumably the entire Civil Rights Movement!) assumes that black people have never paid any taxes for those programs. He quite literally doesn't categorize black people as Americans, but useless layabouts who've never contributed anything to the country. All those charities that Buchanan lays out, presumably none of them were run by black folks.

It goes without saying that Buchanan ignores Jim Crow, the epoch of lynching and housing discrimination. That's what bigots do. And Buchanan's rhetoric shouldn't make us angry. He's always been a racist. That said, it's always frustrating to see rank neanderthals, half-wits, and fools making the argument that black people should be thankful to them. Intellectually, Pat Buchanan can't carry Barack Obama's unwashed boxers--from last week. I just got done jogging down Lenox Ave and passed no less than five brothers that would smash Buchanan in any debate.

Continue to the full post

MLK Was A Radical, Not A Conservative

I have to admit that I have no idea why conservatives resist all manner of change in society, especially with regard to race, only to attempt to claim credit for such changes decades later. Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson's attempt to claim the mantle of abolition for evangelical Christians is trash history at its worst:

For many conservatives, the birthday of the movement is Nov. 1, 1790 -- the publication date of Edmund Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France." Burke described how utopian idealism could lead to the guillotine, just as it later led to the gulag. He rejected the democracy of the mob and argued that social reform, when necessary, should be gradual, cautious and rooted in the habits and traditions of the community.

But there is another strain of conservatism with a birthday three years earlier than Burke's "Reflections." On May 12, 1787, under an English oak on his Holwood Estate, Prime Minister William Pitt pressed a young member of Parliament named William Wilberforce to introduce a bill for the abolition of the slave trade. Wilberforce's research found that the holds of slave ships were, according to one witness, "so covered in blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the (dysentery) that it resembled a slaughterhouse." Enslaved Africans on the ships attempted to starve themselves to death or to jump into the ocean. Wilberforce thought this suffering a good reason for reform.

The only problem is that the act for which Wilberforce is best known, his effort to abolish the slave trade, it decidedly un-Burkean and un-conservative: It is the definition of radical, progressive change, and the very opposite of what Gerson describes as"Burkean" in the first paragraph of his Op-Ed.

Were that the fabrications ended there.

Both Wilberforce and Shaftesbury considered themselves Burkean conservatives; Wilberforce was a friend of Burke's and a fellow opponent of the French revolution's wild-eyed utopianism. Wilberforce and Shaftesbury were gradualists, not radicals. They hated socialism and rejected the perfectibility of man.

But both were also evangelical Christians who believed that all human beings are created in God's image -- and they were deeply offended when that image was degraded or violated. Long before compassionate conservatism got its name, the ideas of compassion and benevolence were central to their political and moral philosophy.

[...]

But the compassionate conservatism of Wilberforce and Shaftesbury is just as old as Burke, and more suited to an American setting. American conservatives, after all, are called upon to conserve a liberal ideal -- that all men are created equal. A conservatism that does not accommodate the "ideology" of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. will seem foreign to most Americans. A concern for the rights of the poor and vulnerable is not simply "theological"; it is a measure of our humanity. And skepticism in this noble cause is not sophistication; it seems more like exhaustion and cynicism.

Maintaining this fairy tale requires that Gerson remain in Britain and not discuss the circumstances of the abolitionist movement in any deta