The Right needs to tone down the rhetoric

[Adam]

The continuing saga of people on the Right using outrageous, some claim dangerous rhetoric:

[mgunner]

Lol... but we're just getting started!

[Michele]

DID MSNBC'S CHRIS HAYES USE 'KKK' IMAGE FOR CRUZ, PAUL, RUBIO?

Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC's All In, has a favorite tactic--though not an original one: connecting today's Republicans with the racist Democrats of the old South. In June, he rewrote history by casting George Wallace as a Republican--an error for which, to his credit, he later apologized. On Wednesday, he appeared to use a more subtle tactic to connect the Tea Party's Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio to the Ku Klux Klan.

In a segment on possible Tea Party contenders for the Republican Party's nomination in the 2016 presidential race, Hayes used a graphic (above) that portrayed Cruz, Paul, and Rubio as kings in a deck of cards--and that, rather conveniently, spelled out the initials "K K K." (Hayes did not say the word "kings" during the segment.)

The use of KKK imagery--historically associated with Democrats, not Republicans--to describe the Tea Party would not be unique to Hayes. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) recently used a burning cross to provide the "T" in "Tea Party" in a fundraising email. Hayes's "dog whistle" was more clever, but--if intentional--no less offensive.

There is a hazard, of course, in taking offense too quickly at bad jokes, and there is always the possibility that Hayes was unaware of the graphic, or even that the KKK reference was entirely coincidental. However, given Hayes's past record, and the constant obsession of fellow MSNBC anchors with making false accusations of racism against the Tea Party and the Republican Party, Hayes has arguably exhausted the benefit of the doubt.


Link

[Adam]

More extreme right-wing vitriol:

[Lanie]

Tone it down righties!

I mean lefties!

I mean, oh heck.

Carry on.

[Michele]

Quinn Campaign Wonders: Black Republicans Like Jewish Nazis?

Illinois Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn is in some hot water with the Jewish community after his campaign tweeted—and then quietly deleted—several messages urging backers to read an article comparing black Republican voters to Jews who collaborated with the Nazis.

Chicago Sun Times readers were stunned last week to find that writer Neil Steinberg has penned a column comparing black supporters of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner to Jews who collaborated with the Nazis against their brethren.

“As a general rule, individuals will sell out the interests of their groups in return for personal benefit,” Steinberg wrote in his column, which claimed that Rauner is buying off the black community and its leaders. “It isn’t just a black thing. Jews collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, helping them to round up their own people in the hopes they’d be the last to go.”

Quinn’s camp praised the piece and tweeted it out to supporters several times. The tweets were deleted after local Jewish community officials quietly communicated their outrage to the governor.

“If Rauner is willing to throw his own money away like this, what’s he going to do when he gets his hands on ours?” read one now-deleted tweet from Quinn’s campaign account.

The campaign also retweeted—and then deleted—a missive from Steinberg promoting his piece.

Both tweets were captured by the website Politwoops, which archives political tweets for posterity.

Some in the Chicago Jewish community say that they were outraged by Quinn’s support of the Nazi rhetoric, which was disseminated over Passover, the holiday marking the ancient Jewish people’s release from slavery.

“Coming during Passover just a few days after the [anti-Semitic] shootings in Kansas, this kind of rhetoric was beyond outrageous,” said one local Jewish community insider. “Community leaders immediately contacted the governor’s office and urged retraction.”

Sources say that the heads of several major Jewish organizations personally registered their outrage with Quinn.

Even those in the Chicago political world say they were stunned by the Quinn campaign’s endorsement of the piece.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Democratic official embrace racist rhetoric and Holocaust imagery like Pat Quinn did here,” said one Chicago political strategist. “It’s possible this was a campaign staff mistake—but the buck stops with the governor and he better start vetting every tweet personally going forward.”


More at Link

[Norm dePlume]

Illinois Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn is in some hot water with the Jewish community after his campaign tweeted—and then quietly deleted—several messages urging backers to read an article comparing black Republican voters to Jews who collaborated with the Nazis.

Chicago Sun Times readers were stunned last week to find that writer Neil Steinberg has penned a column comparing black supporters of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner to Jews who collaborated with the Nazis against their brethren.

Help me understand this. Are you taking an ironic swipe at political correctness, or do you think that Steinberg was actually in the wrong here, and the governor's staff were in the wrong by extension?

[Michele]

Help me understand this. Are you taking an ironic swipe at political correctness, or do you think that Steinberg was actually in the wrong here, and the governor's staff were in the wrong by extension?

I think that the governor's staff..if that's who controls his campaign twitter acct..can help you understand since they thought better and deleted their tweets relating to the rant.

[Adam]

Help me understand this. Are you taking an ironic swipe at political correctness, or do you think that Steinberg was actually in the wrong here, and the governor's staff were in the wrong by extension?

I think that the governor's staff..if that's who controls his campaign twitter acct..can help you understand since they thought better and deleted their tweets relating to the rant.

It certainly seems clear that Quinn's office decided after they got a backlash that maybe re-tweeting the racist rantings of a wife-beating drunk might not be such a good idea.

[Norm dePlume]

Okay, so you're practicing political correctness in this instance rather than criticizing it. He mentioned Jews and Nazis; that's taboo; therefore whatever he said must be shunned by all good people.

[Adam]

Okay, so you're practicing political correctness in this instance rather than criticizing it. He mentioned Jews and Nazis; that's taboo; therefore whatever he said must be shunned by all good people.

What is said is that Black people who wander off of the liberal plantation are equivalent to Jewish Nazi collaborators. That's racist, no matter how you try to slice it.

[Norm dePlume]

What is said is that Black people who wander off of the liberal plantation are equivalent to Jewish Nazi collaborators. That's racist, no matter how you try to slice it.

That might be said, but it wasn't said by Neil Steinberg and it wasn't said by Pat Quinn and it wasn't said by his campaign staff. No equavalence is claimed, and no comparison is made. Steinberg's column did not say anyone was "as bad as" or "equivalent to" or "just like" Nazi collaborators. He said that individuals have been known to sell out their groups for individual benefit, and used Nazi collaborators as one of several examples before going on to address one particular magazine publisher for taking $51,000 from a gubernatorial candidate that the magazine then endorsed. He makes no claim that one is just as bad as the other. He only says they are both examples of people selling out "their groups".

But since he invoked the touchy subject of Jews and Nazis, no assessment of his actual meaning is allowed and hyperbolic assertions are the order of the day. That is the essence of the political correctness that righties love to condemn.

[Adam]

That might be said, but it wasn't said by Neil Steinberg and it wasn't said by Pat Quinn and it wasn't said by his campaign staff. No equavalence is claimed, and no comparison is made. Steinberg's column did not say anyone was "as bad as" or "equivalent to" or "just like" Nazi collaborators. He said that individuals have been known to sell out their groups for individual benefit, and used Nazi collaborators as one of several examples before going on to address one particular magazine publisher for taking $51,000 from a gubernatorial candidate that the magazine then endorsed. He makes no claim that one is just as bad as the other. He only says they are both examples of people selling out "their groups".

But since he invoked the touchy subject of Jews and Nazis, no assessment of his actual meaning is allowed and hyperbolic assertions are the order of the day. That is the essence of the political correctness that righties love to condemn.

Oh bullshit. That's exactly what Steinberg said.

[Norm dePlume]

Oh bullshit. That's exactly what Steinberg said.

Kindly highlight the "equivalent to" part:

‘The machine,” political guru Don Rose said, years ago, “could get 30 percent of the black votes for George Wallace over Martin Luther King.”

Though we don’t have to raise hypotheticals. When the actual Dr. King actually did bring his open occupancy marches to Chicago, there was no shortage of black aldermen willing to rise in City Council and denounce King as an unwelcome outsider, their strings pulled by Richard J. Daley.

Let me be clear: As a general rule, individuals will sell out the interests of their groups in return for personal benefit. It isn’t just a black thing. Jews collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, helping them to round up their own people in the hopes they’d be the last to go. The Republican Party will deny global warming until the ocean laps at Pittsburgh simply because doing something about it crosses the immediate profit of the coal burners and oil companies and carbon spouters who write the checks. No tobacco company has any trouble finding people who, at a hefty salary, stare into the camera and say no, all that lung cancer stuff is just fiction.

Still, knowing this, I had to smile, broadly at Mike Sneed’s item Thursday on Hermene Hartman, publisher of an obscure Chicago African-American periodical, N’DIGO, who pocketed $51,000 of Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner’s bottomless pail of money and then decided, my God, he’s the man to back, the billionaire with a heart of gold that beats in time to the hopes of the black community. She wrote a lengthy tribute to Rauner’s “fresh approaches,” never mentioning the money she pocketed.

[Adam]

Kindly highlight the "equivalent to" part:

"... [I]ndividuals will sell out the interests of their groups in return for personal benefit. It isn’t just a black thing. Jews collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, helping them to round up their own people in the hopes they’d be the last to go."

You can try to pretend that's not making an equivalency between the two, but no one is going to believe you. Jewish groups in Chicago didn't believe that horseshit, and neither did the governor's office, which is why they tried to make their endorsement of that sentiment disappear.