How the Devil Works

They don’t call him “The Prince of Lies” for nothing. (And I note that no feminist group screams and insists that Satan might be a woman, you know, the Prince OR Princess of Lies. Hmmm.)

Not the Devil, just plays him on the Radio

What? you ask.

OK, it’s about Our Nigger President.

There. I’ve said it. Shocked you. And I apologize. Truly, humbly and sincerely. It’s a bad thing. But think about it: we have heard nothing BUT that said (by actions) from the Inauguration on, only in increasingly transparent code. And there is a difference between a bad word spoken with a good intention and good words spoken with bad intentions.

I only say this because this conclusion seems lost on a huge number of Americans who NEED to remember it: deeds count for more than words.

(Especially if they’re deeds to property.)

I think that history’s verdict on this GOP will be an ugly one, indeed. The fact that the congressional GOP universally opposes everything that the Black President proposes is inarticulately eloquent in an irrefutable manner. It confirms our suspicions about the Arizona university commencement address. Sadly, by making Janet Napolitano the director of Homeland Sekurity, Obama elevated (unintended consequences) Jan Brewer to the Arizona governorship.

And she’s just a flat-out bigot-shrew, period. We got lost in the narrow definition of “racism” and so meekly shrug and nod whenever they scream “WE’RE NOT RACISTS! WE’RE BIGOTS!” as though that somehow justified their Rovian Flip of shouting racism at the Obama Administration and progressives in general.

No, the Left meekly stands aside as ACORN (an organization with a LOT of minority staffers and volunteers) is crucified by Breitbat and his minion James O’Pimmpe. And we stand aside when they produce a videotape of Helen Thomas making the mistake of not biblically supporting Israel. And say nothing when Van Jones is taken down. Or Dan Rather (with their abetting) or David Weigel. Or Journolist.

With the country burning; they fiddle.

And the tune, more often than not these days, is “Dixie.”

That’s how the Devil works: Whatever crime he has committed, he accuses YOU of. And then, in too many cases, calls himself (or herself) a “patriot” and a “Christian.”

Sean Hannity, good Catholic boy, regularly blasphemes his own God to call Obama “the Anointed One,” as the Tea Partiers put our president in WHITEFACE (the Joker) and call him “the Messiah.”

That’s not Christian, Christians. And YOU know what it actually IS.

(NOT Christian)

Rush Limbaugh, one of His favorites on Earth (“His” referring to Lucifer and not Jehovah) — or Hers — finally tiptoed over the line into outright racism on the Shirley Sherrod story, but everyone is so busy pillorying the president that nobody seemed to notice, not least of which is MediaMatters dot org, who are usually on top of this.

But I understand: there is so much hateful bigotry in the GOP — as currently constituted — that not only is merely speaking the words “The Party of Lincoln” a tragic, sick, sorrowful joke, but it is humanly impossible to keep up with the endless hate media. And, weirdly (to persons who actually think) the entire Rightie echo-chamber comes up with the same takes and same focus on the same stories day after day after day. The one-note hate media, and somebody behind the scenes is playing it like a cheap toy piano, relentlessly pecking out a tinny melody of hate.

So, in the final analysis, are we really concerned about WHAT kind of hate it is? Whether it’s racism, sexism, sneering at the unemployed, dismissing the poor and homeless, screeching about deficits for schools and bridges when they stood with High Moral Dudgeon against the slightest reduction in “off the books” war deficits for nearly a decade; or whether it is about calling anyone NOT agreeing with them “godless” and “unpatriotic” — only those aren’t the terms they use.

Consider “liberal.” A perfectly respectable word throughout the history of Western Civilization.

Now turned into a sneer, a smear, a hate term issued with all the bile and blind bigotry that ever the word “nigger” was.

But we get caught up in the classifications, and when a good and decent woman is smeared, the blame falls … on the Obama Administration? Andrew Breitbart and his enablers get a pass, and never once answer. Like Sarah Palin gets to make news with Facebook postings, but never answer a reporter, or acknowledge “the People’s right to know,” which lies at the base of ALL American journalism.

And no one will call this satanic brew of lies, sophistries and bigotry what it is: evil.

Whether we agree or disagree  on any issue in American politics, we have agreed to disagree and compromise, from the very beginning, from that very first meeting of the First Continental Congress in Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia.

And yet our 111th Congress is paralyzed by lies and hate and bigotry. It has all the eloquence of our most accomplished mime. It is possible to say one thing and do another. And it has always been a pillar of wisdom that one judges by the actions and not the words of the doer.

Or, in this case, the NOT-doers. The obstructionists. The … racists.

Listen to Rush, from his own transcript, “innocently’ claiming to be just a truth-seeker:

We’re wondering why this subject just dropped like a hot potato before the highly, quote, unquote, influential Sunday shows. By the way,

And then he drops the hammer:

this organization that Charles Sherrod was part of, “key member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the ‘60s,” was taken over at some point by Stokely Carmichael and then by H. Rap Brown, whose members went on to form the old Black Panthers. That was the organization Shirley’s husband was part of.

In October 1961 Charles Sherrod became the first field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for southwest Georgia, which eventually was taken over by Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown and became the Black Panthers. Here is Shirley Sherrod’s husband in an unknown place in January. Now, I must offer a disclaimer here for partisan political operatives monitoring the program. We do not know the all-important context. We do not know if Charles Sherrod disavowed racism before or after these remarks.

Note the dream logic here. The coded racism couldn’t be more clear, except that it’s not in code anymore.  You could just as well argue that Lincoln was a member of the Republican Party, which was later taken over by … Rush Limbaugh, and, therefore, by implication, Abraham Lincoln is Rush Limbaugh. The linkage to the “Black Panther” party is, itself racist, because it plays on the phony Faux Nooz™ fear the two black panthers video running 24/7 at present, a current kerfuffle that even drew an apology from CBS News’ Bob Schieffer for “not knowing” about it.

CBS’ Schieffer not reporting on Black Panthers

These are deep and ugly old code words: SNCC, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Black Panthers. And they are INTENDED to roil the cauldron of white racism that has never entirely left us — it mostly went underground.

I cannot tell you how the times I’ve heard it in my OWN family, in what was thought to be “private” sickened and disgusted me. Hating Blacks is robustly still with us, and, sadly, the racists among us have learned to “pass” — in the ultimate sort of satanic reversal.

If that “N-word”  gets blurted out, whether casually and unselfconsciously invoked or merely as the ugliest word the rampaging asshole could think of, you lose your job. So the crypto-racists have learned to “pass” in tolerant, liberal and progressive America (we remain progressive socially, as even Reagan and the two Bushes couldn’t stamp out Gay Rights) much as a sufficiently “light skinned” “Negro” would “pass” as “white,” not so long ago, when being “white” meant significantly different social position and possibility within American society. Which is why what you’ll read below is so tragic.

They wait until you’re “confidential” company, and let loose with the “niggers” and the “cunts” and the “spics” and the “beaners,” and the “sand-niggers” (or “ragheads”) or the “slants,” “chinks” and so forth, ad nauseum.  They haven’t gone away, and, like homosexuals in airport bathrooms in Minneapolis, they have coded signals by which they communicate.

Subtle coded racist signal sign

They have learned to “pass,” these racists, these bigots, these hate-merchants cashing in on the lowest ignorance of their audiences, they have learned to “pass” so as to not suffer the fate of Jimmy the Greek, or Mel Gibson, or Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz and his “loose shoes, tight pussy and a warm place to go to the bathroom.”*

[* Earl Butz [was]… Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture. Though he was a friend of agribusiness who argued that “food was a weapon” and farmers should “get big or get out,” he helped Nixon win the farm vote. After Nixon was forced to resign, Earl worked under Gerald Ford, though it wouldn’t be long before he, too, was asked to resign. On a plane home from the 1976 Republican National Convention, Butz was sitting in first class with Pat Boone, Sonny Bono, and, unfortunately for him, John Dean. Boone, always the earnest teenager, asked him why the party of Lincoln couldn’t win Negro voters. An honest answer would have acknowledged that the Republicans had written off blacks after LBJ pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and were now pursuing a Southern strategy based on racist code words such as “law and order,” “forced busing,” and “states’ rights.” Instead, Butz joked, “All the coloreds want is tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit.” Dean, whose testimony had done Nixon in three years earlier, was on assignment for Rolling Stone. He reported the joke, and a few weeks later, Earl Butz was out of the White House and on his way back to Purdue.

– Ned Stuckie-French, Guernica Magazine, July 2009]

Sounds eerily contemporary doesn’t it?

Manufactured news. And now, as Rush — deftly, he thinks — links the Faux Nooz™ video to the HUSBAND of the Breitbart-smeared woman Shirley Sherrod, he’s become as transparent as the bullet-proof glass at a check-cashing store.  SNCC = Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown (guilt by association as in the Lincoln example above) = (unstated) the BLACK PANTHERS then = the alleged “Black Panthers” now.

What a satanic stew of offal it all is! Not just stinky offal, either, but truly awful offal.

Racist signal

Breitbart releases the hounds of hell, and the blogosphere picks it up. Faux Nooz™ is getting ready to run with it on Glenn Beck that night. A mole in Faux Nooz™ tips off the Administration, and the Secretary of Agriculture’s office is on the cel phone to get Shirley Shirrod to pull her car over and resign via Blackberry (portable messaging device, somewhere between a pager and an i-phone).

Because the braying of the hellhounds becomes so loud that governance becomes impossible. This was what they did to EIGHT years of the Clinton Administration. Just gum up the works, and engage in literal political sabotage.

Because “sabotage” comes from the French “sabots” which are wooden shoes. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, displaced workers would throw their wooden shoes into the machinery, and, the hope was, the Industrial Revolution would be stopped.

And the Conservatives/Teabaggers/Republicans/GOP (another satanic hallmark — the devil is known by many, many names) throw their legislative sabots into the machinery.

WHEN America is engaged in two wars, and a near-complete meltdown of the financial system, and of the American automobile industry. When flooding and superstorms are widespread, and homelessness and foreclosures run rampant.

But racist?

The burdon of proof lies on the bigot.

If you are behaving EXACTLY as a Grand Kleagle of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan would behave in your same congressional seat, you’re a racist.

Racist sign

If you’re devoting all your time to destroying the presidency (the American People’s presidency, as was the Clinton Presidency) just because he’s not a member of your party, and defending war criminals and mega-embezzlers just because he’s a member of your party — you’re a bigot.

If you believe that illegal aliens are the cause of slavery and not the factory owners who hire them at slave wages, you’re possibly a bigot, probably a racist but most certainly an idiot.

But there comes a point when we have to fight for our votes. We have to fight to demand that our lawfully elected government has a legitimate right to govern, and rules lawfully.

Yet, all of us who are victimized, who are slandered, slurred, protested, stymied and, most of all, hated with a force and focus that’s already sent mentally unstable assassins out to kill fellow Americans at churches, museums and, perhaps, at an American military installation on U.S. soil — we cower behind “reasonableness” and “not wanting to make waves” and quail at the ferocity of the response from the nation of bigots.

As long as we give in to bullies, we will be bullied.

What it is, finally, is SELFISH. The Woodstock Generation came in with such hope, and now they sail into their golden years as Teabaggers — at least the portion of that generation not now living on cat food and coupons.

Racist winking at history

The kleptocracy that has bled this nation dry from 1980 (When Reagan ran up the largest deficits in American history) to 1988 (when Bush the Smarter ran up even larger deficits) to 2000 (when Bush the Dumber made Reagan and his Daddy look like penny-ante poker players, putting two wars and the largest increase in the size of government on the credit card) as Wal-Mart colonized the nation with an interstate system whose maintenance and upkeep were deferred for tax cuts, and our water, sewage, bridges, power-grids and vital infrastructure deteriorated — for tax cuts.

“It’s YOUR money!” Bush Baby the Candidate screamed.

“It’s OUR money!” the Tea Party screeches.

Oh, and “WE HATE YOU!!!!!”

Winking, probably no racism

And they are accorded the lion’s share of air time in the national “debate” on policy that seems to be composed of equal portions demolition derby, food fight and “Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome.”

I want you to listen to Limbaugh and realize that “liberal” talk radio has been blocked by the ownership of media, which was — to Clinton’s eternal shame — passed in the 1996 Telecommunications Act; the ownership of media that has reduced the major media companies to SIX, and the New York publishing houses to TWENTY-FOUR.

Hilariously, he manages to blame Shirley Sherrod’s husband for the entire history of the post-Reconstruction South, all the while mocking civility and “hearing both sides of the issue.” Not that he goes ahead and draws the conclusions he pretends to caution against at the opening of his monologue. Observe:

RUSH: Here is Shirley Sherrod’s husband in an unknown place in January. Now, I must offer a disclaimer here for partisan political operatives monitoring the program. We do not know the all-important context. We do not know if Charles Sherrod disavowed racism before or after these remarks. We don’t have the whole speech. We only have one minute and one second of the speech. So we don’t know if this is out of context. After you hear this, I want you to consider the possibility that at some other point in the speech he disavowed racism or sometime after these remarks in the speech he might have disavowed racism. We don’t know. We don’t have the whole speech. But here’s what we do have.

SHERROD: We must stop the white man and his Uncle Tom from stealing our elections. We must not be afraid to vote black. We must not be afraid to turn a black out who votes against our interests. In a few days or weeks the FCC will announce that we won a full power community-owned radio station in Albany, Georgia, a result of years of work. Tears that we shed so many times when the TV and the newspaper comes out the day of an election or day before an election and tell white folk all over wherever we’re running somebody for an office that blacks are gonna take the office over and thousands are coming to the polls. But we had no means of communicating with our people. It’s a blessing that finally we will have a radio station to cover thousands of people.

RUSH: Now, again, we’re trying to ascertain here the context of these remarks because the media is holding Charles Sherrod up as a paragon of virtue. And John Lewis said that there’s not a hair of racism on his head or anywhere else on his body. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard anybody say that. There is not a shred of racism any hair on his head, or the rest of the body.

What’s Lewis thinking when he says that?

You heard it, Charles Sherrod: “We must stop the white man and his Uncle Tom from stealing our elections. And the only way we can do this is with black radio stations.”

Meanwhile, this is earlier this year in January, blacks are being elected left and right in this country.

He’s very happy he got a black radio station.

Again, we don’t know the context. He could have disavowed racism at some point in the speech prior to these comments. He could have disavowed racism at some point in the speech after these comments.

All we have is what we played. We must stop the white man and his Uncle Tom from stealing our elections. It might well be that the reason the partisan political operatives did not on their Sunday shows take this Shirley Sherrod story any further is that they didn’t want any of this kind of stuff to eventually hit.

END TRANSCRIPT

Obama in Whiteface: the hate trifecta

Which is, of course, what Rush specializes in: spewing vile, satanic hatred and then pulling back, winking and saying: Now, I didn’t really mean that, or your taking me out of context, or, as in the case of “Barack the Magic Negro” — where Rush COMPOSES the song on the radio, and tells his minion what lyrics to include, (and was ignored, seemingly by all outlets save his vorpal sword, “Rush Limbaugh Wrote Magic Negro Parody” 29 December 2008) because, quoth Rush, “I’m just quoting what this writer in the Los Angeles Times said.”

Doubly racist with double intolerance (liberals and Muslims) thrown in

Gee, you’d think that repeating it dozens of times and chortling to himself at his clever stunt might give away a slightly different inflection on the phrase than mere quotation from an editorial (the subject of which was the long-standing  ”magic negro” in Hollywood iconography, like Will Smith in “The Legend of Bagger Vance” or Sidney Poitier in “Lilies of the Field”: as a figure that assuages White guilt, as many were projecting on Obama. Read it here.).

• Here is the audio where Rush “composes” the “hilarious” parody. (.mp3)
• Here’s from my April 13, 2007 blog post. (bonus .mp3)

And the intentionally, racially offensive song was a hit with Rush’s listeners. Including … well…

Listen to this demonic tissue of mellifluous mendacity:

Chip Saltsman [National RNC Chair candidate who sent out CDs of the "Magic Negro" parody to RNC memberws] … JUSTIFIED the clip using Limbaugh’s rationalization, nearly verbatim:

As the Washington Post reports: “Liberal Democrats and their allies in the media didn’t utter a word about David Ehrenstein’s irresponsible column in the Los Angeles Times last March. But now, of course, they’re shocked and appalled by its parody on ‘The Rush Limbaugh Show,’ ” Saltsman said in a statement …

Media Matters reports Limbaugh laying the same phony rhetorical “trap” (March 19, 2007):

“I’m going to keep referring to him as that because I want to make a bet that by the end of this week I will own that term,” adding, “If I refer to Obama the rest of the day as the ‘Magic Negro,’ there will be a number of people in the drive-by media and on left-wing blogs who will credit me for coming up with it and ignore the L.A. Times did it, simply because they can’t be critical of theL.A. Times, but they can, obviously, be critical of talk radio.”

If blame must needs devolve on the blameworthy, then let’s put it where it belongs: On the overample paunch of Mr. Limbaugh.

Nobody in the land is willing to call this what it is: evil and wrong, pure and simple.

You don’t serve the cause of the angels by adopting the tactics of their opposition.

“By their fruits ye shall know them.” [Matthew 7:16, KJV]

would seem so cliché as to automatically disqualify its inclusion in any intellectually serious examination of the topic, but the simple truth contained has been jettisoned along with the platitude (or, beatitude, I forget which).

We listen to what they say and they’ll say ANYthing. But we don’t call them on what they DO.

The “pre-emptive strike” racist sign

Andrew Breitbart requires the same sort of public media humiliation and embarrassment that was meted out to John Edwards, or, at a minimum, at LEAST as much as they’re piling on Senator John Kerry for mooring his yacht in Rhode Island — they, it should be noted, who wholeheartedly support the kind of tax shell game that got our local Oregon RV dealers busted several times for registering their Washington State and California RVs to an Oregon P.O. box, to avoid having to pay sales taxes on their purchase.

But Breitbart skates.

Racist tool @ center, racist sign at lower R.

Do I believe that Rush Limbaugh says “Our Nigger President” in private with his buddies?

Duh.

If it isn’t already manifestly clear THROUGH HIS ACTIONS, it’ll never be clear.

But the liars’ lyres of the Right churn out a thick gruel of muzak to the masses and somehow Barack Obama is responsible for Andrew Breitbart’s race-baiting smear.  And Rush Limbaugh can CONTINUE that smear and not even Media Matters notice, because we’ve been stifled with their bullshit for so long that we’ve lost our sense of smell altogether.

1920s GOP anti-Al Smith (a Catholic) campaign button

And something stinks terribly in America, friends. We remain an election away from martial law and the suspension of ALL civil rights. We have witnessed the largest wholesale transfer of class wealth since Joseph bought up all of Egypt for Pharoah. (See “Pentateuchal Investigative Reporting” 18 October 2007.) And the greatest loss of civil rights since the Civil War.

They stir up outrage and anger. They destroy lives as casually as an Andrew Breitbart puts a decent civil servant up for public ridicule and job-loss just to create a counter-anger because the Teabaggers have been nailed for tolerating the racists in their ranks. (Too bad we can’t do the same for the bigots in their ranks, but that would thin the herd to the point of extinction, methinks.)

And our righteous anger is redirected wrongly, and the wrongful anger of the bigots who watch Faux Nooz™ and are too goddamned lazy to check out the phony race-baiting about the “black panthers” and pass viral hate emails to their “loved ones” accusing our PRESIDENT of every dark and horrific  thing that the satanic imagination can conjure that might possibly stick.

Blasphemy covering racist code, or perhaps, pure religious bigotry

That anger is channelled back at us, but never towards those who make their millions by roiling the hatred, ignorance and animousity of GOP-o-Americans and like-minded bigots. Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, Hannity, Savage, Malkin, Ingraham, Lars Larson, Ann Coulter, David Horowitz, John Stossel, felons Oliver North and G. Gordon Liddy (the felon who styles himself as the “G-Man”), all the Faux Nooz™ bionic blonde Barbies, and so on and so forth and scoobie doobie do wah.

I live in a nation who think that somehow Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow are EQUIVALENT to the list I just ticked off. Prozac Nation.

But, evidently there ARE two Americas. The problem is …

One America wants to slit the other America’s throat –by whatever means necessary.

Now, TELL me that these monstrous lies are “Christian” won’t you?

Sort of like that Über-Christian Dominionist Foster S. Friess.

Who’s funding Tucker Carlson’s “The Daily Caller” attack by whatever means necessary on the “liberal” media through a series of exaggerations, falsehoods and fallacies. (More about him very soon.)

They’re not racists! (Fine. We can cede it to them.)

We know that they aren’t because they call Rev. Jeremiah Wright a racist, and Barack Obama a racist, and Shirley Sherrod a racist, and Charles Sherrod a racist, and Elena Kagan a Marxist and Van Jones a Marxist AND a Communist.

Winner of the “Superfecta” coded bigotry sweepstakes

We know they’re not racists because, even though their actions are indistinguishable FROM that of racists (WWRD?) they tell us that they aren’t racists and they never lie to us.

(When their mouths aren’t moving, that is, and sometimes even then, in the case of Rightie ventriloquists … like the ones that used to speak through “Bush” and “Reagan.”)

They ARE bigots (and the difference between bigots and racists is only that racists are a specific TYPE of bigot). That much is indisputable. If you need proof, ask them what this spells: L-I-B-E-R-A-L.*

(Caution, many may be challenged by this task. As the man said, not all Republicans are bigots, but pretty much all bigots are Republicans.)

Limbaugh is very much personally responsible for that one. And, he is indisputably a racist, as his actions have clearly and consistently demonstrated. But he’s sure got a slick  patois (both definitions).

On which side of the angels was that sort of behavior, again?

I seem to have lost my sense of smell.

But then, that’s how the Devil works.

Doesn’t He?

Or She.

Courage.