But I Thought They Had Said It Wasn't About Racism

Somebody tell Carville and Greenberg to take that study and shove it up their ass!

WASHINGTON - The unprecedented number of death threats against President Obama, a rise in racist hate groups, and a new wave of antigovernment fervor threaten to overwhelm the US Secret Service, according to government officials and reports, raising new questions about the 144-year-old agency’s overall mission.

snip

The domestic threat is also growing, fueled in part by Obama’s election as the nation’s first black president, according to specialists who study homegrown radical movements.

Obama, who was given Secret Service protection 18 months before the election - the earliest ever for a presidential candidate - has been the target of more threats since his inauguration than his predecessors.

Two days before Obama’s appearance at San Francisco fund-raisers on Thursday, a 59-year-old Northern California man was indicted on charges of sending a racist, profanity-filled e-mail threatening to kill Obama and his family. The rambling e-mail included specific references to Michelle Obama and the phrase, “do it to his children and family first in front of him,’’ according to the indictment.

The Southern Poverty Law Center says that antigovernment militias and white supremacist groups have strengthened in recent years, responding to an increasingly diverse population and what they see as an expanding government.

A center study released in August found a nearly 35 percent growth in racially based domestic hate groups since 2000 - from 602 to 926. The center concluded that opposition to Obama’s election has only increased the phenomenon.

“A key difference this time is that the federal government - the entity that almost the entire radical right views as its primary enemy - is headed by a black man,’’ the report said. “One result has been a remarkable rash of domestic terror incidents since the presidential campaign, most of them related to anger over the election of Barack Obama.’’

Threatening language has also found its way into talk radio broadcasts and social networking websites, raising fears that individuals not normally considered threats to the president could be incited to violence.

For example, the Secret Service in recent months has investigated a poll posted on Facebook about whether Obama should be killed. It has interviewed a Florida radio talk show host after a caller mentioned ammunition, target practice, and the president, and federal officials have raised concerns about several instances in which protesters carrying weapons showed up at Obama events, including a man at an August town hall in New Hampshire.

“The racist extremist fringe is exploiting themes that strike a chord in the mainstream more than we have seen in the recent past,’’ said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino, citing several elected leaders who have questioned whether Obama is a US citizen eligible to be president.

I can't wait to hear these fucknuts try to explain this away as just "fear of big government".

Freely Giving Cover For Racists

So James Carville and Stan Greenberg have come out with a study on the opposition that purports to prove that they are against President Obama because of ideological differences and not because of racism. An exact quote:

"Instead of focusing on these intense ideological divisions, the press and elites continue to look for a racial element that drives these voters' beliefs - but they need to get over it. Conducted on the heels of Joe Wilson's incendiary comments at the president's joint session address, we gave these groups of older, white Republican base voters in Georgia full opportunity to bring race into their discussion - but it did not ever become a central element, and indeed, was almost beside the point."

Yeah, because you know how racists just LOVE to admit their racism.

What an epic fucking fail from those two. I have no idea how they think this helps President Obama or Democrats for everybody to put their head in the sand about racism in this country but it does prove yet again that Attorney General Eric Holder was absolutely right earlier this year when he said when it comes to matter of race we are a nation of cowards. Good white liberals tend to run for the hills whenever the topic of racism comes up, quick to try to dismiss it and get it out of the public conversation. We saw it just a little while ago. As soon as Jimmy Carter said what should be obvious to anybody,that much of the most ferverent opposition to President Obama stemmed from racism those same good white liberals were falling all over themselves to hurry up and rush to a mic and disagree.

Got damn its frustrating.

This has nothing to do with "most" Republicans or "most" Conservatives. But if you don't think there is a blatant element of racism in the tea bagging movement and in many of these townhall shouters and random protestors bring guns to President Obama's speeches then you are nucking futs. Its really that simple.

But I so look forward to the next big story where a Republican/Conservative says something racist about President Obama and then in defending themselves they say "even the liberal study by Carville and Greenberg...."

You already know its gonna happen. Its just a matter of when.

Bump What You Heard, Give Me James Carville ANY DAY!!!

I know a lot of the people who support President Obama aren't too keen on James Carville but I am so over that primary bullshit from last year. And I can tell you one thing, if you want somebody to push a Democratic agenda aggressively and make wingnuts look foolish, there ain't nobody in the game better than Carville. With something as simple as treating this teabagger like the clown he is, Carville gives rational Republicans a choice. Either they can roll with clown ass idiots like Mark Williams, or they can pump their breaks and try to figure out what is really going on here.

Oh and props to Anderson Cooper for calling Williams out for his vitriolic racist comments about President Obama!



(h/t John Cole)

Robert Novak

Rather than speak ill of the dead I will just offer this clip up in rememberance.

It Was Just A Matter Of Time

As much as it has irritated the hell out of me to see Liz Cheney all over my Tee Vee over the past few months spewing invective at President Obama and lying through her teeth to try to keep her dad from going to jail, one of the more amusing side notes has been how many so called "pundits" have rushed to say that she would be some kind of viable political candidate in the future. Nothing about her appearances had suggested that this was the case, in point of fact she has been fact checked so mercilessly as to lead most rational Democrats to HOPE she tries to run for office so she can be publicly humiliated and we can get some measure of retribution for all of the hijinks she is pulling now. But I guess because she is a Republican and she can string a sentence or 50 together without taking a breath this meme persisted and indeed started to gain momentum with the Villagers.

Now for someone like Liz Cheney they are caught in a conundrum. On the one hand she has an almost unquenchable thirst for publicisty now and she wants to be out there as much as they will have her so she can continue her low risk high reward campaign against President Obama. But on the other hand she is also batshit crazy and she as well as her handlers have to know that sooner or later the more she talks the higher the likely hood that some of that crazy is going to slip out. This makes for an interesting balancing act.

Having already noticed this dichotomy it wasn't all that surprising to me last night when reports started trickling out about an appearance that Liz Cheney made on the Larry King Show where she defended the "birthers". Here is how Salon.com's Joan Walsh put it:

After King showed video of the crazy birther who disrupted a meeting with poor GOP Rep. Mike Castle, demanding he acknowledge Obama was born in Kenya (that's one birther claim); and after Carville denounced them as a "poor, pathetic" fringe group, King gave Cheney a chance to distance herself from them. But Cheney demurred, telling King the Birther movement exists because "People are uncomfortable with a president who is reluctant to defend the nation overseas."

The rarely shocked Carville seemed briefly speechless, and even King, not known to be the most combative interviewer, tried a second time to get an honest reaction from Cheney -- which I read as expecting her to separate herself from the crazies. But Cheney repeated her talking point about Obama inadequately defending the nation overseas. Unbelievable.

At the time of that post Walsh did not have a video of the interaction and so I had to rely just on her words. But even just with her characterization to go on I figured this was going to be bad. For one she had finally run up on someone who was way out of her league. What had been so irritating to me about Liz Cheney wasn't just that she was all over cable news, but that she was almost always paired with someone sympathetic to her or at the least someone who was not very confrontational. Because of this she was allowed to say whatever the hell she wanted to without much if any pushback or fact checking on the spot. But you had to know that James Carville wasn't going to go for that.

She also has a bad habit of filibustering with long ass diatribes so that the other party doesn't have time to respond and when they do respond she loves to try to talk over them. Again that wasn't likely to happen with Carville either. I have to believe that she didn't know she would be paired up with him or she wouldn't have shown up. Having finally seen the video, if she ever really had any electoral ambitions its likely that she will forever wish she never did show up.

At first I was a little ticked that I couldn't find the video anywhere but CNN and of course their video is pretty long. But the truth is I think its good to watch her whole appearance unfold as time goes on. Carville is masterful as usual not allowing her to talk over him and by the end of her time on the show Larry King himself is constantly admonishing her about interrupting. Not only that Carville kept pointing out her filibustering that by the end of her appearance Larry King was making note of it too. All in all it was a case study in how any opponent of hers can make her look like an ass and incompetent all at the same time. Oh she brings the same sloganeering as usualy but it falls completely flat when Carville challenges her with fact.

In the end her ridiculous "birther" comments are just the cherry on top, especially when Carville calls her and her party out for encouraginig those whackjobs.



If she ever decides to put her name on the dotted line to run for elected office you can expect more of that kind of EPIC FAIL.

In Cahoots

Remember my earlier post about Bill Sammon's story trying to draw a false equivalence between Rush Limbaugh and James Carville? Well MediaMatters has the transcript of Limbaugh's show and I want to excerpt just a bit of it.

LIMBAUGH: OK, it's finally been posted. I've been waiting for this. When I got in here to our broadcast complex this morning, there was an email here from Bill Sammon at Fox News. You know, he's the, he's the D.C. bureau chief there, and he said, Rush, I'm working on a piece here, I hope to have it ready by the time your show starts, and here it is. And I read this, and I just smiled. Mouth fell open a little bit, and I just smiled. And then Bill Sammon asked me for any input, would you like to reply to what I learned, so I sent him a note back. And the story has been posted at FoxNews.com, it's also linked, by the way, at the Drudge Report.

So Bill Sammon tried to time out his article so that it would be ready for Rush Limbaugh to read it on air. Man if there is anybody out there who still thinks that FoxNews is "fair and balanced" I don't see how you can do so after Limbaugh himself revealed that Sammon was basically colluding with him to smear James Carville. I swear man I would really love to meet the millions of people who watch FoxNews every night. Its just hard for me to believe that they really are convinced that they are getting the real story. They aren't even trying anymore.

FoxNews, Bill Sammon And CNN Are So Full Of Fail

Yesterday the WingNut blogosphere was energized by a post on FoxNews.com from Bill Sammon alledging that on 9-11 Democratic strategist James Carville, the man they claim came up with the Limbaugh strategy, said he wanted President Bush to fail. CNN's Wolf Blitzer thought it was such a scoop that he repeated Sammon's claims on his show. There wasn't a link to be found in Sammon's column and much of what he wrote was unsourced and unquoted. So it wasn't surprising to find out this morning on Greg Sargent's blog that he misrepresented what Carville had said.

Carville’s comments were made at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast on the morning of 9/11, before the attacks.

The Monitor’s Dave Cook, who runs the breakfasts, has audio of the event, and he transcribed the relevant comments and emailed them to me. Carville was asked if Bush was politically vulnerable. Carville replied:

People basically like this president as a person and they want him to succeed, but they have some pretty serious doubts that have not crept in but are sort of there. You have almost half the country saying he is in over his head. Over half the country saying he is for the powerful. And as much as I would like for it or wish for it, they are not going to pull away completely from him months into his administration.

I don’t care if people like him or not, just so they don’t vote for him and his party. That is all I care about. I hope he doesn’t succeed, but I am a partisan democrat. But the average person wants him to succeed. It is his country, his life or their lives. So he has that going for him. There is a lot that is going to happen between now and next November. It is not that people don’t like him. It is not that people don’t want him to succeed but it is also not that he doesn’t have some serious underlying problems.

It’s clear from that context that Carville was talking about his own desire for the President to fail politically, in terms of getting votes for himself and his party, not in policy terms. Carville went on to say that average Americans want him to succeed substantively, which he said was a political boon to Bush.

Now the surprising thing is how outlets like CNN chose to pick up Sammon's drivel and put it forth as credible news. I wonder how long it will take them to run a correction. But bigger than that even if Sammon was to be believed lets take a look at how he says Carville ended the discussion after learning about the planes hitting the Twin Towers.

Minutes later, as news of the terrorist attacks reached the hotel conference room where the Democrats were having breakfast with the reporters, Carville announced: "Disregard everything we just said! This changes everything!"

You see, Carville (of whom I am a big fan) knew immediately that this wasn't a time for partisan ship. In the aftermath of the attacks he didn't want a divided country, he wanted a country united behind the President. In contrast Rush Limbaugh at a time of financial crisis is still calling for his listeners to take a totally partisan stance and not support President Obama's efforts to revive our economy. Its fine for Limbaugh to disagree with President Obama, I have no problem with that. Its even fine for him to oppose different bills while they are being debated. But to hope that the stimulus bill fails when in point of fact that will mean great harm and hardship for many many Americans, is borderline traitorous. And that is the difference between what liberals and progressives did during Bush and what Limbaugh is exhorting conservatives to do under President Obama. Its truly sickening and reprehensible and next year the Republican Party is going to have to deal with the blowback.

Ragin Cajun

I know James Carville rubs some people who supported President Obama the wrong way but I love the guy. And I tell you one thing, if we had more Democratic surrogates like him on all of the talking head shows, President Obama would be winning the spin war right now over the stimulus bill.