Liberal actress and political activist Janeane Garofalo, in all seriousness, said activists who attended tea parties are racists with dysfunctional brains in a recent prime-time television appearance.
“Let’s be very honest about what this is about. This is not about bashing Democrats. It’s not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea party was about. They don’t know their history at all. It’s about hating a black man in the White House,” she said on MSNBC’s “The Countdown” with Keith Olbermann Thursday evening. “This is racism straight up and is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks. There is no way around that.”
Olbermann did not once try to challenge her on those assertions.
The actress went on to describe the brain size of typical “right-winger, Republican or conservative or your average white power activist.”
“Their synapses are misfiring. … It is a neurological problem we are dealing with,” she said. This isn’t the first time she’s offered this analysis, either. Ms. Garofalo said similar things about Alaskan GOP Governor Sarah Palin’s brain last February in an interview with an environmental blog.
The actress went on to bash the GOP on MSNBC Thursday because it had “crystallized into the white power movement” as well as Fox News, which she said has captured the “Klan demo[graphic].”
“Who else is Fox talking to? Urban older white guys and their girlfriends who suffer from Stockholm Syndrome,” she said.
I did attend a Tea Party and its attendees were, to my estimation, about 99% white. That doesn’t bother me, and I don’t feel guilty about it.
Liberals push this angle because some conservatives do feel guilty. That’s why the Republicans elected incompetent pro-abortion pro-gun-control idiot Michael Steele to the chairmanship and also why little old white ladies I met at the 2006 Texas Republican convention were head over heels over “Condi Rice” despite her support for abortion and affirmative action. Their rationale: “she’s the only one who can beat Hillary” (oh, for the days when Hillary was our biggest fear). And maybe those mean old liberals will stop calling us names.
We do this to ourselves. We’re like trust fund babies who spend all of their time proving how unimportant money is to them instead of growing the family fortune. The freedom-loving people of this country tend to be members of the historical American population, which is undeniably European, and more specifically Anglo-Germanic-Celtic, in origin.
As this demographic shrinks due to immigration, so will the freedoms we enjoy. No other group has shown as great a willingness in history to die for freedom. Every other civilization is a sad history of oppression and exploitation by dominant elites. There is nothing special about our geography or environment or even our laws that will change this. If we want to be free, the price of freedom is preserving the people who love it and ensuring their continued political dominance in this country. We already have 45% of white liberal idiots like Garofalo against us, so there’s not a huge margin to play with.
The clock is running and realistically there is no hope in a universal suffrage regime. Even if all immigration were stopped today, differential birthrates and the aging of the immigrant child population into voters will mean that, by 2016 at the very latest, the old Reagan coalition landslides will be unable to elect a President. That’s a candidate getting 60% of the white vote, virtually none of the black vote, and the usual “shadow” functionality of the Hispanic vote (which tends to flex up or down with the white vote, but always throws its weight behind the Democrats).
Consider that Reagan was the most conservative President elected of the last fifty years and he wasn’t able to do very much beyond cutting taxes, whereas fixing the fundamental problems of this country will require more extreme action.
We should certainly seek to expand our coalition and welcome converts, but to count on others to love freedom as much as we do is folly. It’s time to stop feeling guilty or defensive and accept who and what we are. Throwing hail mary’s hoping recent immigrants from Mexico will suddenly leave their traditional ways and embrace Jeffersonian Republicanism is not a strategy.
The body politic of this country is quickly slipping away; we haven’t any time for another generation of universalist delusions.
But the system is generating its own crises that will destabilize many of the assumptions I have made; politics, like the stock market, is a dynamically unstable system not subject to the normal laws of statistics. If such a force put 85% of the white vote behind a certain candidate (block voting behavior already witnessed among whites in Mississippi and Alabama), all bets are off. And it will be a long time before all hope is truly lost. It didn’t take many British to colonize half the world, and it wouldn’t take many Americans either once committed to the task.
Our people are slow to anger and high-minded, not bitterly racist coveters like the Obamas and Sharptons of the other side. But if pushed into a corner, once all options are gone, we will fight:
The Beginnings
Rudyard Kipling
It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late
With long arrears to make good,
When the English began to hate.They were not easily moved,
They were icy-willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the English began to hate.Their voices were even and low,
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show,
When the English began to hate.It was not preached to the crowd,
It was not taught by the State.
No man spoke it aloud,
When the English began to hate.It was not suddenly bred,
It will not swiftly abate,
Through the chill years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the English began to hate.
You know, as much as I find Mz Garofalo distasteful, I have to admit she’s right… to a point. At least by appearances.
Obama’s social agenda is patently bad, granted. Dubya’s was bad, too, just not as patently–largely because he couched it in conservative rhetoric that resonated with the average “flyover” voter. Ditto, his political agenda.
But the fact remains that Dubya was the absolute worst President in recent memory–if nothing else, from a fiscal and civil libertarian point of view (tho’ The One is doing his dead-level best to catch up). He grew geometrically the federal budget and public debt, and exponentially the size and scope of government power. Where was the public outrage then?
[crickets chirping]
So, it’s easy to see–crazed demoguery aside–how someone such as Mz Garofalo could “mistake” these tea parties for racist demonstrations against a black liberal President who is only, after all, continuing the policies of his immediate predecessor. Though, like you say, she might want to find a better outlet than denigrating that “bunch of teabagging rednecks.” We tend to be armed, and have a low tolerance for stupid.
Of course, the hope is that the American voter is just the college co-ed who wakes up from a Rufie-induced haze, realizes something is terribly wrong, and accuses the first person she sees. In that context, everyone at the DC frat house is to some extent culpable, no? If they realize that, if they own that, then we have reached a breaking point beyond which things will start to improve. If not, then it gets derailed into another 1994-style GOP takeover of Congress, with much the same result: status quo.
I supported the “movement” until it started being co-opted by such as Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity, and other GOP mouthpeices. They don’t give the movement validity; the movement gives them greatly undeserved validity. And that at the expense of the average American.
As with a Perry-led secession, count me out. If that’s eschewing the good in pursuit of the perfect, so be it. I don’t mind baby steps; but, as with Ananias and Sapphira, tainted at the beginning means tainted forever.
err… “crazed demogoguery aside”
The reason for the change is social mood. Most people are irrational and respond emotionally to everything, including politics, obeying their herding impulse in their mammalian midbrain instead of their neocortex-based reasoning.
Look at the stock market and wait three to six months or so, as the stock market’s ups and downs are the best proxy we have for what the herd is feeling at the moment. That will tell you what the political landscape will look like. Good markets are good for incumbents, bad markets good for challengers.
So I expect Obama to now have an extended honeymoon until early next year or so, when the market will start dropping again, possibly violently, to Dow 4000 or worse. I think it’s possible he will leave office as one of the most hated Presidents in history, even more than GWB, and he may be impeached. If the first black President is run out of office under a cloud of incompetence and scandal, what will that do to race relations in this country? It will be Rodney King on a national scale, and that’s the sort of thing that could make our good Englishmen ready to fight.
If we want to lead, we have to separate ourselves, fight the herding impulse and get ahead of the crowd. You want to be where they’re going to be so you’re setup to lead when they get there. That’s why I advocate politics a little more radical than mainstream, because I expect the public will follow in a few years.
I don’t disagree with any of your comments. The “Perfect Storm” of oppressive taxation, out-of-control public debt, total unaccountability (or at least disconnectedness) in the political classes, rapidly expanding police state, and a really, truly devastating economic forecast may just tip the scales in our favor. To which I say, “bring it on!”
My chief concern is that we’ll become lousy with “pretenders to the cause,” and end up essentially changing labels around, but keeping the same fatally flawed power structure (changing names ot protect the guilty, as it were). A junior concern is the opposition coming up with some kind of strong-arm tactic — or worse, a strong dose of socialist “obecalp” — that distracts from the issues at hand.
Then again, like the man said, if it’s of man it can’t succeed; if it’s of God it can’t fail.
It must definitely involve God. My faith is that he will always preserve a remnant. I believe that remnant is mostly in the heartland of the United States.
I wonder why geography plays such a factor. In Israel, the remnant was mostly in the South as well…(Judah, vs. mainstream Israel). I wonder what the correlation is…?