For those not familiar with Goldberg, he's the political genius responsible for Liberal Facism, a book which attempts to explain how progressives are a specific subset of authoritarian bigots. You can probably guess for yourselves the level of argument employed there; because Nazis called themselves socialists actual socialists must be Nazis; that kind of razor-sharp analysis.
I wouldn't normally darken the pixels of this blog with his random wittering (though I dimly remember tearing him apart a few years back over at GeekPlanetOnline), but this was just too funny to pass up. Sure, most of it is standard deliberate misunderstandings, assertions without context, and outright lies (it is impossible to "defensibly" dub Secretary of State Susan Rice as incompetent over her role in the aftershocks of Benghazi unless you accuse the CIA of lying to protect her and pretend to not understand how linear time operates), but the really choice part is here:
But can you imagine how much worse it will get if Republicans actually do reach out to black community (as they should)... Any serious attempt by the GOP to win black votes won’t involve Republicans copycatting liberal policies. It will require going over the heads of black and white liberal slanderers to offer a sincere alternative to failed liberal policies on schools, poverty, crime, etc. The more effective that effort, the more the GOP will be called racist.Get it? The liberals have done such a good job of calling Republicans racist that even if the Republicans start trying to adapt their policies to black concerns, they'll get into trouble. They've been called racist so long they're not sure they'll be able to actually start listening to black people. If only they'd been allowed to ignore black issues for fifty years without being accused of racism, they'd be in a position to consider whether there's anything they might be bothered to do for the Afro-American community.
(Oh, and on the freak-out over Romney's "birth certificate "joke""; if you can't tell the difference between a joke's audience and a joke's target (in this case, racists and a guy who people were being racist about, respectively), then you're a goddamn idiot. Indeed, you might even be so stupid as to argue that a party racist until the 1960s is more of a problem than a party racist from the 1960s until right fucking now. Oh, wait...)
2 comments:
I'm not sure that excerpt is particularly outrageous. It's quite a common and effective weapon in politics to use the "We want X, this will be achieved by Y, you oppose Y, therefore you don't want X" attack. If everyone knows that the group in question did used to be opposed to X, it's even more effective.
It's not even a question of trust. Even if the Democrats were to believe that all Republicans now were fully committed to X, but they opposed Y and proposed Z instead, you'd still call the Republicans anti-X because this will win you elections.
I might not be fully understanding your point, BH, but my objection isn't to Goldberg suggesting accusations of racism will not be staunched by an attempt to reach out to black people, it's the fact that Goldberg is tacitly admitting here that the Republicans need to do it.
In other words, he's admitting the Republican Party doesn't do enough to court black votes, but he's arguing it's unfair to suggest this systemic problem in his party should be labelled racist. If he were to back that up with something, that might be useful, but right now his argument boils down to "We've behaved in a way consistent with being racist, but everyone who says we're racist is being mean, and they'll be even more mean when we stop behaving in a manner consistent with being racist."
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