Elephant, Now In Room

Pulling the pulling-the-race-card card; Brow-beating Beyoncé; Self-promoting Tories won’t save the Liberals; Why we need government-run news; AND: FUDGE!!!!!

Radical conservatives against "Western sexy performances" 1, Beyoncé’s Western sexy performances 0. | Christopher Polk / Getty via ABC

Asurvey done by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg supposedly says that race has nothing to do with the Republican base’s opposition to Barack Obama. Of course, that’s the kind of blindly tolerant idea a PR-conscious party led by an African American man would use to defend itself from charges of pulling the race card. From the Huffington Post:

"Race just wasn’t brought up," said a surprised Greenberg on a conference call with reporters Friday. He said that the focus groups were given as much time to talk about race as they could possibly need.

"If there was any kind of a racial element, we thought we’d pick it up. We didn’t," said James Carville, who also worked on the report.

And when asked who spoke for the Republican Party, the answer was overwhelmingly: Fox News.

The pollsters claim what’s riling the GOP base is a massive conspiracy theory.

What drives the GOP base, rather than race, was a genuine belief that Obama has a "secret agenda" to drive the country in a socialist direction, said the authors. These voters want more opposition, not more cooperation.

"They want more opposition," said Carville. "If you don’t wanna get primary-ed, there’s nothing in this [report] that tells [a GOP member of Congress] to go compromise on anything. Quite the contrary."

The argument is laughable. There is much to lampoon but here’s the gist: American racists have decades’ worth of practice tucking away their bigotry behind codewords and passion for hot-button issues. The out-and-out racists—Stormfront writers and such—are a tiny minority, but also a minority among the racially bigoted. The rest rally against immigration and welfare and sometimes violent crime because these are ways of getting out their animosity in a politically correct way.

I just play one on TV. | Tony’s Rants

American racists by and large are not going to come out with it the second you ask a question about politics. They don’t want to sound like bigots—in fact they’ll usually be quicker to declare, without prompt, that they’re not racists—because U.S. culture has a low tolerance for blatant, explicit racism and the use of racial epithets. Americans are just fine with bashing welfare queens and plague-bearing Mexicans illegals. Or complaining about "reverse racism." Or declaring that whites are more discriminated against than blacks.

Of course, Greenberg didn’t exactly prompt survey participants about their racial beliefs. That would defeat the purpose, which is to put out a supposedly objective poll that goes to prove that Democrats don’t play the race card. Because that’s exactly what Republicans are hammering Democrats and liberals for.

And that’s yet another coded message: African-Americans should stop whining.

Americans really can’t talk bout race, and it’s because racist discourse still has the right of way. We shouldn’t let radicals walk all over everyone else’s obligation to recognize the obvious: Tea Party paranoia about Obama’s "secret agenda" is exactly what you get when you mix a black president with a majority white country still home to a helluva lot of racists.

Culture Cops Win The Day

Beyoncé ditched Malasia—but not because of the Islamist conservatives in that country’s government who condemned the immorality of her showing skin at her concerts, so her flak says.

There’s no reason to believe that she didn’t give in to the culture cops. I would hope that the leading third of now defunct Destiny’s Child would try to make a statement and perform anyways, censors be damned. But you can’t blame her for not wanting to be a hero.

Oh no! The government wants credit for what it did!

The hapless Liberals are desperately scavenging for issues, and now they’re hitting the government for its brazen use of billboards promoting its recession "action plan." From The Star:

Papering Canada with billboards is the latest tactic in an unprecedented promotional campaign by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his team of Conservative MPs to put their stamp on the government’s taxpayer-funded economic bailout program.

...

"This is the most comprehensive, deliberate propaganda campaign at the federal level in Canadian history," said Liberal MP David McGuinty (Ottawa South).

"They’re using every asset that’s available to them" to burnish the Conservative image, McGuinty said. "Whether it’s government websites, whether it’s the Conservative logo, whether it’s ministers wearing jackets with Conservative logos handing out cheques, they can’t seem to help themselves."

While the opposition should criticize the government for such eye-rolling self-promotion, that flimsy rap—along with claims that the Tories are doling out more money to blue ridings—should not be the beginning and the end of the opposition critique of the government stimulus plan.

I can imagine this innocuous issue disappearing from the headlines in a week or two. Might take the rudderless Liberal Party with it.

Twitter is Destiny

This New Yorker send-up of Web 2.0 jargon of questionable substance is pretty funny. It’s of course not all bad. But the Web alone can’t make up for its devastating effect on traditional reporting. Len Downie and Michael Shudson write in the Washington Post:

This emerging journalistic ecosystem, in which the gathering and distribution of news is becoming much more widely dispersed, holds great potential. But it is still quite fragile. Accountability journalism in particular requires significant reporting resources with strong professional leadership and reliable financial support, which the marketplace can no longer be expected to sufficiently supply.

Downie and Shudson recommend, among other things, changing the tax code to help local news sources more easily claim charity status, reorienting the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to put a greater emphasis on local news, and encouraging universities and colleges to better engage in their local communities by getting more into the reporting game. "American society must now take some collective responsibility for supporting news reporting," they write.

These are all good ideas, but one is missing: heavy government involvement in local news reporting. Americans hate this idea—no way George III is quartering his redcoats at my local news station—but it’s not so alien in other functioning democracies, like Canada and Britain. In fact, the British model is much better, since it enables high-quality coverage with little taint from commercial or other moneyed interests while simultaneously shielding the public from the possibility of the BBC turning into Pravda. The idea being to keep the government’s meddling politics at arm’s length, but also keep the money flowing predictably. That means governments can’t threaten to pull the plug or push more money towards one issue or style over another.

Quite frankly, besides heavy non-profit involvement, which can be unpredictable, how else can we save local news, or good reporting in general? How else do we prevent real journalism from dissolving into a sea of inane celebrity Twitter posts?

What Stage Are You?, or Divinity Fudge Sounds Awesome

The Ages of Man, from the New York Times.

Unfortunately, this map of Toronto’s moods and dispositions from the Rotman school does not show where you can get divinity fudge in the city. But it does show that citizens of Rexdale are disagreeable, closed-minded, extroverted, and conscientious, i.e., West Indian. End.