Deep Stupid #9

This is S. E. Cupp's Facebook profile picture.*  She is one of the GREAT CONSERVATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN, who counts among her credits experience as a Fox commentator and columnist for Newsmax.com

Rather attractive in a cute-librarian sort of way, don't ya' think?  Let us determine what makes her so great, by probing one of her recent articles. 

The Democrats' Descent Into Irrelevance

© 2009 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Sunday, October 4, 2009 9:34 PM

By: S.E. Cupp

“The Democratic Party is the architect of modern-day racism.”

You know right away this is going to be good.

That’s a direct quote from Frances Rice, the (black and female) chairman of the National Black Republican Association and a former US Army Lieutenant Colonel. And despite a well-documented 150-year history of racism (Michael Scheuer calls Dems the party of the four S’s: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism), you don’t have to re-read your high school history book to see that Ms. Rice’s statement is true.

With Mike Scheuer as your source, you can forget about the textbooks.  Good point.  And that 150 years ago stuff - sure has a lot to do with modern-day racism doesn't it?  If you actually cracked a history book, you would learn that southerners turned Democratic in response to being abused by Republican Yankee carpetbaggers during post-Civil War reconstruction, and that race was totally irrelevant to that political decision.   And never mind that the once solidly Democratic south fragmented in the 60's over the Civil Rights acts of 1964 and 1965, which were staunchly opposed by Republicans.

Just re-read the rhetoric of the recent past – the past few weeks. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times says South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson is racist for calling President Obama a liar. The increasingly irrelevant Rev. Al Sharpton, of course, sanctimoniously agrees.

Now there are some truly representative Democratic voices: the Times' resident shrill snark-mistress cum red-haired harridan, coupled with the - how shall we put this . . . oh, yes - "increasingly irrelevant" Mr. Sharpton.  When you can't base your argument on anything that's actually convincing, it always pays to pick a cherry or two.

Oh, and to set the record straight, Addison Graves Wilson  isn't a racist because he called Mr. Obama - who, incidentally was telling the truth - a liar; he called Mr. Obama a liar because he is a racist.  Got it?

Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson worries that people will suddenly be donning “white hoods and white uniforms again and riding through the countryside" if we don’t root out this conservative racism spreading across the nation.

Uh-oh.  We've almost strayed into relevance here.  Have you ever heard of Congressman Johnson?  Neither have I.  But, a quick Google search reveals that he is a black American representing Georgia's 4th district.  Is there some chance he might actually know what he's talking about?

Former President Jimmy Carter goes on hiatus from his usual discourse of Palestinian apologia and rank anti-Semitism to call “an overwhelming portion” of President Obama’s critics racist.

Wow: "rank anti-Semitism."  Oh,  of course; anti-Semitism is a form of racism, isn't it.  Democrat = racist.  I'm starting to get it.  Never mind that the Palestinians are Semitic, too, so their alleged apologist could hardly be anti-Semitic - that inconveniently fails to line up with the Cupp agenda.  Note that in addition to making unverifiable naked assertions about Mr. Carter's record on international human rights, Ms. Cupp fails to refute Mr. Carter's statement.  She merely misquotes him, and then ridicules the misquote. Lets take a look at what Mr. Carter actually said.

"Overwhelming majority," OK, so far.  Looks like she got those words right.

"President Obama's critics,"  Ooops.  Not so much.  Listen carefully and you will hear the former President say, "intensely demonstrated animosity."  To equate those who demonstrate intense animosity with the majority of the president's critics is really nothing better than a bare-face lie.  Hell, he gets plenty of criticism from the left, including me.  Mr. Carter wasn't talking about us, or any other rational, right-thinking person.  He was talking about tea-baggers, birthers, the people who mistake Obama for an Arab or a Muslim, or who carry signs picturing him as Hitler.  But this subtle nuance also does not fit the Cupp agenda.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi pretends to publicly weep at the racism she sees across the country, in the faces of elderly grandmothers who are worried about Medicare cuts at health care town halls in Wichita.

Did weepy old Pelosi make that connection?  Could be, I suppose.  And is Ms Cupp clairvoiant, so she knows when Pelosi is pretending?  Let's just give her that.  Why not?  But those grandmothers have been mislead by lying Republicans, so I'm not sure what the relevance is.

And even formerly-funny man David Letterman tries to lure Obama into another disastrous admission that the country (that just elected a black president) is racist.

A propos of exactly what, S.E.?  And, something like 46% percent of the voters did opt for the other guy.  I'd say there's room for a tad or two of racism there.

Of course, the first one hit when Obama inexplicably announced his buddy Skip Gates had been a target of racial profiling by the Cambridge police who arrested him outside his home.

Once again, let's go to the source to see what Mr. Obama actually said.  Note that he did not bring this up, his comment was in response to a direct question on the Gates incident.  

Now, I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts what role race played in that, but I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry. Number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. And that's just a fact.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/22/obama-on-skip-gates-arres_n_243250.html

Not even close, C.E.  Mr. Obama wouldn't speculate on the role race might or might not have played, and - oh, by the way - racial profiling is a historic fact. Keep this up and I will begin to think you are a shameless liar.

That ended with a bizarre Benetton beer summit in the rose garden, with a white police officer, a black professor, and a biracial president. Oh, and Joe Biden was there, too.

Meeting to settle your differences with some high profile mediation and a couple of cold ones is bizarre in Cupp-world.  Or, perhaps, it's the multi-racial nature of the event that she can't wrap her head around. The off-hand, pointless, vaguely dismissing, and irrelevant nod to Biden, on the other hand, makes perfect sense.

The old-guard, tried-and-true Democratic tactic of turning the race argument on Republicans is so staid and transparent, it’s almost become a parody of itself.

Nixon's Southern strategy being a stand-out example, as is Reagan's 1980 Philadelphia Miss. speech, to pick just one item from the rich Reagan legacy.

Where illegitimate charges of racism were once potent enough to silence an opposing point of view, now they merely elicit laughs and head shakes from a generation who isn’t informed entirely by the angry identity politics of the past.

Good point!  Angry identity politics of the present comes from Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Hannity, Savage, Beck, Coulter, and, no doubt, several other right wingers I've missed.

And if the Democrats continue to cling to this preposterous fear mongering,

We interrupt this rant to bring you a reminder of smoking guns in the form of mushroom clouds, and color coded terror alerts. Now, back to your regularly scheduled dreck.

without a word of admonition from high-ranking Democratic officials who are all too happy to let the practice carry on underneath and around them,

Why, oh, why do Democratic leaders persist in doing nothing to eliminate actions that exist only in the fevered brains of partisan Republican ideologs?

eventually my generation will dismiss them entirely as out-of-touch, embittered dinosaurs who are using race just to win votes.

While the Republican party shrinks to a regional fringe of Southern whites.  The cognitive dissonance is reaching a crescendo.

And the more they reach for the race card, the more they devalue legitimate instances of racism.

This would be a point of some salience, were it only connected to reality.

But even worse, they reveal that their policies are meant to keep black America under their thumb, victims, vulnerable to persuasion, dependent on their handouts.

 Well put right-wing talking point, C.E.  And your evidence is . . . {crickets}

As Rice puts it, “The message that Democrats give to poor blacks is despicable. If you remain poor, uneducated and vote for Democrats, we will celebrate your victimhood.

I thought the celebrated victimhood belonged to embattled conservative Christians, with the radical left's war on Christmas and insistence on separation of church and state.  See what we can learn from intellects like C.E. Cupp and Frances Rice!

If you get a good education, get a good job and vote for Republicans, we will denigrate you as ‘acting white,’ a ‘sellout,’ an ‘Uncle Tom,’ and worse.”

I'm trying to remember the last time I heard the phrase "Uncle Tom."  It might have been as recently as the 80's.  I'm also trying to remember anyone denigrating a black American for getting a good education and a good job.  Coming up empty there, I'm afraid.  Of course, as an equal-opportunity snark, I will gladly denigrate anyone who votes Republican. What is really striking, though, is that in the context of Cupp's article, the outrageous dishonesty of Rice's statement doesn't even stand out.

Thomas Friedman acrobatically proved irony’s full range in a recent New York Times column in which he suggested the critical rhetoric against Obama from the “right fringe” will destroy the legitimacy of the presidency. (I doubt he was equally as concerned when the left fringe continuously compared President Bush to Hitler,

Friedman is a self-agrandizing blowhard who was wildly in favor of both globalization and the war in Iraq. He could simply have been too ego-focused to notice the Bush parodies.  Bush, on the other hand, was a nationalistic, warmongering, religious-right coddling, constitution-stomping, anti-union corporatist with delusions of competence. Other than that, the Hitler comparisons were rather overdone.

burned him in effigy, 

Really?  Damn, I missed that.

or mocked him as a chimpanzee.)

Only after he put food on his family.

But it’s the Jurassic-era race-baiting by the Democrats that is chipping away at the shiny veneer of the presidency, victimizing the president himself, and marginalizing liberals to the extreme corners of relevance.

If the preceding verbiage is supposed to represent whatever in the hell this sentence purports to be about, then sorry, C.E., you've failed.

Now that there’s a black man in the White House, rather than embrace the post-race America that Al Sharpton and his cohorts so excitedly promised Obama would deliver, Sharpton knows that would mean he’d be out of a job. And so the buffoonery continues, at the peril of black America , Democrats, and even Obama.

When did the "increasingly irrelvant" Sharpton become a spokesperson for the Democrats?  And how can an irrelevant person's bufoonery put anyone at peril?  Just askin' . . .

I asked Rice what GOP leadership could do to kill this lame line of attack once and for all. She wasn’t optimistic. “What are their options? Issue a public statement admonishing the Democrats for their incivility?

A google search reveals that "incivility" is "a general term for social behaviour lacking in civility or good manners, on a scale from rudeness or lack of respect for elders, to vandalism and hooliganism, through public drunkenness and threatening behaviour."  Frex: teabaggers, birthers, those who take guns to political events - you know the type.

Issue a public statement condemning Democrats for denigrating black Republicans? The likely reaction by black Democrats and liberal journalists would be to trash the GOP leaders as racist.”

Has any Republican issued a public statement admonishing teabaggers, birthers, Ann Coulter?  Glen Beck?  It's possible.  I really haven't been paying attention.   Hey, I've denigrated Republican Michael Steel.  But because he's an idiot, not because he's black

She’s right. The condemnation has to come from the left, from within the Democratic Party. And who better than our first black president to say to the Sharptons and Dowds and Carters and Pelosis, “Enough is enough. You’re making us all look bad.”

Well sure, if you use the line of reasoning that any member, or alleged member of a group, is the relevant spokesperson for that group, because that is who YOU have appointed.  And if you are guilty of steroetyped thinking.  And if you think you are the person that the President ought to try to appease.  But, look, he has more important things to do, like take on Fox News!


At last, though, I see now what it takes to be one of the Great Conservative American Women.

It's the ability to make:
1) shit up
2) no sense.

Here's the bottom line.  I'm not even particularly good at this, but with a little bit of quasi-clear thinking, the Google, and a dash of snark, I was able to reveal S.E.'s article as nothing more than a steaming pile of horse manure, and damned mean-spirited, to boot.  This is all they have, and it's pathetic.

I was tempted to call this post "S.E.Cupp gets the FJM treatment,"  but I don't think it quite qualifies.

 Update:  Cupp's article draws heavily on a newletter put out by the National Black Republican Association, over Rice's byline.  It is undated, which seems a bit odd for a newsletter.  No matter, a link to the document in pdf format can be found here.  Click on the line that says "The Democratic Party Owes Blacks An Apology  By Frances Rice." Or, just click the preceding bold, underlined sentence, if you don't mind missing the context.

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* Update 2:  Nov. 22
Looks like my original photo link has evaporated.  Second try found here.