A Fresh Hell: Hyping an Angry Base with Lies

Posted: September 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, religious extremists, right wing hate grouups | Tags: , , | 71 Comments

We’ve seen an incredible amount of lies, distortion, and bigoted memes aimed at the most frustrated and ugly part of the Republican base.  These racist dog whistles (see the am post by BB) have been so bad that I can’t believe that any dog in america has been sleeping.  Ralph Reed’s group has been trotting out its usual set of  over-the-top rhetoric too. The Romney camp is desperate, and desperate angry people do desperate angry things.

A mailer blasted out by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a nonprofit group spending millions of dollars to mobilize evangelical voters this November to help Mitt Romney’s campaign, compares President Barack Obama’s policies to the threat posed by Nazi Germany and Japan during World War II. It also says that Obama has “Communist beliefs.” A copy of this so-called “Voter Registration Confirmation Survey” was obtained by Mother Jones after it was sent to the home of a registered Republican voter.

The Faith and Freedom Coalition is the brainchild of Ralph Reed, the former head of the Christian Coalition who was once hailed as “the right hand of God” and who is now tasked with getting out the evangelical vote for Romney. In the mid-2000s, Reed was ensnared in the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Reed was a longtime friend of Abramoff’s, and he took payments from Abramoff to lobby against certain American Indian casinos. Reed once ran a religious-themed anti-gambling campaign at the behest of an Abramoff-connected Native American tribe to try to prevent another tribe from opening a competitor casino. His current efforts for Romney are something of a political rehabilitation for Reed.

We’ve seen the President of the United States called “foreign”, “not really American”, and deemed an apologist for radical Islamists and communists.  We’ve now got conspiracy theories about his birth, his education, and the mainstream public polls. What positive outcomes can come from hyping up a base that tends to be filled with militia groups, dooms day-oriented religious followers, and old school, KKK-like racists?  What possible outcomes might happen if these groups decide they should save their country from the outrageous stereotypes built around a democratically elected leader? This is a questions explored by Josh Holland at Alternet.

It’s an exceptionally dangerous game that the right-wing media are playing. If Obama wins – and according to polling guru Nate Silver, he’d have a 95 percent chance of doing so if the vote were held today – there’s a very real danger that this spin — combined with other campaign narratives that are popular among the far-right — could create a post-election environment so toxic that it yields an outburst of politically motivated violence.

A strategy that began with a series of rather silly columns comparing 2012 with 1980, and assuring jittery conservatives that a huge mass of independents was sure to break for Romney late and deliver Obama the crushing defeat he so richly deserves, entered new territory with the bizarre belief that all the polls are wrong. And not only wrong, butintentionally rigged by “biased pollsters” – including those at Fox News – in the tank for Obama. (See Alex Pareene’s piece for more on the right’s new theory that the polls are being systematically “skewed.”)

Consider how a loosely-hinged member of the right-wing fringe – an unstable individual among the third of conservative Republicans who believe Obama’s a Muslim or the almost two-thirds who think he was born in another country – expecting a landslide victory for the Republican might process an Obama victory. This is a group that has also been told, again and again, that Democrats engage in widespread voter fraud – that there are legions of undocumented immigrants, dead people and  ineligible felons voting in this election ( with the help of zombie ACORN ). They’ve been told that Democrats are buying the election with promises of “free stuff” offered to the slothful and unproductive half of the population that pays no federal income taxes and refuses to “take responsibility for their lives” – Romney’s 47 percent.

They’ve also been told – by everyone from NRA president Wayne LaPierre to Mitt Romney himself – that Obama plans to ban gun ownership in his second term. (Two elaborate conspiracy theories have blossomed around this point. One holds that Fast and Furious – which, in reality, is much ado about very little – was designed to elevate gun violence to a point where seizing Americans’ firearms would become politically popular. The second holds that a United Nations treaty on small arms transfers (from which the United States has withdrawn) is in fact a stealthy workaround for the Second Amendment.)

And they’ve been warned in grim, often apocalyptic terms of what’s to come in a second term. The film, “2016: Obama’s America,” offers a dystopian vision of a third-world America gutted by Obama’s supposed obsession with global wealth redistribution. His re-election would bring something far worse than mere socialism – it would be marked by Kenyan anti-colonialism, in which America’s wealth is bled off as a form of reparations for centuries of inequities between the global North and South.

We’ve seen undercurrents of this already in the Tea Party Movement.  We’ve also seen actual acts of terrorism–like the bomb found along a parade route in Washington State–that indicate that many elements of the right are taking these things seriously.  We also see that legitimately elected politicians  repeat and spin these same paranoid memes.  Republican Reps Steve King (R-Iowa), Michele Bachmann (R-Minnesota), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Allen West (R-Florida), and others have been repeating complete nonsense and legitimizing it by asking for congressional investigations.  The media also gives these folks air time to spew what amounts to tin foil hat hypotheses.  Remember the judge in Texas that was preparing for all out civil war based on an Obama re-election? Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday Reads: Animal Psychology, Republican Race-Baiting, Obama’s Drone War, and More

Posted: September 27, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Afghanistan, Foreign Affairs, Media, Mitt Romney, morning reads, Newt Gingrich, Pakistan, psychology, racism, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 74 Comments

Good Morning!!

Before I get to political news, here’s an interesting story that has nothing to do with the upcoming 2012 elections: Suicidal dogs and bipolar wolves. It’s an interview with Laurel Braitman, a PhD candidate at MIT and the author of an upcoming book, Animal Madness. As someone who strongly believes that animals have personalities and strong emotions, I’m looking forward to check out her book. Here’s just a bit of the interview, conducted by Malcolm Harris of New Inquiry Magazine.

MH: How did you get involved in writing about mental illness in other animals in particular?

LB: I was doing something completely different but I had gone to graduate school for history of science at MIT. I had originally gone there to do research on the aquarium fishery in the Amazon basin. But I had a dog at the time, my partner and I had adopted a Burnese Mountain Dog. And he was fine for the first six months and then he went spectacularly crazy. He developed a debilitating case of separation anxiety. If we left him alone he would destroy himself, the house, anything in the way. He nearly killed himself at least once. So I had to take him to the vet hospital after he jumped out of our 4th floor apartment, and they said I had to take him to a veterinary behaviorist who would give him a prescription for Prozac and Valium. I was stopped in my tracks. I had heard there were some animals taking these drugs, but I never thought of myself as the kind of person who would put an animal on Prozac. But I found myself in a desperate situation with a 120 pound dog and I tried all these things and they didn’t work, so I became that person that puts her dog on antidepressants. Prozac didn’t work for him really, but the Valium did, at least in the short term. And I began to get curious about how these drugs got into vet clinics in the first place and if there was something to this. Was my dog responding to these drugs in the some of the same ways that people do?

I ended up switching what I was studying because I couldn’t find anything written about the history of this. My PhD research is now the story of what the last 150 years have to tell us about mental illness in other animals. Can they be crazy? Who says they’re crazy? How did the industry around animal mental health come to be? And how do we make other animals feel better? That’s the question that interests me most. Once you notice that another animal is disturbed or anxious– what do we do then? I’ve spent the last few years traveling all over the world to talk to people who are making it their life’s work to help these animals – whether they are elephants or dogs or birds.

What a brilliant idea!

And now, once again we move from the sublime to the ridiculous–and offensive. The Romney campaign is up to it’s old dirty tricks, sending their meanest surrogates out to race bait again. First up, Newt Gingrich says Obama is “not a real president.”

“[Obama] really is like the substitute [National Football League] referees in the sense that he’s not a real president,” Gingrich told Greta Van Susteren on Fox News Tuesday night. “He doesn’t do anything that presidents do, he doesn’t worry about any of the things the presidents do, but he has the White House, he has enormous power, and he’ll go down in history as the president, and I suspect that he’s pretty contemptuous of the rest of us.”

Unbelievable! And there’s more:



“This is a man who in an age of false celebrity-hood is sort of the perfect president, because he’s a false president,” he said. “He’s a guy that doesn’t do the president’s job.”

 ….

“You have to wonder what he’s doing,” Gingrich continued. “I’m assuming that there’s some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don’t understand. Whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to go play basketball for a while or watch ESPN, I mean, I don’t quite know what his rhythm is, but this is a guy that is a brilliant performer as an orator, who may very well get reelected at the present date, and who, frankly, he happens to be a partial, part-time president.”

It kind of takes your breath away, doesn’t it? Next up, John Sununu: Obama Is “Absolutely Lazy And Detached From His Job”

“Look, let me tell you what the big problem with this president is in my opinion. He is absolutely lazy and detached from his job. When he doesn’t go and attended 60% of the detailed presidential daily briefings that come from the CIA and thinks he can just skim it, skim the summary paper on his iPad instead of sitting down and engaging in what — I was in the White House with George Herbert Walker Bush. He took that brief everyday. George W. Bush took it everyday and I believe that Bill Clinton took it everyday. This president thinks he’s smarter than those guys and he doesn’t have to engage in the discussion. That’s the most important half-hour of the day for a president who has to protect the security of the United States,” Romney surrogate John Sununu said on Hannity.

Watch the video at the link, if you can stand it. Read the rest of this entry »

Scott Brown Finally Takes Some Responsibility for His Staff Members’ Racist Behavior

Posted: September 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, open thread, racism, Scott Brown, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , | 32 Comments

This morning, Principal Chief Bill John Baker of the Cherokee Nation released the following statement in response to the Scott Brown staffers who attacked Brown’s opponent in the Massachusetts Senate race, Elizabeth Warren, with racist “war whoops” and “tomahawk chops” in Boston last weekend.

The Cherokee Nation is disappointed in and denounces the disrespectful actions of staffers and supporters of Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown. The conduct of these individuals goes far beyond what is appropriate and proper in political discourse. The use of stereotypical “war whoop chants” and “tomahawk chops” are offensive and downright racist. It is those types of actions that perpetuate negative stereotypes and continue to minimize and degrade all native peoples.

The individuals involved in this unfortunate incident are high ranking staffers in both the senate office and the Brown campaign. A campaign that would allow and condone such offensive and racist behavior must be called to task for their actions.

The Cherokee Nation is a modern, productive society, and I am blessed to be their chief. I will not be silent when individuals mock and insult our people and our great nation.

We need individuals in the United States Senate who respect Native Americans and have an understanding of tribal issues. For that reason, I call upon Sen. Brown to apologize for the offensive actions of his staff and their uneducated, unenlightened and racist portrayal of native peoples.

Brown first responded by simply releasing a statement George Thomas, a member of the Pequot nation in Massachusetts.

“Being of Native American and African American ancestry, I find it insulting and wrong for Professor Elizabeth Warren to claim minority status as a Native American at Harvard,” Thomas said in the statement. “Professor Warren has never reached out to the Native American community within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to offer an explanation or an apology.”

Thomas said Warren should receive two ‘F’s: one for her failure to apologize, and one for fraudulently presenting herself to Harvard as a Native American.

I believe that Thomas made this statement some time ago–before the racist demonstration last Saturday. In addition, there is no evidence that Warren used her Native American ancestry for personal gain.

In any case, someone must have put heavy pressure on Brown, because this evening he released another statement that called the behavior of his staff “unacceptable.”

After a second day in which a video of racist behavior by his staff members threatened to overwhelm his re-election bid, Senator Scott P. Brown’s campaign issued a statement Wednesday evening saying he “regrets” what he called “unacceptable” behavior.

He also issued a verbal warning to his staff members who participated in the tomahawk chops and Indian war whoops — and to all of his staff — that such conduct would not be tolerated, according to a statement from his office.

The statement, from his spokeswoman, Alleigh Marre, follows:

“Senator Brown has spoken to his entire staff – including the individuals involved in this unacceptable behavior – and issued them their one and only warning that this type of conduct will not be tolerated. As we enter the final stretch of this campaign, emotions are running high, and while Senator Brown can’t control everyone, he is encouraging both sides to act with respect. He regrets that members of his staff did not live up to the high standards that the people of Massachusetts expect and deserve.”

I doubt that Brown wanted to do this, and he sure didn’t have the guts to stand up and say it himself. If he does ever appear in public again, perhaps a member of the press could ask him where he got the psychic power to determine an individual’s ethnic heritage by simply looking at him or her. I’m not sure how George Thomas does it either.

Meanwhile, Warren received the endorsement of the Firefighters’ Union today.

Flanked by firefighters in front of a station in South Boston, Elizabeth Warren accepted the endorsement of the Professional Firefighters of Massachusetts and said she would stand by them if elected to the U.S. Senate.

“This race is not about what kind of truck you drive. It’s not about what jacket you wear. It’s about how you vote, and Scott Brown has turned his back on firefighters,” Warren told the crowd on Wednesday morning.

In the 2010 special election, there was some opposition within the organization to supporting Brown’s opponent, Attorney General Martha Coakley. The endorsement of Warren was unanimous, according to PFFM President Ed Kelly, whose union represents 12,000 firefighters.

Go, Liz, Go!!!

This is an open thread.

Of Polls and Pols

Posted: September 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections | Tags: , , | 50 Comments

Recent polls show Obama leading in his bid for reelection by an increasingly larger number.

For weeks, Republicans in Ohio have been watching with worry that the state’s vital 18 electoral votes were trending away from Mitt Romney. The anxiety has been similar in Florida, where Republicans are concerned that President Obama is gaining the upper hand in the fight for the state’s 29 electoral votes.

Those fears are affirmed in the findings of the latest Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News polls of likely voters in both states, which show that Mr. Obama has widened his lead over Mr. Romney and is outperforming him on nearly every major campaign issue, even though about half said they were disappointed in Mr. Obama’s presidency.

The polls, along with interviews with supporters and advisers in the nation’s two largest battleground states, lay bare an increasingly urgent challenge facing Mr. Romney as he prepares for his next chance to move the race in his favor, at the first debate with Mr. Obama next week.

Mr. Romney’s burden is no longer to win over undecided voters, but also to woo back the voters who seem to be growing a little comfortable with the idea of a second term for Mr. Obama.

Romney is losing key constituencies.

Women in Ohio prefer Barack Obama to Mitt Romney by a margin of 25 points, according to a new poll. In Pennsylvania, it’s 21 points and in Florida, another swing state, women gave the president a 19-point edge.

It appears the so-called war on women has taken its toll. In Ohio, Romney is actually winning with men by 8 points, but the gap among women is so wide that Obama leads the state by 10 points, according to the Quinnipiac University/CBS News/New York Times poll of likely voters.

In other bad news for Romney, those polled gave Obama the edge on the economy.

Ohio appears totally out of reach for Romney.

But Romney appears to be in deeper trouble in Ohio than elsewhere, an alarming development for Republicans who know that the candidate’s White House chances begin and end with the kind of middle-class voters who reside in places such as Akron, Cincinnati and Zanesville.

So why exactly is Romney trailing?

Two surveys released in recent days, one from the Ohio Newspaper Association and another from The Washington Post, crystallized the challenge facing Romney as he embarks on his second straight day of campaigning in the Buckeye State.

The topline numbers — Obama led by 5 points among likely voters in the Ohio poll, and a startling 8 points in the Post poll — only tell part of the story.

Fresh polls give Obama advantage in four battleground states

Romney’s favorable rating is underwater. Almost two-thirds of voters approve of Obama’s decision to bail out the auto industry, a staple of Ohio’s manufacturing economy. The president leads Romney by a wide margin on the question of who would do more to help the middle class.

Republicans–in an attempt to overcome their deep-seated need to live in the land of surreality–are calling the pols skewed and untrue.  Rush Limbaugh is calling it a liberal media conspiracy to depress Republicans.  (Warning: the links go to the sources.)

RUSH:  The purpose of the people right now, most of them doing these polls, they’re trying to make news, not reflect it, they’re advancing an agenda.  They’re all Democrats.  They’re all liberals.  They just have different jobs.  The polls are the replacement refs.  They see certain things. They don’t see other things.  They don’t call certain things, and other things go by.  In this case, what they’re trying to do is exactly what they’ve done in your case:  frustrate you, make you pull your hair out, say, what the hell’s happening to the country?  They want you thinking the country’s lost. They want you thinking your side’s lost. They want you thinking it’s over for what you believe.  And that makes you stay home and not vote.  That’s what they’re hoping.  That’s why you have to fight it every day, Stephanie.

CALLER:  I do; I do.  And it’s so frustrating.  You know, I wish somebody could say, “Hey, this is what’s gonna happen on Election Day.”

RUSH:  Well, I know, I would love to be able to tell you, but see, nobody knows.  Nobody knows.  Not even the pollsters will predict that their poll is right, right now.

Notice that Rush conveniently ignores the FOX news poll that shows the same results.  But, Fox is playing the same game.  It’s a “Democratic” Skew and not the response of the electorate to the Romney Ryan agenda and incompetency.

Conservatives and the Romney campaign may say that the swing state polls which shows a widening lead for Obama are out of whack, but the trend is unmistakable. A month ago in must-win Ohio, Romney trailed in the Quinnipiac University poll commissioned by the New York Times and CBS News by 6 points. It’s now 10 points.

Polls may not be predictive, but even a poll that doesn’t reflect the actual condition of the electorate can still show you the trend line. And right now, there aren’t any indications that Romney is closing the gap. Romney may be closer than a double-digit deficit, but he’s sure not where he needs to be.

Romney’s attack slogan on President Obama has been “Obama isn’t working,” but it’s clear that Romney’s strategy hasn’t been working.

Romney’s even lost seniors.  He only has a clear advantage with one group.  That would be White Men. So what does the Quinnipiac Poll indicate?

Gov. Mitt Romney had a bad week in the media and it shows in these key swing states,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “The furor over his 47 percent remark almost certainly is a major factor in the roughly double-digit leads President Barack Obama has in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The debates may be Romney’s best chance to reverse the trend in his favor.”

“The wide difference between the two candidates is not just a result of Romney’s bad week. In Ohio and Florida votes are basically split down the middle on whether the county and they and their families are worse or better off than they were four years ago. If voters don’t think they are worse off, it is difficult to see them throwing out an incumbent whose personal ratings with voters remains quite high,” Brown added.
“The president’s strength results from the fact that for the first time in the entire campaign, he is seen as better able to fix the economy than is Romney, the issue that has been the Republican’s calling card since the general election campaign began. And the economy remains the overwhelming choice as the most important issue to voters’ presidential choice.”

TP just published a list of six prominent reactionaries that think the media are manipulating the polls. Republicans appear to be delusional.  Dave Wiegel is calling them “Poll sample Truthers”.  They simply refuse to believe reality.

Nicknamed “poll sample truthers” by Dave Weigel, the skeptics are falling over each other to explain how the numbers are lying:

Erick Erickson
Erickson, Editor-in-Chief of RedState.com and CNN political contributor, accuses the media of a “confirmation bias” that makes them conform their data to what they want: “The polls are confirming what the press thinks and that they have a larger than 2008 Democratic turnout is of no consequence to them.”

John McLaughlin
The Republican pollster explains the poll conspiracy: “The Democrats want to convince [these anti-Obama voters] falsely that Romney will lose to discourage them from voting. So they lobby the pollsters to weight their surveys to emulate the 2008 Democrat-heavy models. They are lobbying them now to affect early voting. IVR [Interactive Voice Response] polls are heavily weighted. You can weight to whatever result you want.”

Hugh Hewitt
Radio host Hugh Hewitt thinks the CBS/Quinnipiac/NYT poll is “junk”, choosing instead to focus on Rasmussen and Gallup’s daily polls, which have Obama leading by a smaller margin. These polls, he says, amounts to “lots of evidence this morning that their campaign is in terrific shape.”

Dick Morris
Tea Party icon Dick Morris insists if the election were held today Romney would win by “4 or 5 points,” carrying Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania — leading Sean Hannity to exclaim, “Oh, come on!” Morris later declares, “The polling this year is the worst it’s ever been.”

The question is will Republican just blame Romney for this when they eventually wake up to reality or will they see that entire swatches of the voting populace reject their agenda?

Scott Brown Shows His True Colors and They’re Not Pretty

Posted: September 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 elections, open thread, racism, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , | 48 Comments

Today Blue Mass Group posted this video (filmed on Saturday) of Scott Brown staffers letting out “war whoops” and doing the “tomahawk chop” at Elizabeth Warren supporters.

 

 

9/22/2012, nearby Eire Pub in Boston, at a rally for Scott Brown including former Mayor Ray Flynn. Some supporters of Elizabeth Warren were also gathered around with signs. Here you can see Brown’s staffers making “war whoops” and “tomahawk chops”, presumably in reference to Warren’s Cherokee heritage. Identified in video making the chop are Brown’s Constituent Service Counsel Jack Richard (camoflage shirt) and — we believe — Massachusetts GOP operative Brad Garrett Garnett, front and center with tan baseball cap and gray hoodie, leading the whoops and chops. (Garrett is known for having recently delivered a cake to Warren for the anniversary of the Occupy movement.)

(Also present, though apparently not participating in the whoops and chops, are Greg Casey, Deputy Chief of Staff, (black polo near end of video), Jerry McDermott, State Director, (blue fleece and shades on head), and Jennifer Franks, special assistant, (plaid shirt, beginning).

According to The Boston Globe:

On Tuesday, Brown said he had not seen the video but “if you’re saying that, certainly that’s not something I condone. It’s certainly something that, if I’m aware of it, I will tell that [staff] member never to do that again.”

Still, he struck a defiant tone when asked if he would apologize for his staffers’ behavior.

“The apologies that need to be made and the offensiveness here is the fact that professor Warren took advantage of a claim, to be somebody – a Native American — and using that for an advantage, a tactical advantage,” Brown said.

The state Democratic Party said Brown bears responsibility for his staff’s conduct.

“Scott Brown and his staff are launching outrageous and offensive personal attacks to distract from the issues that matter,” said Matt House, Massachusetts Democratic Party spokesman. “The behavior of his staff is completely inappropriate, but the tone of the campaign is set by the candidate.”

Right. Brown doesn’t condone this disgusting race baiting. That’s probably why he never attacked Warren’s Native American ancestry in the recent Senate debate. Oh wait….

Brown has also been attacking Warren over her work with Travelers Insurance on an asbestos case in which she advocated for a settlement that would benefit victims. Travelers later got the settlement reversed, and Brown is twisting what happened to call Warren an advocate for corporations against the little guys.

Brown said Warren’s advocacy on behalf of the insurance giant flies in the face of her reputation for sticking up for “little guys” and working people.

“Now, I don’t know anybody who’s hired by an insurance company that was actually working for the victims,” Brown said. “Huge insurance corporations don’t hire big-time attorneys from Harvard to fight against their interests for their opponents, which would be the victims.”

Here’s the real story:

In the asbestos case, Warren did represent Travelers but, at the time, the company was seeking to unlock a $500 million settlement account for victims, a step many asbestos victims supported. After Warren left the case, however, Travelers won a separate court ruling that allowed the company to avoid paying out the settlement. That ruling is under appeal.

“Elizabeth Warren got involved to protect the settlement,” against a challenge from another insurance company, said David J. McMorris, a lawyer at Thornton & Naumes in Boston, who represented victims in the case.

McMorris and several officials from an asbestos workers’ union stood outside Brown’s headquarters after the senator’s press conference and defended Warren’s role in the lawsuit.

“It should be very, very clear the victims would have no chance to get paid by Travelers were it not for the work of Elizabeth Warren,” McMorris said. “She’s been with the victims then, and she’s with the victims now.”

The Asbestos Union has endorsed Warren. It seems that Brown has taken his cue from the Romney campaign’s use of lies and distortions against President Obama. Coincidentally well-known Republican ratfucker Erik Fernstrom works for both candidates, even though Brown pretends he’s an “independent” barely knows Romney.

Josh Marshall has a great post up today about the fallacies behind Brown’s assumptions that anyone with Native American ancestry could not have white skin. I borrowed the photo below from Marshall’s post. I wonder if Brown would dismiss this man on the basis of his skin color?

 

Principal Chief Bill John Baker of the Cherokee Nation (h/t Talking Points Memo)

 

I’ll end with this pithy paragraph from Charles Pierce:

There’s only one reason to pound the issue about Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry and that is to race-bait, to gin up the lizard-brained anger at “quotas” and “affirmative action.” Brown already tippy-toed down that line last week in the debate, when he explained that he can tell an Injun jes’ by lookin’ at one. You talk about her like she gamed the system and you’re not merely casting aspersions on her career, but you’re giving a nudge-nudge, wink-wink to all the usual suspects out there who know somebody who knew somebody who was related to somebody who knew somebody who didn’t get the job they should have had. This is also what they do. This is also what they’ve always done. This is also why you hired people because this is what they do.

The moral of this story: Scott Brown is not a “nice guy.”

This is an open thread.

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