This is the latest in a series on the use of the race card for political gain:
I warn you, this is hard to follow. I’m not even sure I have the sequence down. But as with many fights in which accusations of racism are thrown around loosely, I’m not sure the precise sequence matters. And toss Twitter into the mix, and it becomes near impossible to unravel.
What does matter is that there is a massive fissure in the Democratic Base (more on that later) in which Joan Walsh, one of the Grande Dames of the Professional Left stands accused of racism and white privilege after a comment over who is Obama’s “base.”
The history is laid out in almost incomprehensible posts at The Angry Black Lady, The Extreme Liberal, and Salon.com.
For simplicity sake, some background is summarized at The Atlantic, Joan Walsh Sparks Twitter Brawl Over Obama And Race:
The Players: Joan Walsh, Salon.com editor-at-large; numerous outraged Twitterers
Opening Serve: Joan Walsh commented on the state of American progressivism in a Salon article this week, in which she wrote, “I deeply resent people who insist that white progressives who criticize Obama are deluding themselves that they’re his ‘base,’ when his ‘base’ is actually not white progressives, but people of color.”
Return Volley: A tweeter by the name of Truthrose1 took offense to Walsh’s comment and wrote, “@joanwalsh read your article, I resent white progressives who pretend they are the base of the Dem party and ignore AA’s, we are even,” sparking a back and forth between Walsh, Truthrose1, and several others that continues to drag on. Walsh attempted to defend herself by noting, “Not saying white progressives are THE base; opposite. But I resent African Americans who say THEY are THE BASE. Wrong,” but Truthrose1 shot back instantly with the comment, among others, of “PBO is not your lap dog, thank god Gibbs called out the liars in the progressive media, u have done nothing but act like baggers.”
I’ll admit, it’s hard to follow all this, as is the case with most Twitter wars, but I repeat myself.
What is clear is that there is a growing fissure in the Democratic “base” over criticism by the (mostly White) Professional Left, as reflected in this Twitter exchange:
And this one:
And this one:
And this one:
And this one:
And this one:
Even Jane Hamsher’s name was dragged into this, showing there is a deep resentment not only towards Walsh, but also another Grande Dame of the Professional Left:
Who won, who lost? I have no idea, but a fairly extensive list of the tweets involved is at Chirpstory.
Bring plenty of popcorn, and tell me the ending, I don’t mind a spoiler.
Update: Until the Twitter war above, I had never heard the term “Firebagger.”
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Comments
Wow, that is hilarious! Thank you, Professor, for adding some much needed levity to my otherwise very stinky day. I feel so much better now. Nothing like a good leftist cannibalism show to pick up one's spirits!
After mindless bouts of Yo mama, no- yo mama, the kidz will conclude they're all racists for invoking/ provoking/ stroking race so constantly for political edge, profit and cover when only character, idea and deed should count.
In our dreams.
MLK dreamt once.
"The tree of liberty needs to be spinkled with the blood of progressive implosions from time to time."
Or something.
Who wants to bet that this incident will have no bearing on Walsh when she decides to trash conservatives and Republicans as racists in the 2012 election season?
Translation: Obama loves us more. No, us. Un-uh, he loves us more because we're progressives. No way, he loves us more because we're black. Wrong, it's us he loves most and we love him most, too. So there.
What a bunch of ridiculously immature, whining little babies. They are all his base, he loves them all equally. There, is that all better?
I think playing the race card, eventually eats up all the players.
I think I know the ending…
Someone gets called a racist and it's all Bush and Palin's fault.
I think I know the ending…
Someone gets called a racist and it's all Bush and Palin's fault.
……or Glenn Beck's.
Either I'm full of beans or this whole episode spills the beans about beans and bean-counters not knowing beans about beanie-baby coexistence.
Beans and their bean-counters, the magical fruit …
LukeHandCool (who had too much chili for lunch)
It's kinda of like Jerry Springer, where the two mistresses fight over one misogynistic guy in front of a live televised audience.
Meanwhile, everyone watching is like, that dude's butt ugly and totally not worth the effort. The audience leaves wondering, why those women didn't just realize that they'd both been had, dumped the dude, just ride off into the sunset together and become lifelong friends.
But, like Springer, we all know in real life, that after all of this fighting, they will blame themselves as being the unworthy party, not Obama. And will go onto vote Obama in 2012. Many of them will even vote more than once, especially if they are recently deceased, but that's another Jerry Springer story…
It's always a joy to watch Lefties panic and play hot potato with the Race Card grenade…. with the pin still in it.
DELISH!!
One thing AA's (if I can borrow the phrase) hate more than anything is the Ivory-Tower wing of the Democratic party lecture them on how they're supposed to feel. They'll realize one day that the Democratic party is using blacks, nothing more.
Ah, yes. Reminds me of the good old days of the Iran/Iraq war.
You know. When you hoped both sides would wipe each other off the face of the Earth?
I put my sixth-grade sentence diagramming skills to work on Ms. Walsh's oeuvre:
http://www.gabrielmass.com/rac/blogcontent/salon-sentence.png
But really, it's no wonder truthrose1 didn't understand it in the way Walsh intended: the thing's too ambiguous to be parsed reliably.
I guess the editor-at-large of salon.com needs an editor.
This just illustrates that the Democratic Party isn’t really a unified party at all, but instead, it’s nothing more than a motley conglomeration of disparate, self-serving interest groups. They only vote as a block when they can each extract some sort of benefit for themselves and that’s why whenever they draft legislation, their bills all look like someone ate pizza and then threw up. Its not even a symbiotic relationship, its more of a mutually parasitic society.
Failing to completely understand this, Hillary Clinton ran for President thinking she could put forth that the Democratic party was united behind a common ideology. As we can see, she was clearly wrong. The Democratic Party may be the home of the environmentalists, the climate change movement, the people of color (who don’t even like each other), the anti-war crowd, the socialists, etc, but each of these groups are concerned only with their own narrow platforms and they don’t always work together.
To make things even more complex, the Democrats long ago began to manipulate people by playing the race card. What Hillary Clinton forgot was that when it comes to cultivating sympathy, black trumps female. And the irony of it all is incredible because it was the white Democrats that used the blacks to build up voting constituencies so that THEY could remain in power. Never in their wildest dreams did they think the blacks would ascend from their positions on the bottom rungs of the ladder. As Dr. Stephen Karpman so eloquently points out, the rescuer always ends up being the ultimate victim. The ubiquitous infighting on the left is thus nothing more than a dynamic they set in motion a long time ago – poetic justice isn’t it.
A case of them eating their own?
Or those that think they own the Democrat plantation finding out that the occupants (who've faithfully kept reelecting their overseers because they believed that Democrats "cared" more about them than the Republicans despite all the evidence to the contrary) are thinking for themselves and talking to each other and aren't too happy with being taken for granted.
Snake bites self; dies lingering death.
Perhaps this may push some people to learn more about the roots of the early progressive movement. The movement was built upon racism and eugenics. The social sciences were all intertwined with the racist movement from the beginning. It blows my mind that black people support the progressive movement. They should let the white eugenecists oops I meant progressives be Obama's base. His mother was one of them. He has much more in common with the intellectual progressives than he does with any common American of any color.
I tried following this, I couldn't, I genuinely tried, I really cannot follow this.
I agree with one of the comments above, I was a Hillary dem, I saw the ugly disgusting underbelly in 2008, that underbelly is now in full view, I left the party after being a democrat for 30+ yrs, am now a registered independent, a tea party supporting independent.
After throwing down the race card so often, on so many issues to so little effect there is but one community where it still carries weight: Progressives.
They will now start to play it on each other as it is the only card they have that carries some weight in their community. They will, finally, end up burning it out… but that will be only after they have used it to exhaust each other.
Popcorn, please!