From 1998-2006 the media, comedians, independent journalists, and Republicans acted as if all Dems were Limousine Liberal-Womanizers... It comes and goes.

I don't blame anyone but the Dems (for acting like it wasn't a big deal) and people who thought it was a big deal.

The Republicans looking like racists is all their fault.

I personally think it is a big deal. So you can blame me.

More importantly:

I don't think most people are stupid because I'm liberal. I vote liberal because I think most people are stupid.

Did I missing something or were you conceding the point on the analogies?

@reply,

That's just being careless with placing the blame.  Yes each party is in charge of its own image but that's no excuse for folks to spread FUD freely, that's intellectual dishonesty and the blame should go with the perpetrator not the party.  I said before the RNC should expect some backlash for this one moron's actions (despite its non-involvement) and agree that it certainly comes with the political territory, but that doesn't mean its OK for people to go around telling folks that the RNC produced the CDs, or endorsed the CDs, etc...

Truthfully I see this thread (and others like it pro-liberal and pro-conservative alike) as serving a purpose as a FUD factory.  As I said before repeat it often enough and voila it is the truth.  Isn't that the point behind a liberal posting a negative article for conservatives or a conservative posting a negative article about a liberal?  Its fanboyism basically, like a Nintendo fanboy posting a RROD article in the MS forum.  This is how wars for mindshare are waged.  Its why you get cases like this where the party should never be brought up but the war for mindshare must be waged. So the party falsely becomes the culprit as the connections are made and the FUD is tossed and before long the debate has been framed to the advantage of one side or the other and the truth ultimately gets twisted to the left or to the right.  That is political strategy in a nutshell, control the framing of the debate and produce a consistent message within that framework.  Thats what this thread does, it frames the debate for those who haven't seen the story before and delivers a message that hammers that framework and the position home.

Your contention with your post here is that it doesn't matter that the framework is a lie or that the message supports that lie, the people involved should have never put themself in that position to begin with.  I find that to be pretty distasteful but you're right that's how politics is played.

That's basically what you're saying anyways, although perhaps not quite so cynically, and it's why even after we have reached what is undoubtedly the best agreement we are going to reach we again have the words republican and racist linked together. 

As I said we've reached what I think is our best agreement possible, so I'll just leave it here for now.  I'm sure you'll have something to disagree with and honestly thats fine, there isn't much politically I think we see eye to eye on anyways.

@stupid people issue,

I wasn't looking to start a debate on the this, but we seem to agree anyways so no harm.

@frank,

I can't disagree about the politicians

Alright, you are putting words in people's mouths now.  Neither I nor Steven said that the RNC produced this song.  That was clear from the first post in the article.  And you are reading the word distributed the way you want to read it.

The RNC person who gave away this CD didn't create any of the content on it.  No one ever said he did.  And he did distribute the CD to his fellow RNC members.  That doesn't mean he had a record label and "distributed" the album to the public or something.  You are reading what we are saying how you want to read it even though neither of us suggested that the person "distributing" the CD produced or "distributed" the CD.  Handing a CD to someone is distributing it last time I checked the dictionary.

Regardless, this whole argument is completely irrelevant.  I was talking about how this is a strategic error on the Republicans part.  It doesn't make a damn bit of difference to the average voter who wrote the song or who "distributed" it.  All they see is the smoking gun.  Is that right?  No.  Is that how it is?  Yes.

And its not so much what you are saying Sqrl that makes you come off as sounding like you are attacking who you are responding too, but how you say it.  The sections I quoted are perfect examples.  Your tone is wholeheartedly condescending even though you put words in our mouths.  You act like you have some heightened knowledge of the discussion even when you got what both me and steven said plainly wrong. 

There is barely anything in your tone that is the least bit friendly or respectful.  Its hard to have a discussion with someone who takes this tone, not to mention the fact that it is hard to have a conversation who distorts what you are saying.

Not to mention you are misdirecting all of this back at "liberals" when it was "conservatives" who were the ones who did this in the first place!  It wouldn't bother me so much if you weren't just making blanket statements about liberals reacting to this without providing any evidence whatsoever, short of attributing qualities to the liberal posters here which you gather from your misreading of what we are saying in the first place, of how "liberals" are reacting to this.  Its even more ironic that many "conservatives" are responding in the exact same way as me and steven are.

Hell yeah!  I know I'm right when I've even got Newt Gingrich on my side (quote from him in the article)!  He's like my mortal enemy!  This article is pretty brutal, but it criticizes Saltzman far more than it does Republicans.

Given the current state of affairs, the Republican Party's next national chairman probably will need a sense of humor. A little judgment wouldn't hurt either -- unless, of course, the GOP elders think it's a good idea to further refine their party into a pure aggregation of fervently religious heterosexual white people who hate taxes.

The notion that salvation resides in a zealous remnant is always appealing to traumatized true believers. But to gloss the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous admonition on justice: The arc of the American electoral universe is long, but it bends toward the inclusive center.

That brings us to Chip Saltsman, the former Tennessee state Republican chairman who ran Mike Huckabee's underfunded but shrewd bid for the GOP's presidential nomination. Saltsman now wants to be Republican national chairman, and, apparently as part of his campaign, he sent his associates a Christmas gift consisting of songs by the satirist Paul Shanklin. The title track, sung in a voice meant to impersonate Al Sharpton, is "Barack the Magic Negro." It parodies the president-elect as a black man acceptable to whites. Another song, "Star Spanglish Banner," disparages Latinos.

Shanklin, who first performed his parody on Rush Limbaugh's radio show (and they say ideologues don't have a sense of humor) said he was inspired by an Op-Ed article by David Ehrenstein that appeared in The Times this year. Saltsman, who as you can imagine has come in for a bit of criticism for his gift, now characterizes the column as "irresponsible." (We'll leave it to him to explain why he distributed irresponsible ideas.)

Ehrenstein, one of whose grandparents was African American, is a sophisticated cultural critic with the reflexes of a street fighter; he can take care of himself in this one. It's worth pointing out, though, that as a longtime scholar of film and politics, his essay borrowed a term of art that long has been used to describe a certain kind nonthreatening black man as portrayed in literature and cinema. Ehrenstein cited a litany of such portrayals on screen and linked Obama's political popularity to the characters' appeal.

The point is, when it comes to discussions of race in America -- and particularly racial or ethnic humor -- context is everything. In fact, racial and ethnic humor are probably the most contextually sensitive of all forms of satire. They work only when everyone is clear that the person making the joke regards the differences and foibles of another group affectionately and as something that makes everybody's life more interesting. Lots of traditional Jewish and Irish humor falls into that category, though even there, it depends on who is telling the joke, and to whom.

The right contextual conditions, however, never exist in politics, which is why ethnic or racial references in that venue nearly always offend -- or, at best, fall flat. It's also perplexing that anyone with a feel for public life would satirize the race of the first African American president. You might be able to do that with the third or fourth black chief executive, but not the first. It isn't funny because there's too much painful history being exorcised here, and there's nothing "politically correct" about saying that. It's simply an acknowledgment of reality.

That's not a liberal or Democratic point of view. It's an American one. That's why former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that Shanklin's song was "so inappropriate that it should disqualify any Republican National Committee candidate who would use it."

What Republican leaders choose to make of Saltsman's sense of the antic is an intramural matter. The defense he has mustered isn't. He is huffing that "liberal Democrats and their allies in the media didn't utter a word about David Ehrenstein's irresponsible column in the Los Angeles Times last March. But now, of course, they're shocked and appalled by its parody on 'The Rush Limbaugh Show.' ... I know that our party leaders should stand up against the media's double standards and refuse to pander to their desire for scandal."

Oh, what would we do without our shibboleths? The liberal media? Double standards? This being a nostalgic season, whatever happened to the Eastern Establishment? Oh, that's right, the Bushes are card-carrying members. Oh, well.

Does Saltsman really believe that Gingrich, current RNC Chairman Mike Duncan and the heads of GOP state committees in places as different as Florida and North Dakota -- all of whom have pronounced themselves appalled by his bad judgment -- are dupes of the liberal media's double standards?

Actually, if he can sell people that one, maybe the Republicans should elect him chairman.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/MalePenis.jpg

I've always loved Newt, and he's a hella-nice-guy too.