I suppose I should be grateful to David ‘Axis-of-Evil’ Frum for his effort to calm the more nativist impulses of his party. And, I guess I am. It’s worth a try. It’s the right thing to do. But, I really wonder how people like David Frum can continue to associate with a party that has so much racial hatred and so much hatred in general. It’s not that I think that David Frum is a great person. I think he’s compromised himself to an almost staggering degree. But he’s got enough moral fiber to know better than to belong to a party that depends on racists to win elections. Seriously, he does.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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When I visit one of those right wing sites, I notice that many of them don’t allow comments. Seems like they aren’t very interested in having a conversation, even with themselves.
People like Frum have a big problem. If the GOP were to jettison its racists, gun nuts, flat earthers, and snake handlers, they wouldn’t have a big enough party to win elections. Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich stitched together the ‘big tent’ that is the modern Republican Party, with all of its odd parts. So Frum is stuck in a bad marriage. Even if we concede that he and some of his fellow Republicans show strains of decency once in awhile, they are tethered by political necessity to a party that is rotten to the core.
I’m really hoping that Obama and the Democrats have a smashing win on Nov. 4, because it’s going to be great fun watching the writhing and squirming on the Right in the aftermath.
Wow, this is very well written, indeed. Nice job.
From Nixon’s days when he had the Steelworkers and Construction workers in their hard hats march down Fifth Avenue in support of his war on Vietnam to today, the reactionary right wing in this country has had only one goal in mind:how to deny equal rights to blacks,Hispanics and other minorities.
In this quest they have devloped an infrastructure and a subculture with its own vocabulary and smoke signals that convey hidden meanings to their tribe while making high sounding noises to the culture at large.
McCain and Palin are but the latest incarnations of that mindset.
“terrorist niggers” if the economy were good.
that’s what I took away from the article.
Someone needs to tell ol’ Dave that the time to calm the cavemen was a couple of weeks ago. I think it’s a little late now.
Kinda like the GOP response to katrina.
I don’t think they’re stupid. They know how much hatred and stupidity is in their party. And if they weren’t getting an ass kicking in the polls, they wouldn’t be talking about it. Rovian politics has stripped them bare. It was fun when it was working. But now the people they’ve ginned up are turning their pitchforks on the intelligentsia, too (like Kathleen Parker). I hope they’ve learn something from this, if not, let there be blood.
And yet despite Frum’s hand-wringing and moping and whining about “hey guys, it kinda looks like we’re going to lose big and we’ll have problems in 2009 with Obama if we lose like douchebags”, he’s still voting for John McSame and the GOP for the exact same intellectually bankrupt reasons he would have voted for McSame on September 14th before the Crash of 2008.
In other words, Frum has concluded that despite his little epiphany that Realignment comes because the GOP fouled up our economy…he’s still going with the GOP. He has learned nothing but how to spout a hollow “hey stop that or I’ll say stop that again”.
Screw Frum. He’s still a worthless, vapid idiot and an unrepentant apologist for Bush/Cheney/McSame.
The Assclown Express throws the whole pot in on Ayers:
http://dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/9/12944/4333/737/624712
A 1:40 video on the connections between Ayers and Obama.
The Chicago associations of Barack Obama are incidental and secondary because none of those men cited by McCain and Palin are people Obama ever quoted in his speeches or appointed to his campaign. (one fund raising lunch is not an appointment).
McCain has more troubling associations, deliberate and primary ones in Palin the serial encourager of Alaskan secessionists and in former Texas Senator Phil Gramm, the one man economy wrecking crew for Wall Street speculators. I would think an Obama/Biden TV ad confronting the Ayers association and contrasting it with the very public behavior of McCain’s top two awful choices is a good weapon to have ready for the last couple weeks before Nov 4. As Bill Clinton proved, you can win if you are ready to be tough enough. Every voter should be able to chat about Sarah Palin’s friends at AKIP and Phil Gramm’s credit default swap deregulation amendment before they vote.
“I would think an Obama/Biden TV ad confronting the Ayers association and contrasting it with the very public behavior of McCain’s top two awful choices…”
You really want Obama to make an ad, spend money to repeat the Ayers association then encourage further discussion? Obama answered but not in the way McCain wanted by calling for McCain to ‘say it to my face.’ The subject changes from being about Ayers to McCain is a coward. Well done.
I think it has finally dawned on the dense Mr. Frum that the hatred currently being directed against Blacks by Ms Palin and Senator McCain can be readily redirected against Jews. It’s the same constituency of haters, and when they lose their homes in the coming meltdown, they will be looking for scapegoats. There aren’t very many Black bankers.
We’ll see how brave they are and if they’re willing to post the same comments showing their face that they would typing blindly. Seesmic has teamed up with the Washington Post and are taking questions over on The Fix. Too bad, your site doesn’t allow the coding for Seesmic; I’d be able to plop the embed player here and then any Pond Dwellers who wanted to pop in could watch straight from this site without going to Chris Cillizza’s “blog”.
This is all very interesting only because blogs are now part of “old media” this election. This is a web 2.0 election thanks to Obama and his supporters. It’s cool to see the few bloggers (i.e., Man Egee, Liza, the Jack & Jill Politic writers, Oliver Willis, African American Pundit) who get that.
Not to sound like a current advertising campaign, but from recent scientific discoveries Neanderthals were not stupid, seemed to embrace new technology and lived in relatively sophisticated social groups with belief in the afterlife. They seemed to have the ability to speak. They even had larger brains than Cro-Magnons.
How they were supplanted by modern man is still a mystery.
+++
It is fascinating how otherwise intelligent people can fall for blatant lies in order to further their own prejudices.
Earlier this year there was a precinct in Florida where the results showed that 120% of the voters voted. That is, more votes than voters. I suggested to my sister that there was a problem with the voting machines. She said that it was illegal aliens. Think about it. Illegal aliens, not even illegally registered to vote, just lined up at polling places and all voted. As if anyone in Florida who walks in off the street votes. That kind of thinking is nuts. It is easily and logically dismissed. And yet my sister would embrace this idea as a solution to why the election results were wrong. I would hope that someone else told her. I’d hate to think that she cobbled this idea together on her own.
The truth is, Neandertal’s (the preferred spelling is actually without the “h”) have gotten a bad rap. They are the most successful human species that ever lived. They survived for over a quarter of a million years, living through and adapting to the most violent extremes of climate. The image of the Neandertal as a hunched, apelike brute is wrong. That image is at least in part due to the earliest discoveries having skeletal warping due to severe arthritis. That suggests a compassionate society that cared for the old and infirm, quite the opposite of the brute.
The average Neandertal brain size was greater than that of modern Homo sapiens (though we know brain size alone does not determine intelligence). Neandertals had culture, believed in an afterlife (as evidenced by burial practices), made and used stone tools, used fire, cared for their injured and elderly, and likely had some form of language.
Compared to modern humans, Neandertals were larger in size and had different cranial features. Much of their size is understood to be an adaptation to the cold climate of Europe during the Pleistocene epoch, as are their enlarged nasal cavities/sinuses, and barrel chests.
Homo sapiens and Neandertals actually lived at the same time in apparently overlapping territories of southern Europe and the Middle East for approximately 10,000 years… until Neandertals disappeared between 29,000 and 25,000 years ago.
There is still debate about whether Neandertals should be classified as a separate species of Homo (Homo neandertalensis) or as a subspecies of Homo sapiens (Homo sapiens neandertalensis). Genetic studies suggest the former is likely the correct classification, but we cannot be 100% certain.
This leaves open the debate on whether Homo sapiens and Neandertals could have, would have, or did interbreed. Again, genetic studies are pretty conclusive that there was no interbreeding, or at least none with genetic lines still persistent, but even this is not 100%. I have even seen it suggested that autism and aspergers are caused by the reemergence of Neandertal genes.
The idea of Neandertals as brutes may be exactly backwards. Neandertals may actually be the very first example of human genocide. Many scientists think it is likely that Homo sapiens are at least partially responsible for the demise of Neandertals, either through direct conflict or by out-competing them in the same environmental niche.
Still want more? See the wikipedia on Neanderthals and Neandertal interaction with Cro-Magnons.
So, next time you want to use the term Neandertal to describe someone you don’t like, think twice.
I originally posted this as a diary at DKos a few years ago, and shortly thereafter, the Geico caveman commercials started to appear. Hmmm… did an ad exec see my post about misunderstood cave-people? Probably not. We anthropologists are always trying to educate people about these things, so they could have gotten the idea from any number of sources. Still, I found it to be quite the coincidence.