I don’t get the Republican sense of humor. It’s not just that I am not amused by their jokes. It’s that I can’t really determine where the snark begins and the sarcasm ends. Victor Davis Hanson’s NRO piece on winning the Latino vote is clearly tongue-in-cheek, except when it isn’t. If his intent were to make fun of Republicans’ views on race relations, his piece would actually be kind of clever, but that is not his intent at all. He’s making fun of the very idea of trying to reach out to Latinos.
My favorite part of his column is the the section that mocks the president for acting black like two times in his first term and then protests all the left’s false accusations of racism.
The Obama administration’s four-year barrage of “my people,” “punish our enemies,” “a nation of cowards,” the Skip Gates pontification, the Trayvon Martin if-I-had-a-son line, Eric Holder’s charges of racism over the Fast and Furious investigation, the whites-in-Hell slurs from Joseph Lowery, who gave the benediction at Obama’s inauguration in 2008, the hyphenated campaign committees, the executive orders, Sandra Fluke, the constant charges of racism by the liberal media, the weekly outraged Black Caucus — all of that insidiously created a climate of socially acceptable anti-old-white-guy feeling that anyone not of that suspect group could buy into — and anyone of that unfortunate group could buy out of by loudly proclaiming his support for Obama.
Is this not a model for capturing more of the Latino vote?
I’ll let Latinos decide if Mr. Hanson’s profile of the Latino community is racist or just hopelessly unfunny. But I am confident that the GOP won’t be winning any more Latino votes if they follow Hanson’s example.
Hanson is a fucking racist.
Beginning.Middle.End of anything he writes.
He would have made a good Nazi.
Where was he trying to be funny? He struck me as dead serious. He wasn’t even unintentionally funny, which I’ve seen in his past screeds. If I were Hispanic I’d be insulted by what he wrote.
I didn’t get it at all. That was some pretty shitty writing.
Aw, give ’em a break. It’s a tough world for these guys right now. They just found out they don’t matter.
Oh, I get it all right. No, snarkically, I think it is well written. But Rikyrah is right, it’s racist.
It IS tongue in cheek, in a rather complex way. He resents the idea of identity politics. Basically you got that part. “He’s making fun of the very idea of trying to reach out to Latinos.” (By saying, if you did try to do that, here is what you would have to do. Subtext: this is what the Democrats do.)
Everyone should be treated as “an individual”. But what is an individual? I get the distinct feeling that “an individual” is someone very much like Victor Hanson.
Everybody else, well, you’re just pandering to their tribal values. And you don’t even understand their tribal values! (And this is where he switches from just being clueless about other other people’s cultures, to racist stereotypes.)
Booman, you say you “can’t really determine where the snark begins and the sarcasm ends.” Aren’t snark and sarcasm the same thing? But maybe you mean he’s not consist with the irony. Aside from the two-paragraph intro, which is clearly set off from what follows, I think he is consistent, it just gets a bit complicated in places.
For example. where he says “When Republicans talk of cutting spending, Latinos feel targeted. Why cut the hours of a DMV employee so that a grandee in Atherton has low enough taxes to afford a third Mercedes?” We’re supposed to understand that this is the way “a Latino” is “supposed” to think — and it is supposed to be patently ridiculous. I had to look up Atherton. It’s a small suburb of San Francisco which is mainly white, with very few blacks or latinos. The median household income is over 200K. Repubicans outnumber Democrats by 2 to 1, and it is “the most Republican political subdivision in heavily Democratic San Mateo County” (Wikipedia). Thanks to Google, I see that Hanson frequently mentions Atherton in his columns.
You could not get a better view into the pissy, whiny mind of an old white conservative who really resents his newly discovered “minority” status as an old, white conservative. No actual privilege has been taken away from him, and it’s not the few extra bucks he’s going to have to pay in taxes that really hurts, it’s the identity thing. He’s always known he was America, and now he’s being told that America is not just about him. How terribly tragic.
Atherton is where a lot of the google millionaires bought their houses. It’s a suburb of both SF and the Silicon Valley, and tech money is what buys you in there.
In many ways it’s not a “real” town; it has few services, despite being surrounded by commerce outside its borders, and there is a lonely, forested caltrain station that seems utterly out of place. Each house is on an unusually large lot and has a high fence. It is very quiet. If you hear any sound at all, it’s the sound of stock options maturing.
It’s quite a bubble. And not surprising to me that it leans GOP in a left-wing area. Atherton is where you go to pretend your employees don’t exist.
Never forget, these are the people who think “Mallard Fillmore” is a knee-slapping riot.
Republican Humor = Oxymoron
With an emphasis on moron.
“created socially acceptable anti-old-white guy feeling…”
This is not satire to this guy. Jeebus, these turds really do see themselves as the poor victims of everything.
Yes, indeed, there was no racism comin’ out of the Birthers or Tea Party or Palin and Her Traditional Muricans or Hitlerian Show-Us-Your-Papers laws or 21st century Repub Jim Crow Photo ID gambits or early voting cutbacks or Gingrichian cries of “Food Stamp Prez” or ObamaCare death panels and “crowded waiting rooms!” and “Nation of Takers”! And certainly no phony War on Women!
Nope, the REAL discrimination and hatred over the past four years (fueled by the lib’rul media!) was against those hapless well-meaning white guys who just happened to violently hate hate hate Obama solely cuz of all his anti-American socialism! And for participatin’ in democracy they are vilified! And treated with contempt by having their lame ass Bishop White Male lose the election! The cruelty!
As for the supposed “humor”, it looks more like the ravings of a lunatic than a satirist. I’m not willing to search this shit further, sorry.
If you start with the understanding that republican humor is someone being mean to a liberal or some “other” then this makes perfect sense. And, since actual humor is based on introspection – something republicans can’t do – then you understand Hanson perfectly.
I wrote the above with full understanding that it was a generalization. One of the consistently funniest guys I know is a republican facebook friend. And his humor is introspective.
I don’t get Democratic humor:
WTF, Plouffe-head? Medicare and Medicaid are anything but the chief drivers of our deficit.
The GOP is over a barrel now. Can we just push that barrel over the cliff for once? Do you not realize you just won an election?
And is Social Security on the table or off the table? That great humorist Dick Durbin can’t decide.
Medicare and Medicaid are not chief drivers of our deficit?
Even if we got medical inflation under control, enrollment growth is going to balloon what we’re spending on Medicare.
Social Security is off the table. I suspect that Medicaid is pretty close to off the table. It’s Medicare that is going to do the work here (on our side).
What drives our deficit is the failure of the folks who make the appropriations to raise the tax revenues to cover it. No single appropriation drives the deficit except that Congress makes it so.
If Medicare is going to do the work, it will require moving more aggressively on provider payments.
But Plouffe should not be signalling what the White House is willing to give up. Unless the intent is to rile up the folks who are concerned about Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare.
This absolutely does not kill the lefty narrative about another sell-out.
frankly, the narrative is just chatter. If people vote to raise taxes, they aren’t selling out Grover. Grover is a negotiating tool. Do you want to be a tool, too?
Go ahead, but don’t call it a sell-out. It’s a compromise.
“It’s that I can’t really determine where the snark begins and the sarcasm ends.”
GOP humor spans entire emotional range from sadism to viciousness.
For those of us whose activism included standing in the RW (and being scared shitless I might add), the lack of humor from the right is axiomatic.
The Klan had humor only in the sense that they would giggle at disgusting sexual racism. They admitted that humor existed, they just didn’t know how to be funny. Oddly enough, for the ones that I actually knew, Dick Gregory was their favorite humorist. Never understood that … or Dick Gregory as far as that goes (this was befor Andrew Dice Clay).
The Posse had no humor at all. Those bastards were sure the world was out to screw them. They were right. The more the merrier. Laughter would send them into a drooling maniacal frenzy.
The Birchers had anti-humor. That is to say, they told jokes but always got the punchline wrong. Remember the dork in grade school who would always shout out “You got a match? …. YEAH, My FACE AND YOUR ASS!”. Trust me, he grew up to be a Bircher.
“standing in the RW” = “standing in front of the RW”
Sorry. My brains are faster than my fingers.
You would have to personally know some conservative ex-frat boys from southern party colleges to “get” Republican humor. They have NO sense of irony, or satire, and would probably bridle at being called racist, but they are, to the core. Just because they aren’t inclined anymore to lynch someone from the nearest tree, they consider themselves enlightened. The Southern Strategy was aimed at them and it worked, in spades.