Shaking my head at white politicians complaining that people don’t laugh at their black jokes.
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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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I’m very surprised at de Blasio. Maybe, like me he didn’t know what the term “CP time” meant. And what idiot aide allowed Hillary to participate? That moron will probably get a high level job in her administration. I can see popcorn time ahead! Impeachment II?
LOL. Yeah, impeachment seems right. Or just a hanging.
PRIMARY!
Burn the witch!
Go ahead, guys, make light of it. I guess it’s a sliding scale.
“Well, we play your rules, don’t we? Well, don’t we?.”
-Mean Streets
I guess I didn’t need that last period after the question mark.
Nobody’s perfect
I mean after she’s in office. Seriously. Not over this but something. They thought Bill’s perjury in a private suit about having sex was impeachable. But they won’t think having an illegal private e-mail server isn’t impeachable? Benghazi! Or some future Benghazi?
Do you think they wouldn’t have impeached over “Bin Laden determined to strike in US”?
Maybe you think we are going to regain control of Congress. Think again. You may be right that people will vote for her to stop trump or Cruz, but I think that many will split their tickets as a hedge because outside the zealot Democrats, the public does not regard her as Joan of Arc. Bill was wildly popular, not so Hillary.
I had somehow gone through my entire life without hearing this term.
The joke wasn’t funny even without the distasteful associations. White privilege, we’re swimming in it, even the African-American actor here.
I grew up hearing JST, Jewish Standard Time, and didn’t hear CPT until my 20s.
I’ve never heard of either one, until today.
.
I was familiar with the idea but never heard the term itself before.
While I can’t speak to the issue myself, I’ve seen a fair amount of comments from African Americans who take umbrage at white people making a big deal out of this. As if they can’t tell the difference between a bad joke, and something they ought to be offended by.
I’m puzzled why this even happened, what in the world was it about?
White liberal Boomers trying to be hip and succeeded in looking like clueless Archie Bunkers.
I’ve never heard about this “CP” time before in my life, and now I wish I’d never heard of it.
Why would any politician use such terminology as a “joke”??
Shakes head in appalled wonderment. Ugh.
What a pair of utter numbskulls.
Like others have posted I had never heard of this either.
In any case, why does there seem to be the need by public figures, though politicians appear to be the worst offenders, to be edgy when they make a joke?
Even when such jokes aren’t offensive, they usually only play well to a select audience.
hard to see how the joke could “work” (it still wouldn’t, but how it even theoretically could work) without depending on an existing understanding of CP time as meaning “colored people” time, thereby setting up Clinton’s punchline, which is essentially, “no, not that offensive meaning, silly! ‘Cautious politician’ time! Duh.”
So the potential excuse that it was just a well-intentioned joke that went wrong when people took it the wrong way doesn’t seem plausible.
Shaking head in bewilderment seems the right response to such astonishingly poor judgment and tone-deafness. Even if any of the participants weren’t aware of that necessary context for the joke to “work”, somebody who wrote/instigated it had to have been.
I’ve never heard of CP time or any other kind of time. Found this article relevant to the question:
http://www.chicagonow.com/opinionated-woman/2015/07/should-white-comedians-make-jokes-about-black-pe
ople/
No. In the 1973 clip from “Maude,” the writers knew that.
“Maude clip?” Which one was that? I’m thinking about the Cleavon Little/Demond Wilson episode of All in the Family when the two joke about their poverty.
BTW, I think that link is wrong and Little took the gun “so you won’t hurt yourself” instead of giving it back. Maybe he just took the clip out.
Downthread — the “Maude” youtube embed. It’s interesting because first it’s an early use of the term for public consumption and second, the Florida character uses both WPT and CPT, but Maude only picks up and uses WPT.
Reference from February 13, 1973. (Guess I didn’t watch enough TV back then either.)
I think Di Blasio will be sleeping on the couch for a while.
Just look at it this way: If Bernie and Jane Sanders had done this routine during the New York primary, the Clinton campaign would be going nuts. It would be their “We Built This” moment, and anchor the their campaign for the next week.
The New York Daily News would have a big cover about what a sick fucking racist Bernie Sanders has become.
The fact is HRC is an elitist tone-deaf bubble-dweller, who is being foisted on a country that does not want her services. Her ONLY chance of squeaking in to the White House, was to leverage her power and influence to squash any other likely Democratic candidate, and then beat a weak-ass Trump or Cruz. She better pray for Trump or Cruz. We all better.
Thanks DNC.
Things like this make me worried about how she will perform if she becomes president. And this is in addition to my current concerns…
This is her fourth time doing a primary campaign for the presidential election and with all the missteps she has made it look like her first.
Scary.
A touch of Alzheimer’s? Despite all the concern about Bernie’s age, she’s no spring chicken despite the botox (or is it Tammy Faye Bakker makeup?). He seems to be weathering the campaign pace better than her and he’s traveling more.
Doubt that. Although not seen often in public, HRC has an offbeat (and unpleasant) sense of humor. She probably went along with the skit because she thought it was funny. Whereas, for many of us, we see nothing funny about CPT and it doesn’t even compute as one of those offensive and archaic negative stereotypes.
You know what surprised me more, was not politicians doing dumb shit to try to be funny, because that happens all the time, it was Obama inserting himself into this. Which means someone in Hillary’s campaign requested that. I thought this wasn’t that big a story, just clueless but it wasn’t like I saw this all over the media, mainstream or social. So why would the Clinton campaign call in another favor from Obama? Doesn’t this just keep the story in the new cycle?
Dumb to do it in the first place, dumber to ask the President to weigh in, imo.
The obvious answer is that anything that risks the black vote in new york is big fucking deal.
And HRC passes the buck, again.
Probably true, but the bus didn’t have to be in fourth gear.
Naked Capitalism – John Helmer: Brookings Launches Unguided Missile – The Panama Papers as Putin Plot
This is really scary — no, not Putin — but Brookings. This is telling as to where things will go under a certain new regime.
Thought I read a charge that …the absence of incriminating information about Americans… was because ICIJ’s initial search requests were deliberately designed to do so?
Well, we don’t know exactly why the reports to date have almost nothing on Americans. But the MSM headlines — Putin and the Panama Papers — was a major tell because Putin wasn’t in any of the actual releases. Then a check on the funding/support background of ICIJ was highly suggestive of a more political and less informational agenda. Curious minds quite naturally began to speculate that it wasn’t out of the question to consider that there was no whistleblower such as Snowden.
The Gaddy/Brookings publication has the stench of an effort to shut down those curious minds. IOW, it’s disinformation propaganda to reinforce not only the rap on Putin as a player in the Pananma Papers, but charges Putin with a black operation that is behind the release of the papers. Totally consistent with what the Clinton wing of the DEM party has been doing for a long time. The “con” part of neoliberalcon that Billmon coined.
Such stupid-assed shit which is all the more bewildering as Di Blasio has a ‘colored’ wife. And what is all this Hamilton mania anyway? As if we don’t have any problems that a musical might help to mollify today. Retro creativity the American way.
It’s similar to ‘Hawaiian time’ out there. Different rhythm of life, that’s all. Not pejorative, just realistic!
Navigating all the offendabilities these days you’d need to be Fred Astaire.
Still that being said, definitely a ‘duh’ moment.
The trouble with this isn’t the idea of a joke being made, even an edgy one. I’m a big fan of edgy Mel Brooks jokes, but at his best he constructs them so that they’re targeted right (like the ‘rape, murder, arson and rape’ joke in Blazing Saddles: the actual joke is how horrible Hedley is)
The trouble with this ‘colored people’ joke is that for it to work, you have to assume that EVERYBODY knows all about ‘C. P. Time’. To participate in such a skit, you have to both accept that Colored People Time is common knowledge and nobody in the audience could possibly ‘miss it’ or fail to get the setup… and then the punch line is ‘ha ha, I am too cautious to have made that joke!’ (that, or ‘I don’t even know what that is, yet I’m part of this preplanned awkward skit’)
I’m pretty sure Colored People Time goes waaay back, and not strictly as a slur. It’s subtler than that: most likely dates back to slavery, and I see no shame in dragging your feet when there’s damn chains on them. I’ve worked with black performers who still don’t bother to be super-type-A punctual because they’ve got their freedom and nobody can give them orders (small time folks, but still).
I wonder how Hillary’s black voters in the deep South feel about this one. You all fine with the white folk getting playful in this way? I would not have expected it in a million years, but then I was accepting the narrative that ‘at least Hillary is more in tune with racial justice issues’. If she can’t be trusted even with that, I don’t know what to say.