Blue in the Bluegrass: islamaphobia

Showing posts with label islamaphobia. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Dead Wrong Then, Dead Wrong Now, Dead Wrong Forever

I grew up with these motherfuckers, too, and shame on Bill Clinton for absolving them of guilt for their crimes.

To be sure, the country still counts. America surely must hear the voice of the “forgotten” voters who put Donald Trump in the White House: the angry rural whites and the neglected high-school dropouts and the women for whom race and class weigh more heavily than gender. Bill Clinton spoke prophetically about them back in 1995, in the wake of an earlier revolution that became known as Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America.” Back then, a wave of disgruntled rural voters elected 60 new and deeply parochial members of Congress, flipping the House of Representatives to Republican control and blocking most of what Clinton was trying to enact. The president spoke wisely at a Camp David confab I attended back then, where he took on angry liberal staffers and even his own wife:

I know how you feel. I understand Hillary’s sense of outrage. It makes me mad, too. Sure, we lost our base in the South; boys voted for Gingrich. But let me tell you something. I know these boys, I grew up with them. Hardworking, poor white boys who feel left out… Think about it, every progressive advance our country has made since the Civil War has been on their backs. They’re the ones asked to pay the price of progress. Now, we are the party of progress, but let me tell you, until we find a way to include these boys in our programs, until we stop making them pay the whole price of liberty for others, we are never going to unite our party, never really going to have change that sticks.

No, no, no, a million times no. If you took every whining white boy in the country, stripped him of every civil, constitutional and human right, forced him to work without pay, to starve and freeze and suffer rape in horrific conditions, and continued that punishment for him and all his descendants for five hundred years, you would not even begin to scratch the surface of what those white boys should have to suffer for what they inflicted on people of color, on women, on immigrants, on gays, on jews and muslims and everybody who is not them.

The fact that they can DARE to whine about their slightly-less-than-perfectly-privileged existence today is proof they have learned nothing and never will.

Or as the Rude Pundit put it to the irredeemable residents of Beattyville, KY:

But for the poor who voted for Trump, you are going to be punched in the face repeatedly by your own fists. And you'll come running to Democrats to help you, and we will, 'cause that's who the hell we are, and then you'll run right back to the racist pricks because that's just who the fuck you are: ungrateful, uneducated bastards who have been brainwashed so thoroughly that you don't realize who is stabbing you and who is trying to get your wounds healed, willing victims asking, "Please, may I have another" as the knife is twisted in your gut.

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Fuck the Yokels. Liberals are Real Americans.

The Rude Pundit:

What you're calling "elitism" is just simply not being ignorant. We don't have our heads shoved up Jesus's ass. And when the left gets angry because of how fucking dumb some of the shit coming out of rural and red mouths is, we're told we need to understand what they believe. No, we're just gonna say that stupid is stupid.

You can stop explaining the white working class rural conservative Christian farming folk, hot-takers and self-justifiers. Instead, why don't you explain liberalism to them? Why don't you explain that jobs are drying up and communities are dying not because of abortion and same-sex marriage but because of Republican economic policies that have favored the wealthy, most of whom live in cities, including a certain president-elect they voted for who took advantage of those very policies in order to stay rich? Ultimately, though, it won't matter. Because despite every fucking word to the contrary, the real problem is that those who voted for Trump are racist. They are sexist. They are Islamophobic. They are ignorant.

The whole thrust of these "let's learn about the yokels" articles is to imply that there are real Americans and there are coastal elites. Sorry, motherfuckers. We're all Americans. And if I have to suffer under your stupid, you have to hear about our smarts.

Thursday, November 19, 2015

Repug Pants-Wetters Determined to Create Radical Muslims in America

Their hysteria over muslinterrists under the bed is pure projection: America's real domestic terrorists are the very right-wing, freakazoid gun nuts repugs have been growing and cherishing for 60 years.

And now their screaming hate-mongering is going to create in reality the myth they lie about.

Digby:

Michael Cohen makes a good point in this column about the various myths surrounding the Paris attacks and US policy toward ISIS:
Myth No. 1: America Is Next

From the pages of Politico to the CBS news program “60 Minutes,” this argument has been made repeatedly since Friday night, and it demonstrates a glaring ignorance about the differences between the U.S. and Europe when it comes to vulnerability to terrorism.

The biggest difference is that the United States simply doesn’t have a radicalized Muslim population, as is the case in France and elsewhere in Europe. That matters a lot because foreign terrorists operating in the United States, especially in a post-9/11 environment, would need local assistance, safe houses, access to weapons and explosives, logistical support and more. In short, they would need Americans, or people who know American culture and who can operate in the country freely. Yet, in the 14 years since 9/11, there’s been no serious emergence of radicalization among American Muslims. The Fort Hood shooter and the Boston Marathon bombers are obvious exceptions, but exceptions nonetheless.
Europe is a very different kettle of fish than the US. They have large Muslim populations with long-standing social unrest and cultural alienation. It's quite possible that the radicalization, at least among some of them, has as much to do with their own issues as Europeans as it has with their religion or solidarity with the aims of ISIS.

We have not had this in the US. But from the way the Republicans are acting, it appears we're jealous and would like to get some. At the very least they seem petulant that we aren't in the center of the fight. Treating Muslims like aliens and talking about closing mosques and rounding up and interning or deporting them is one way to get there.

Keep it up boys. This demagoguery may very well keep out Syrian refugees but if you want to create some American homegrown Islamic radicals you're doing a heckuva job.

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

QOTD: Refugees

If America is not the beacon of freedom to every oppressed person on earth, then it is nothing at all.

Paul Campos at LGM:

... the proper response to calls for an end to accepting Syrian refugees is to point out that such a policy is grotesquely inhumane, as it buys Americans an infinitesimal decrease in the already infinitesimal risk that we as individuals will be victimized by jihadist terrorism, at the cost of failing to do anything to ameliorate the vast suffering of the actual victims of ISIS, 99.99% of whom are in Syria and Iraq.

Not Gonna Be Nice: The Mother Fuckers Are Wrong

Via Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo:

Doctor Zoom at Wonkette crystallized the absurdity:

Of course U.S. America should take in refugees. It’s our fucking job. The alternative is to leave them stuck in hell, where they will either die or become radicalized against the United States. Or else we might as well replace the plaque on that nice welcoming statue in New York Harbor with one that reads, “Sucks to be you.” The lesson of World War II was supposed to be “Never Again,” not “leave ’em to die because they’re scary foreigners with the wrong religion.”