I don't think we should judge a person on their past associations, but based on the premise of the thread, it seems like that's the road we're walking down. President Obama has been a part of some shady organizations and has had relationships with undesirables in the past. I honestly do not believe he's a terrorist like Bill Ayers, or a radical like Saul Alinsky, or crooked like ACORN, but based on your assertion that membership to certain groups unequivocally confirms your guilt, the President must be all of these things. And for the record, I have NEVER watched an episode of Glenn Beck on TV or listened to his show on the radio. I spend my entire day working in politics, for most part I don't want to spend my free time slogging through it too. I just get really frustrated when people through these ludicrous accusations of racism around when they have never met the accused person.
You mean Trent Lott telling a one hundred year old man at his birthday party off-the-cuff that life would have been better if he had been President? Yeah, that was just SO awful.
1. Thurmond was not in favor of making MLK day a national holiday. I think someone already addressed that one. 2. The confederate flag flying over the SC capitol is only history to the point when they put it up during the civil rights movement. The flag wasn't placed on the capitol until 1962.
Then you proceed to do exactly what you pretend is wrong. You spend your entire day working in politics? Do tell. I must have missed the story. Sorry to disappoint you. Thurmond was a racist. edit: I'd like to add that while I disagree with thumbs here (no surprise, I assume), I think the "piling on" has gotten a bit vicious at times. While I haven't read everything in this thread, he appears to be going out of his way to be civil in his posts, which is something we should all strive to do, including myself.
We should be civil while discussing madmen who bring guns to presidential appearances and threaten violence if their imaginary demands are not met. Got it.
Save your sarcasm for someone else, Batman. Did thumbs say he supported that? Perhaps he did and I missed it. I haven't read the whole thread. Besides, what I'm talking about is tone, not substance.
I don't have any problem judging people based on their associations as long as there's context. I brought up factual links to Joe Wilson that he has never disassociated himself from and you're bringing up Republican smears of Obama. Neither Ayers nor Obama have confirmed any kind of relationship nor does anyone have any proof of any ongoing or meaningful relationship. The extent of Obama's relationship with ACORN is that of having represented them in a successful lawsuit and giving money to a group affiliated with them to get out the vote in a primary. If you have any evidence of Obama's shadyness with ACORN then post it here. It's crazy that you would try to equivocate a get out the vote organization like ACORN with a Confederacy group with known ties to white supremacists. I *guess* they're almost the same thing. As for the whole Wright thing, that's such a joke. FOX News playing an angry black pastor on television for all of white America to get upset about. Spare me. Even then Obama totally and repeatedly disassociated himself from Wright's comments and even left that church. What has Joe Wilson done to step away from his racist past? Oh right, he disrespected the first black President of the US by interrupting him in a prime time televised speech to the country and then would have us believe he just couldn't help himself.
Did thumbs do that and I missed it? In all fairness, you have been pretty over the top with him in this thread.
This aggression will not stand. I suggest you sit down, then, and don't try to rewrite history when it suits you, in defense of Thurmond's former aide. Strom Thurmond was a racist, through and through. Thurmond's legacy is as much a stain on the United States of America as Hitler's is to Germany; their ideals were the same. That, unlike Germany, there existed men and women in America that kept Thurmond from gaining ultimate power is a reflection of America's virtues. [Mad Men commercial breaks-fueled rant ensues:] For the record, screw Robert Byrd. He founded a chapter of the Klan. This was not an adolescent rebellion; he did so well into his thirties. His turnabout is as easily attributable to changing political winds as to actual, personal conviction. The day Byrd leaves the Senate will be a great day for the nation. But Strom Thurmond was not a segregationist, he was for a time the segregationist. He was the originator of the Southern Manifesto. He was so upset with party leaders on one issue that he broke away from his party and ran for the presidency as a single issue candidate. That single issue? It wasn't the flat tax; it was racial segregation, specifically, "Segregation Forever!" Make no mistake about it. <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/EgH7WgtIU2k&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/EgH7WgtIU2k&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object> And don't for a second pretend that everybody was doing it, so it was somehow okay. This wasn't the late 1700s. This was 1948! People born when that speech was made aren't even eligible for Medicare. Thurmond fought against the rising, and ultimately triumphant, tide of de-segregation, of racial equality of opportunity. Here's Hubert Humphrey, civil rights advocate, from the same time period: Spoiler <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/8nwIdIUVFm4&hl=en&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/8nwIdIUVFm4&hl=en&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object> Thurmond broke the Democratic Party, and handed the South to Republicans for the next half-century, in a Faustian "Southern Strategy" bargain to stymie the implementation of minority civil rights for as long as possible. <object width="434" height="370"><param name="movie" value="http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/flash/player.swf?id=4375"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/flash/player.swf?id=4375" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="434" height="370"></embed></object> This racism wasn't some mere ideological position. He didn't just nominally support the terrorism and lynchings against blacks in the South; Thurmond also actually fought for his beliefs. From his Washinton Post obituary: This is the man who filibustered for 24 straight hours on the Senate floor, in opposition to the Civil Rights Act. He read from the phone book, recited cooking recipes; he was the anti-Jefferson Smith. Bull---- he supported the Voting Rights Act. He fought against it, tooth and nail, and watered it down as much as possible before passage. And, after he helped elect him, Thurmond tried to get Nixon to repeal it. Thurmond hired a black staff member? Whoopty-do; he also had (intended) black servants, and likely held them in the same esteem. Thurmond switched sides and offered nominal support to the idea of civil rights beginning only in the late 1970s and 1980s, and voted meaninglessly for the VRA's renewal, only after his house of racist cards had fallen, and when it was politically expedient to do so. But let's not pretend he was a changed man. Fixed. Thurmond in his twenties raped the family maid, either just before or right around the time of her sixteenth birthday. Based on the laws of today, that is statutory rape. Based on the laws (and mores) of the time, and Thurmond's purported values, that's miscegenation. And before you object, let's consider the definition of rape. She was an employee, and black, and a child, living in the segregated South. Whether Carrie Butler wanted to or not, she had no way of refusing Thurmond's advances. And this was twenty years before he ran for the presidency on an explicitly racist party platform. Per Thurmond, not even the force of the US Army would "admit the Nigra [sic] race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches," yet Thurmond was more than willing to admit his penis into the vagina of the African American maid, then cover it up by moving Butler away and paying his daughter hush money for the rest of his, and her, life. If Thurmond truly found religion on the horrible nature of racism and segregation, why did he never publicly acknowledge his love for his daughter, or even her very existence? Is the Confederacy a part of history? Of course, absolutely. Is the Confederacy a part of history that should be revered, honored? Absolutely not. Would you welcome the sons and daughters of Nazis honoring the battlefield courage of their fathers? Would you encourage the sons of the National Party to honor the clubbing prowess of their fathers under Apartheid? Should the sons and daughters of the Khmer Rouge honor with a place above the family hearth the killing machetes of their forefathers? The Confederacy was justly extinguished; it was an abomination of history. Let a thousand such Atlantas burn. Those who lost ancestors who fought for the South should indeed remember them, but in shame, not in honor. Horse---- false equivalence. The most fiery sermons of Jeremiah Wright were a response to, not the source of, the racism that pervaded the twentieth century of America. And Strom Thurmond was as responsible for that racism as any man or woman in American history. Trent Lott famously got in trouble for speculating on what a better America we would have had if Thurmond had been elected president. To paraphrase Wright, I say, correctly, "God d--- Strom Thurmond's America! God d--- Trent Lott's America!" And, if he truly stands with his hero, "God d--- Joe Wilson's America!" I'll take, instead, the America we have, the America and American race relations forged in spite of Strom Thurmond, not because of him. Thurmond should never be honored, even in death. Let the buried remain buried, the past remain past. [Oh, cool, John Deere office safety tip #1. /End rant.]
Do you really want to debate the finer points of Aryan/white supremacy, or can you honestly deny that Thurmond was a white supremacist? Aryan supremacy and American white supremacy are fruits of the same tree. Strange fruits, indeed. Thurmond only carried a few states in the South when he ran as a Dixiecrat. As stated above, at that time there were enough men and women in our country who stood up against his ideal of a segregated America; our nation was thus thankfully spared the nightmarish possibility of a Thurmond-in-Chief. Thurmond stood for the (continued) subjugation of an entire race of people, and (continued) confinement of them to second-class status. (To wit: the Dixiecrats weren't too fond of Catholics, Jews, and other minority races, either.) If you wish to reduce it to a numbers game, the thousands of lynchings that occurred during (and the dozens that occurred as a direct result of) Thurmond's lifetime certainly pale in comparison to the mechanized barbarity of the Shoah. Thurmond was one of the last in the long line of white supremacist politicians that stretches back to American slavery. Millions of African slaves and their offspring died as a result of white supremacy. That the American South exploited slaves for their labor, grinding them away until they died, is not in comparison to Nazi Germany a mark in America's moral favor. The racial attitude is the same. Charitably, Thurmond did not wish to carry out an American-style Final Solution, true. He just wanted to maintain a subservient class of people which Southern whites could continue to rape, both figuratively and literally (if underaged, an apparent plus), to their hearts' content.
What would we possibly do without giddyup to defend the racists, the bigots, and the mean, hateful, twisted and otherwise evil effluvia from the proverbial anal sphincter of the United States? Keep fighting the good fight, giddyup!
Yawn. I have nothing good to say about Thurmond except this: HE'S NOT ADOLPH HITLER! Batman is going to be so pissed that you beat him to this.... Now, show me again where I defended Thurmond's racism. Ya can't, can you? Want some racism from The Giddyup? How about this... one of my lifelong, adult friends is a guy named Gene. He goes about 6' 6" and about 280. He's a smart guy, a math major at UNC. He's also a black man. How about I ask Gene to go medieval on your and Batman's ass? That would be a site to see; consider yourself warned....
Tens of millions of Africans and their offspring lived and died as slaves in the US; tens of millions more lived and died as second-class citizens under Jim Crow. From the standpoint of morality, is an unjust sentence of life imprisonment toiling on a chain gang, without possibility of parole, all that much better than being unjustly put before a firing squad? Compared to the death camps, should we really credit slaveholders and segregationists for recognizing, back-of-the-envelope, the stark economic benefit to be had by the lifelong exploitation of people they considered the racial underclass? Vis a vis Hitler, should I credit Thurmond because, despite all his efforts, he failed at the voting booth in his quest for national power, and was thus ultimately unable to preserve American segregation "forever"? Racism enforced by state apparatus is a moral abyss, from any vantage point; so no, I don't see much of an ethical distinction between the racist legacies of Nazi Germany and the American South.
I agree with you. Batman, if you cannot exhibit a degree of civility in thumbs' thread, there is one that you started where you can be as nasty as you like.
giddyup ok with obama being repeatedly compared to hitler. giddyup furious with thurmond being compared to hitler. <head explodes>
