Ow ow ow. Michael Bérubé uses his “web” “log” to bring the burninating. Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page attempted to defend incoming White House Press Secretary Tony Snow from charges of racism stemming, in part, from one of Page’s own columns. Unfortunately, he also inadvertently let slip the secret of Tony Snow’s mutant power…the power to see the future! (It’s totally like in this one story from Anne McCaffrey’s To Ride Pegasus
Tony Snow is eminently qualified to serve as White House press secretary not only because he is a man of conscience who genuinely cares about solving the tough problems of poverty, bad schools and sour race relations, but also because he can see the future. If you doubt it—or if you think, as an out-of-touch liberal elite critic who doesn’t understand physics, that this sensible blog has suddenly degenerated into trippy Fafblogisms—look again at Clarence Page’s “contextualization” of Snow’s remarks:
“Snow was trying to explain why the former Klansman had just won an estimated 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor’s race. Snow wanted me to know that, just as those of us who attended Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March were not acting out of black supremacy or anti-Semitism, neither were all Duke voters moved by racism.”
That’s right: back in the fall of 1991, when David Duke had just won 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor’s race, Tony Snow was able to compare David Duke’s white voters to black participants in a Farrakhan-led march that would not happen for another four years. That’s the kind of foresight and sagacity the White House needs now! Oh, how I wish I could have been a fly on the wall when Tony Snow turned and said to Clarence Page, “You can’t write off Duke’s voters as racists, Clarence. After all, four years from now, many of your people will take part in a march organized by a nutcase anti-Semite. And don’t even get me started on O. J. Simpson! It may be hard for you to see it now, but I have the very strong sense that something bad is going to happen with that man, and many white Americans are going to get extremely upset. David Duke is just proleptically channeling that future racial tension into a right-now campaign, and if mainstream politicians don’t listen to the frustrations of ordinary people and address them in some constructive way, the loony extremists inevitably will move in.”
Man, Trogdor would be proud.
{ 43 comments }
Jim Henley 05.03.06 at 7:04 am
Funny entry, but it may just be inelegant sentence constructiion on Page’s part. IOW, in a plausible alternate reading of hte sentence in question, Page doesn’t say Snow compared the Duke primary to Farrakhan’s pyramid-height lecture, Page is offering that as an after-the-fact comparison of his own to, well, help a brother (Snow) out.
Jim Henley 05.03.06 at 7:05 am
BTW, the proper term is “internet ‘web’ ‘blog’.”
abb1 05.03.06 at 7:27 am
I like Clarence Page, leave the guy alone.
Sven 05.03.06 at 8:19 am
Well, you know what they say about inelegant sentence construction.
fred lapides 05.03.06 at 8:42 am
I have a slight problem. I had read a considerable list of things said by Snow about how inadequate Bush was as a president. Now he is going to work for Bush. I was told (online) that Snows’s personal beliefs do not matter because as press secretary he is to address issues for the press. My problem: how can Snow be called a “moral man,” if he grabs a job to defend a guy he had previously thought so little of? Isn’t this being hypocrtical or looking out for the main chance? Or am I missing something here. My rabbi is himself not sure on this too.
Barry 05.03.06 at 9:17 am
Fred, he can be called a ‘moral man’ by the appriate vocal or typing actions. It won’t be true, of course, but that really doesn’t matter. As long as it’s has sufficiently high truthiness, and the powers that be like it, it’t the line that all good presstitutes will toe.
M. Gordon 05.03.06 at 9:36 am
<snark>
This is merely a further sign that Homestar Runner has jumped the shark: a CT egghead saw somebody in their afternoon logical positivism precept wearing a Trogdor t-shirt, and now think they’re hep with the kidz0rs by referring to a three year old internet fad.
</snark>
P O'Neill 05.03.06 at 9:53 am
This ability to see into the future is common amongst Republicans. As Rudy Giuliani told us at the 2004 convention
President Bush is the leader we need for the next four years because he can see beyond just today and tomorrow. He can see into the future.
abb1 05.03.06 at 11:42 am
He really did say that, huh? I guess he must’ve outsourced his speech writing to North Korea, they have comparative advantage in this kinda stuff.
Nat Whilk 05.03.06 at 11:55 am
Were there any surveyors involved in building President Clinton’s famous “bridge to the future”? They must have been able to see into the future, too.
lemuel pitkin 05.03.06 at 12:08 pm
See, this is what bugs me about CT/Berube liberalism. The important question here is whetehr there is in fact an equivalence between the Klan and the NoI, i.e. whether racism in America is a a problem of ‘extremists on both sides.’ I think the answer is, No. But Berube? Belle? Who knows — they’re more interested in scoring debating points.
lemuel pitkin 05.03.06 at 12:09 pm
Oh and Nat: it was a “bridge to the 21st centruy,” you moron. One thing you can say in favor of CT — when they go for a rhetorical cheap shot, they at least get it right.
P O'Neill 05.03.06 at 12:13 pm
Here’s a link for Giuliani’s speech. When we’re sorting through the rubble of the Bush cult of personality in a few years, the speeches from the 2004 convention by Rudy, Pataki, and Tommy Franks will merit special study.
Nat Whilk 05.03.06 at 12:42 pm
Lemuel Pitkin writes: ‘Nat: it was a “bridge to the 21st centruy,†you moron.‘
“In his speech from San Diego, Senator Dole offered himself as a bridge to the past. Tonight Bill Clinton and I offer ourselves as a bridge to the future.” (Al Gore, Washington Post, August 29, 1996, Pg. A27)
“But with all respect, we do not need to build a bridge to the past, we need to build a bridge to the future, and that is what I commit to you to do. . . . Our bridge to the future must include bridges to other nations. . . The real choice is whether we will build a bridge to the future or a bridge to the past, about whether we believe our best days are still out there or our best days are behind us, about whether we want a country of people all working together or one where you’re on your own.” (Bill Clinton, Washington Post, August 30, 1996, Pg. A36)
“Mr. President, in your acceptance speech in Chicago you said the real choice in this race is, quote, ‘whether we build a bridge to the future or a bridge to the past, about whether we believe our best days are still out there or our best days are behind us, about whether we want a country of people all working together or one where you’re on your own.'” (Jim Lehrer, Washington Post, October 7, 1996, Pg. A8)
Michael Bérubé 05.03.06 at 12:56 pm
Mr. Pitkin: if you bother to click on the comments to my post, you’ll find that I do, in fact, challenge the MMM/ David Duke analogy. But perhaps you’re more interested in scoring rhetorical cheap-shot debating points about how X liberalism is insufficiently Y.
I like Clarence Page, leave the guy alone.
You say that now, abb1. Wait ’til Page signs the Euston Manifesto, and then let’s talk.
Steve 05.03.06 at 1:01 pm
I’m confused: do I hate Tony Snow because he’s been criticizing President Bush so much that he will have to lie to do his job, or do I hate Tony Snow because he’s a Fox guy and thus just an apologist for the Repubs? Help me reality-based community, help me! You’ve got two, mutually exclusive critiques at the same time. You need to just sort out which one is reality-based, so we can all pretend the other one didn’t exist. See? I get this academia thing. (oops, I forgot…BUSHITLERMCCHIMPY!!!)
Steve
Evan 05.03.06 at 1:03 pm
Well, I’m torn. On the one hand, I find it really irritating when people casually sling around terms such as “moron” for no particular reason. On the other hand, if we didn’t have moron-slingers, we wouldn’t be treated to those moments when the moron-slinger turns out to be utterly, gloriously wrong.
lemuel pitkin 05.03.06 at 1:20 pm
Michael: I stand corrected, and my opinion of you has gone up.
Nat: My opinion of you hasn’t gone up at all.
Walt 05.03.06 at 1:39 pm
Steve, you are genuinely not smart enough to understand academics. It’s sad when that happens, but it happens.
abb1 05.03.06 at 1:48 pm
Wow, a lovely thread allofasudden, with sarcasm, insults and all. Who woulda thunk. These academics, you never know what’ll tick ’em off.
Dave 05.03.06 at 3:23 pm
Academics are just people who never finished school.
Michael Bérubé 05.03.06 at 3:51 pm
Thanks, Mr. Pitkin! Sorry for the snippiness. It was residual, and not at all dominant or emergent. As we academics like to say.
BUSHITLERMCCHIMPY
Steve: you forgot Halliburton. That ticks me off.
Kenny Easwaran 05.03.06 at 4:07 pm
Academics academics? Academics academics academics. Long pants long pants long pants.
Uncle Kvetch 05.03.06 at 4:13 pm
Steve: you forgot Halliburton. That ticks me off.
I believe the imaginary epithet most preferred by our friends on the right is “Chimpy McHitlerburton.” But I could be wrong.
Functional 05.03.06 at 5:15 pm
Jim Henley’s comment 1 was right on: Page was making the Farrakhan comparison himself; he wasn’t saying that Snow had made the Farrakhan comparison in 1991.
You’d think that an English professor would perceive this reading of the passage.
Michael Bérubé 05.03.06 at 6:55 pm
You’d think that an English professor would perceive this reading of the passage.
Actually, we English professors tend to read things pretty carefully. And when we come upon a sentence like “Snow was trying to explain why the former Klansman had just won an estimated 55 percent of the white vote in the Louisiana governor’s race,” we emphasize the “just won” part (as I did on my very own “web” “log”) because we know that it denotes recently completed action. And if we’re seditious cheese-ending some-French-speaking English professors, we know that “just” is English’s weak version of the French “venir de” for recently completed action, as in, “I just replied to some ‘functional’ guy who thinks he’s scored some kind of debating point.”
And thus, with the judicious use of Close Reading® , we conclude that there’s no way Snow offered Page this “explanation” of David Duke’s appeal in 1995.
Michael Bérubé 05.03.06 at 6:59 pm
Oh, and one more Close Reading® point. The sentence “Snow wanted me to know that, just as those of us who attended Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March were not acting out of black supremacy or anti-Semitism, neither were all Duke voters moved by racism” very strongly suggests that it was, in fact, “Snow” who “wanted me to know” this. So sure, you can surmise that Page was offering the MMM analogy to help a brother out. That’s a charitable reading. But it’s hardly justified by the actual words of the sentence.
P O'Neill 05.03.06 at 11:27 pm
Chimpy McHitlerburton
Not quite. Chimpy McBu$hitlerburton. Glenn Reynolds and Jeff Goldstein both say so, and they would know.
Matt Weiner 05.03.06 at 11:29 pm
So I think the most important part of Bérubé’s post is not the “seeing into the future” part, but the part where he decodes Snow’s quote as saying, “You can’t write off Duke’s voters as racists. Duke is talking about things people really care about: high taxes, black people, black people, black people, and black people.”
And pace Lemuel, the important question is not whether there are equivalent extremists on both sides — I’m not even sure the NoI count as on the left — but the extent to which the mainstream of each side has adopted the views of extremists. Snow is currently as mainstream as mainstream gets, and he seems to have had no problem using coded racist appeals to excuse voting for an uncoded white supremacist. That’s worrisome. The Democrats don’t have any similar problem.
[I don’t know if there are still commenters here who think that ffirmative action is just racist as anything Duke said, but in case they are, I preemptively ask them to give me a break.]
asdf 05.04.06 at 2:44 am
The whites of Louisiana voted for someone to look after their ethnic interests. They behaved in exactly the same way that other ethnic groups do. So what?
abb1 05.04.06 at 3:44 am
Matt, what was suggested is not that Mr. Farrakhan is an equivalent of Mr. Snow (since coded racist appeals can hardly count as extremism), but rather that Farrakhan is equivalent of David Duke.
If you do accept that Farrakhan is indeed an equivalent of Duke, then your point seems weak because David Duke is not exactly mainstream either.
abb1 05.04.06 at 7:16 am
I read Michael’s post now and I think Clarence does have a point. An average American family probably pays a couple of grand a year in federal (non-payroll) taxes, and what do they get in return? They get no services whatsoever or very close to it. Why? Because most of it, one way or another, is spent on military: current military, past military, future military, military veterans, military aid, military, military, military. And then they get crummy schools and crime-ridden streets. So, naturally they feel they are getting nothing in return and they get upset.
Do you hear Hillary Clinton or John Kerry talking about this? Sure you do, and they are for more military spending.
Hey, what do you expect – sleep of reason produces monsters – David Duke comes and makes it all about the blacks.
Nat Whilk 05.04.06 at 8:30 am
Uncle Kvetch wrote:
“I believe the imaginary epithet most preferred by our friends on the right is ‘Chimpy McHitlerburton.’”
Why “imaginary”? Are the posts on sites like dailykos.com that use phrases of this sort generated by AI bots, not by real persons?
Matt Weiner 05.04.06 at 8:48 am
abb1: My point is that Snow, who is mainstream, is carrying Duke’s water; trying to appeal to the same racial resentment as Duke, but in a more subtle way. There’s no corresponding figure in the Democratic Party who does the same thing for Farrakhan; perhaps McKinney and Moran do sometimes appeal to resentment of Teh Jews, but they get marginalized within the party for that very reason.
To be clear, I’m not actually asserting (nor denying) that Farrakhan is as bad as Duke or that McKinney and Moran routinely channel him the way Snow is channeling Duke here; I’m saying that even if both of those were true, it wouldn’t prove that Democrats are as bad as Republicans in this sense, because Snow is absolutely central to their power structure and the M’s are marginal.
asdf 05.04.06 at 3:56 pm
Why is it always ‘resentment’ when white gentiles press their interests as a group? Surely no other group in history has agreed to the relative demographic decline that whites are undergoing in societies that were (for the most part) created by their ancestors. Perhaps it is legitimate interest in seeing the societies built by their forefathers continued on, populated generally by their children. Its a value call, but to say its ‘resentment’ queers the issue at the start.
As for ‘resentment’ against Jews; again we must look at the situation from both sides. Christian America has seen most references to its religion systematically stripped from the public square — many times at the behest of Jewish organizations. Disproportionately Christian soldiers are dying in the Iraq war, which arguably was promoted in part to serve the interests of Israel. So is this ‘resentment’ or a legitimate complaint.
Let us be honest.
Uncle Kvetch 05.04.06 at 4:34 pm
Hoo boy. And abb1 thought the thread was getting interesting 15 comments ago….
Matt Weiner 05.04.06 at 9:33 pm
Are the posts on sites like dailykos.com that use phrases of this sort generated by AI bots, not by real persons?
Nat, the first appearance of “Chimpy McHitlerburton” on Daily Kos was a quote from Glenn Reynolds (the dates are in the URLs; click second link). Most of the top hits are for right-wing blogs, but the earliest I could find was this comment by RC Dean on Hit and Run, which I’d call neither right nor left. Not to deny that Democrats do come up with immature names for the President. “President Toonces” is my favorite.
abb1 05.05.06 at 2:27 am
Well, asdf, fair enough, and the small minority that identify themselves as ‘white gentiles first’ firmly hold their rightful place in our society, building and strengthening their communities in glorious swamps of Georgia and Alabama. One could only hope that other ethnically/racially concerned groups world-wide will one day achieve similar status in their societies.
Nat Whilk 05.05.06 at 8:16 am
Matt Weiner writes:
“Not to deny that Democrats do come up with immature names for the President. ‘President Toonces’ is my favorite.”
What was your favorite immature Republican name for President Clinton?
Matt Weiner 05.05.06 at 8:55 am
Not a connoisseur of those, really. Limbaugh calling Daschle “Puff Daschle” was kind of funny, Limbaugh calling him “El Diablo” or “Hanoi Tom” not (especially in light of the assassination attempt against Daschle around that time).
So, if there’s a serious point here which I kind of doubt, it’s that when rightists start shouting about “Chimpy McHitlerburton” or “BUSHITLERMCCHIMPY” they’re trying to automatically discredit criticism of Bush from the left by claiming that it is all completely unhinged. But this is not so; those criticizing Bush often have actual substantive points to make. (Note Steve furiously trying to change the subject from whether Snow really was defending racism.) The blogosphere would be a nicer place if Glenn Reynolds and others would recognize that, and if I had a pony.
(And even “President Toonces” is based on the idea that he’s driving the country off a cliff.)
On the other hand I would claim that while much mainstream criticism of Clinton was based on substantive differences, but a fair amount was irrational and lacking in substance—I mean, things like the WSJ editorial page and Dan Burton on Vince Foster suicide. And those folks are more mainstream than Cynthia McKinney’s 9/11 conspiracy theories.
But there isn’t much of a real point here. Just a scholarly note about which names were originated by the left and which by the right.
There isn’t much to say to asdf, who seems to have endorsed racial purity and white supremacy and gone on to explicitly endorse anti-Semitism. But I do want to bring something up about stripping references to Christianity from the public square. I live somewhere where, a couple of years ago, an innocuous bit of public art was destroyed because some felt it might conceivably reflect a non-Christian religion. That’s one religion driving others out of the public square. The fact that the government isn’t allowed to give pride of place to Christianity on public property, not so much.
(Which reminds me, Nat, I saw this a few days later; I’m not in Utah anymore but I left some comments at the end. I did not actually wind up asking my friends still at Utah about the issue.)
Nat Whilk 05.05.06 at 12:00 pm
FWIW, the earliest time-stamped reference to “Bushitler” I can find is a post to fl.politics by one Mike Blackford on December 13, 2000, a month before Bush’s inauguration. It doesn’t sound like Mr. Blackford was a fan of the President-elect.
Matt Weiner 05.05.06 at 12:49 pm
You’re right, “Bushitler” (bet there are some pre-1992 occurrences too) is one that’s at least sometimes being used straight—in fact the top Google hit is anti-Bush, though the rest on the first page are right-wingers. But it’s puerile to do what Steve did, which is use these epithets to dismiss any criticism of Bush. Instapundit, for instance, does that far too often, and it provides an excuse to avoid engaging with substantive criticisms.
asdf 05.05.06 at 3:14 pm
‘white gentiles first’…swamps
Swamps… that’s real good abb. Just challenging presumptions, attacking the priveleged “cosmopolitan” view. Taking it to Casper Milquetoast, if you will. And now subject to such razor sharp whit…I am just crushed.
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