Sunday, August 12, 2018

Journalism 101: Who? Racists. What, why, and how? Racism. Where? Some busto golf club in Jersey


By A.J. Liebling
Meta-Content Generator

The congregation of twenty white racists in downtown Washington on the anniversary of Heather Heyer's murder in Charlottesville by white racists might be a good occasion to write a think piece about white racists, whether rampaging in the streets in Washington or kicking golf balls out of the rough at some pisspoor golf course in New Jersey.

But if you're The Washington Post, it's just another occasion to dance around the 299-pound elephant in the Oval Office: the indisputable fact that President U Bum is, as amply demonstrated by his own misconduct and hate speech, a racist.

The ostensible peg for the piece was the Bigot-in-Chief's stalwart condemnation of “all forms of racism,” presented by the Post as a sincere change from U Bum's previous embrace of neo-Nazi skull-crushers.  Of course, it's nothing of the sort; it's a restatement of the white apologists' position that persons on all sides (that is, both the victims and the perpetrators of racism) are guilty of racism (a term that such white racism-deniers falsely deem to include calling out racism).

How do we know this?  Because the same day's Post tells us so, in a piece by Philip Bump:
On the surface, condemning racism in any form seems noncontroversial. Of course racism should be condemned. What makes Trump’s comments questionable, though, is that it goes out of its way to include a condemnation of “all types” of racism, instead of simply condemning “racism.” By pointedly adding “all types,” he’s implicitly raising the question of which types of racism might be overlooked unless they were included. And a natural answer to that question is perceived racism against white people.
So we shouldn't have been surprised that we also read in the same day's Post that the gaggle of loser white racists herded into a little ball by DC police for their own protection claimed their hate fest was in fact a rally for “white civil rights.”

Why not call out the Bigot-in-Chief as the racist he is?  The analysis in question carefully takes into account all factors other than the truth.  He hired Omarosa!  (And then called her a “lowlife” in a classic white racist aspersion of the moral character of a person of color.  By Tuesday she'll probably be a “thug.”*)

Also a white cracker from South Carolina who channeled his unjustifiable rage and entitlement into an effort to reverse the 1996 Presidential election on the basis of lovin' says that the Tangerine-Faced Grifter doesn't have a racist bone in his body.  Tell us more, Lindsay Graham: “Graham, who spent considerable time at Bedminster over the past week, added: “It is how you react to him. It is not the color of your skin, it is not the content of your character. It is what you say about him.””

“In an event with racial overtones . . . ”
Well, that's enough for the objective journalists at The Washington Post to conclude that the issue is in doubt.  Their effort to obfuscate the obvious is aided enormously by their failure to provide the context needed to decode the screeching whistles that his adoring white mobs understand.  The Post hacks dutifully remind us that U Bum began his campaign by announcing that Mexico was deliberating exporting his rapists and criminals to the United States, a classic racist trope enjoyed by all white folks gathered together in a lynch mob.

The piece also recalls U Bum's slurs against distinguished politicians and sports stars of color on the ground that they are stupid.  If you can't decode this classic slur as a racist attack on the supposedly inherent inferiority of black people, then we've got a bell curve to sell you, not to mention a whole bale of justifications for slavery and secession.

To white folks with even a lima bean of wit, and all persons of color, U Bum's performance indubitably marks him as a racist, but the Post hacks will go no further than to note that “Trump’s racially charged statements continued to draw backlash.”

What could the Post be so afraid of?  Failing to describe reality as it is does not make it one whit less likely that white racists and U Bum apologists will continue to rail against media that publish fact-based reporting.  We'll dare to go further and say that the failure of real journalists to call out the Grifter-in-Chief's racism provides cover for bad-faith white supremacist platforms, like Fox News, to claim credibly that if you think the Traitor-in-Chief is a racist, that's a defect in your character, to borrow Sen. Blanche duBois's formula.

In any event, it degrades journalism and public debate to pretend that there are two sides to the debate over whether Germany invaded Poland in 1939.  There's only one objective way to cover racism, whether articulated by two dozen white losers in Washington or one obese white grifter at his busto golf course, and CNN's Michelle Kosinski shows us how:
*UPDATE, August 15:  We were so close!  By Tuesday, she was a “dog.”

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