The state of Virginia, the home of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, W H Harrison, Tyler, and Wilson is in political crisis as the state faces not only political scandal of its Governor, Bob McDonnell, but also of its gubernatorial candidate to replace McDonnell, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who makes McDonnell look “progressive” by comparison, due to his extreme right wing social views! This is not saying that McDonnell is less right wing, but less confrontational in his public statements than Cuccinelli!
McDonnell, who has Presidential ambitions, has been shown to have accepted major gifts from a corporation which does business with the Virginia state government, including large amounts of cash given to his wife and children. There are already calls for his resignation, and it seems likely that he will face criminal charges and the possibility of time in prison.
But Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli also has accepted gifts from the same corporation, although he denies any wrongdoing, just as much as McDonnell so declares! The fact of a denial means nothing, however, as that is standard for politicians of both parties who are accused of wrongdoing, and almost always are shown to be engaged in just that, wrongdoing!
Cuccinelli has also been extremely controversial with his anti gay, anti women, anti immigrant, anti science crusade, stronger in rhetoric and action than even Governor McDonnell!
This gubernatorial nominee has abused his power as Attorney General, and called for the criminalization of private sex acts between adults, along with doing everything he can to insure that ObamaCare is never instituted in the state of Virginia. He has also worked to intimidate all immigrants of Hispanic-Latino ancestry in Virginia. He has also campaigned against the promotion of environmental standards on global warming, declared war on science, and attempted to intimidate various state university faculty who promote such standards. And he is a leader in taking away the rights of women to their own reproductive lives!
To top it off, Cuccinelli’s running mate for Lieutenant Governor, an African American minister named E. W. Jackson, has made statements that make him seem even more extreme than Cuccinelli himself, Jackson has said that the Great Society programs of the 1960s under Lyndon B. Johnson were worse than slavery had been for African Americans! He also has declared that homosexuals and Planned Parenthood are worse than the Ku Klux Klan ever was, and that Barack Obama has Muslim tendencies!
These crazy lunatic statements have made the team of Cuccinelli and Jackson extremely right wing, and with the corruption surrounding both McDonnell and Cuccinelli as well, it has made Virginia a center of controversy and embarrassment that can only be ended by the hoped for victory of Democrat Terry McAuliffe, former head of the Democratic National Committee, who would be in the tradition of former Democratic Governors Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, who now grace the two Senate seats from Virginia!
Supposed Crimes of the Mind-
With hate speech, it’s the perceived ideology of the perpetrator that matters most.
When do insensitive words destroy reputations?
It all depends.
Celebrity chef Paula Deen was dropped by her TV network, her publisher, and many of her corporate partners after she testified in a legal deposition that she used the N-word some 30 years ago. The deposition was made in a lawsuit against Deen and her brother over allegations of sexual and racial harassment.
Actor Alec Baldwin recently let loose with a barrage of homophobic crudities. Unlike Deen, Baldwin spewed his epithets in the present. He tweeted them publicly, along with threats of physical violence. So far he has avoided Paula Deen’s ignominious fate.
Does race determine whether a perceived slur is an actual slur?
It depends.
Some blacks use the N-word in ways supposedly different from those of ill-intentioned white racists. Testimony revealed that the late Trayvon Martin had used the N-word in reference to George Zimmerman and had also referred to Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker†who was following him.
Some members of the media have suggested that we should ignore such inflammatory words and instead focus on whether Zimmerman, who has been described as a “white Hispanic,†used coded racist language during his 911 call.
Actor Jamie Foxx offers nonstop racialist speech of the sort that a white counterpart would not dare. At the recent NAACP Image Awards (of all places), Foxx gushed: “Black people are the most talented people in the world.†Earlier, on Saturday Night Live, Foxx had joked of his recent role in a Quentin Tarantino movie: “I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?â€
Foxx has not suffered the fate of Paula Deen. He certainly has not incurred the odium accorded comedian Michael Richards, who crudely used the N-word in 2006 toward two African-American hecklers of his stand-up routine.
Yet whites at times seem exempt from any fallout over the slurring of blacks. Democratic Minnesota state representative Ryan Winkler recently tweeted of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s vote to update the Voting Rights Act: “VRA majority is four accomplices to race discrimination and one Uncle Thomas.†Winkler’s implication was that four of the jurists were veritable racists, while Thomas was a sellout. After a meek apology, nothing much happened to Winkler.
Winkler’s “Uncle Thomas†racial slur was mild in comparison to the smear of Justice Thomas by MSNBC talking head and African-American professor Michael Eric Dyson, who made incendiary on-air comments invoking Hitler and the Holocaust.
Does profanity against women destroy celebrity careers? Apparently not.
TV talk-show host Bill Maher used two vulgar slang terms with reference to Sarah Palin, without any major consequences.
Those Palin slurs were mild in comparison to late-night television icon David Letterman’s crude riff that Palin’s then-14-year-old daughter had been impregnated by baseball star Alex Rodriguez.
In contrast, when talk-show host Rush Limbaugh demeaned activist Sandra Fluke as a “slut,†outrage followed. Sponsors were pressured to drop Limbaugh. Some did. Unlike the targeted Palin, Fluke became a national icon of popular feminist resistance.
So how do we sort out all these slurs and the contradictory consequences that follow them?
Apparently, racist, sexist, or homophobic words themselves do not necessarily earn any rebuke. Nor is the race or gender of the speaker always a clue to the degree of outrage that follows.
Instead, the perceived ideology of the perpetrator is what matters most. Maher and Letterman, being good liberals, could hardly be crude sexists. But when the conservative Limbaugh uses similar terms, it must be a window into his dark heart.
It’s apparently OK for whites or blacks to slur the conservative Clarence Thomas in racist terms. Saying anything similar of the late liberal justice Thurgood Marshall would have been blasphemous.
In short, we are dealing not with actual word crimes, but with supposed thought crimes.
The liberal media and popular culture have become our self-appointed thought police. Politics determines whether hate speech is a reflection of real hate or just an inadvertent slip, a risqué joke, or an anguished reaction to years of oppression.
Poor Paula Deen. She may protest accusations of racism by noting that she supported Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. But the media instead fixate on her Southern accent and demeanor, which supposedly prove her speech was racist in a way that utterances by the left-wing and cool Jamie Foxx could never be.
We cannot forgive the conservative Mel Gibson for his despicable, drunken anti-Semitic rant. But it appears we can pardon the liberal Alec Baldwin for his vicious, homophobic outburst. The former smears are judged by the thought police to be typical, but the latter slurs are surely aberrant.
The crime is not hate speech, but hate thought — a state of mind that apparently only self-appointed liberal referees can detect. – Victor Davis Hanson
Yes Readers, Juan is mentally unstable with the evidence of his “Ted Kaczynski” type manifesto rants. I wonder if he knows that no one takes time to even read his deranged brain droppings.
I give you this last ranting posting of his socially inept community standings.
You can tell by the way he writes that this person does not have the exposure of what is needed to write college papers much less one in a degree that is based on “Logical Argumentation.”
Even when I have pointed out his pitfalls…he keeps making the same old habits of demonstrating his lack of education of what would be required in higher education.
Of course Professor and other readers, this is all rhetorical.
“Is Obama destroying the Republican Party? No, the Republican establishment is destroying the Republican Party. The only reason they’re in the majority in the House is because of conservatives — conservatives across the country, the grassroots. They lost the Senate. They like to point to two races, one in Missouri and one in Indiana. I can point to ten races where there were liberal-to-moderate Republicans who lost, and of course they never mention that.
The fact of the matter is until the Republican leadership that has brought us McCain and Romney, that has a feckless RNC, a preposterously incompetent get-out-the-vote operation, is removed and replaced, with fresh, smart, confident, knowledgeable people, until some of our backbenchers move to the front, some of the young Tea Party conservative candidates who can articulate our vision and our principles, this is going to continue.
Obama may want to destroy the Republican Party, but the Republican Party is imploding. And, you know what, it needs to be cleansed. It needs to be cleaned out. Not for purity reasons, not for absolutism, but because it needs to be a party that stands for something. Can anyone tell me what the Republican Party stands for today? What the hell does the Republican Party stand for? What does the Republican Party stand for today? Limited government? When? Where? How? Border security? National security? No. If you’re not for border security, you’re not for national security. So they’re not for national security. So what are they for? Cutting spending? Where? When? How? Even when they controlled the whole damn government, did they control spending? No!” – M.L.