Warning to all black children in America: Don’t stare at the police. If you do, you’ll get slammed on the floor and choked by a 200lb + officer.

From the Miami New Times:

Fourteen-year-old Tremaine McMillian didn’t threaten police. He didn’t attack them. He wasn’t armed. All the black teenager did was appear threatening by shooting Miami-Dade police officers a few “dehumanizing stares,” and that was apparently enough for the officers to decide to slam him against the ground and put him in a chokehold.

During Memorial Day weekend, McMillian was rough-housing with another teenager on the sand. Police approached the teen on an ATV and told him that wasn’t acceptable behavior. They asked him where his parents were, but MicMillian attempted to walk away. The officer jumped off the ATV, and tried to physically restrain the teen.

The video footage of the arrest, is, for lack of a better word, disgusting:

According to  the Miami-Dade Police, McMillian tried to pull away, which apparently constituted a “threat.” The teenager was charged with a felony count of resisting arrest with violence and disorderly conduct.

Obviously there is going to be an investigation, but the evidence against the Miami-Dade Police is, well, pretty goddamn obvious.

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By Robert Parry

Racism has been a consistent thread weaving through the American Right from the early days when Anti-Federalists battled against the U.S. Constitution to the present when hysterical Tea Partiers denounce the first African-American president. Other factors have come and gone for the Right, but racism has always been there.

Though definitions of Right and Left are never precise, the Left has generally been defined, in the American context, by government actions – mostly the federal government responding to popular movements and representing the collective will of the American people – seeking to improve the lot of common citizens and to reduce social injustice.

President Thomas Jefferson in a portrait by Rembrandt Peale.

The Right has been defined by opposition to such government activism. Since the Founding, the Right has decried government interference with the “free market” and intrusion upon “traditions,” like slavery and segregation, as “tyranny” or “socialism.”

This argument goes back to 1787 and opposition to the Constitution’s centralizing of government power in the hands of federal authorities. In Virginia, for instance, the Anti-Federalists feared that a strong federal government eventually would outlaw slavery in the Southern states.

Ironically, this argument was raised by two of the most famous voices for “liberty,” Patrick Henry and George Mason. Those two Virginians spearheaded the Anti-Federalist cause at the state’s ratifying convention in June 1788, urging rejection of the Constitution because, they argued, it would lead to slavery’s demise.

The irony of Henry and Mason scaring fellow Virginians about the Constitution’s threat to slavery is that the two men have gone down in popular U.S. history as great espousers of freedom. Before the Revolution, Henry was quoted as declaring, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Mason is hailed as a leading force behind the Bill of Rights. However, their notion of “liberty” and “rights” was always selective. Henry and Mason worried about protecting the “freedom” of plantation owners to possess other human beings as property.

At Virginia’s Ratification Convention, Henry and Mason raised other arguments against the proposed Constitution, such as concerns that Virginia’s preeminence might not be as great as under the weak Articles of Confederation and that population gains in the North might erode Virginia’s economic welfare.

But the pair’s most potent argument was the danger they foresaw regarding the abolition of slavery. As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg wrote in their 2010 book, Madison and Jefferson, the hot button for Henry and Mason was that “slavery, the source of Virginia’s tremendous wealth, lay politically unprotected.”

The Slavery Card

At the center of this fear was the state’s loss of ultimate control over its militia which could be “federalized” by the President as the nation’s commander in chief under the new Constitution.

“Mason repeated what he had said during the Constitutional Convention: that the new government failed to provide for ‘domestic safety’ if there was no explicit protection for Virginians’ slave property,” Burstein and Isenberg wrote. “Henry called up the by-now-ingrained fear of slave insurrections – the direct result, he believed, of Virginia’s loss of authority over its own militia.”

Henry floated conspiracy theories about possible subterfuges that the federal government might employ to deny Virginians and other Southerners the “liberty” to own African-Americans. Describing this fear-mongering, Burstein and Isenberg wrote:

“Congress, if it wished, could draft every slave into the military and liberate them at the end of their service. If troop quotas were determined by population, and Virginia had over 200,000 slaves, Congress might say: ‘Every black man must fight.’ For that matter, a northern-controlled Congress might tax slavery out of existence.

“Mason and Henry both ignored the fact that the Constitution protected slavery on the strength of the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the slave trade clause. Their rationale was that none of this mattered if the North should have its way.”

At Philadelphia in 1787, the drafters of the Constitution had already capitulated to the South’s insistence on its brutal institution of human enslavement. That surrender became the line of defense that James Madison, a principal architect of the new governing structure, cited in his response to Mason and Henry.

Burstein and Isenberg wrote, “Madison rose to reject their conspiratorial view. He argued that the central government had no power to order emancipation, and that Congress would never ‘alienate the affections five-thirteenths of the Union’ by stripping southerners of their property. ‘Such an idea never entered into any American breast,’ he said indignantly, ‘nor do I believe it ever will.’

“Madison was doing his best to make Henry and Mason sound like fear-mongers. Yet Mason struck a chord in his insistence that northerners could never understand slavery; and Henry roused the crowd with his refusal to trust ‘any man on earth’ with his rights. Virginians were hearing that their sovereignty was in jeopardy.”

Despite the success of Mason and Henry to play on the fears of plantation owners, the broader arguments stressing the advantages of Union carried the day, albeit narrowly. Virginia ultimately approved ratification by 89 to 79. However, the South’s obsession over perceived threats to its institution of slavery remained a central factor in the early decades of the Republic.

Arming Whites

Though today’s Right pretends that the Second Amendment was devised to give individual Americans the right to own and carry any weapon of their choice – so they can shoot policemen, soldiers and other government representatives in the cause of anti-government “liberty” – it was primarily a concession to the states and especially to the South’s fears that were expressed at the Virginia convention.

Approved by the First Congress as part of the “Bill of Rights,” the Second Amendment explained its purpose as the need to maintain “the security of a free State,” an echo of Mason’s concerns about “domestic safety,” i.e. a Southern state’s ability to maintain slavery by force and defend against slave uprisings.

As the amendment emerged from various committee rewrites, it stated: “A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” But that right, of course, did not extend to all people, not to people of color.

The Second Congress put substance to the structure of state militias by passing the Militia Acts, which specifically mandated that “white men” of military age obtain muskets and other supplies for participation in state militias. At the time, the concerns were not entirely over rebellious slaves, but also over rebellious poor whites.

Part of the backdrop of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had been Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts in 1786-1787, an uprising of white farmers led by a former Continental Army officer, Daniel Shays. After ratification of the Constitution, the first significant use of federalized militias was in 1794 to crush an anti-tax revolt in western Pennsylvania led by poor whites known as the Whiskey Rebellion.

That uprising was treated as an act of treason as defined by the U.S. Constitution, although President Washington used his pardon power to spare rebel leaders from execution by hanging. Similar mercy was not shown when Southern states confronted actual or suspected slave revolts. In 1800, Virginia Gov. James Monroe called out the militia to stop an incipient slave uprising known as Gabriel’s Rebellion. Twenty-six alleged conspirators were hanged.

Jeffersonian Influences

Of course, slavery and racism were not the only defining characteristics of the Right during the country’s early years, as economic interests diverged and political rivalries surfaced. James Madison, for instance, had been a key protégé of George Washington and an ally of Alexander Hamilton during the fight for the Constitution.

Madison had even advocated for a greater concentration of power in the federal government, including giving Congress the explicit power to veto state laws. However, after the Constitution was in place, Madison began siding with his Virginian neighbor (and fellow slave-owner) Thomas Jefferson in political opposition to the Federalists.

In the first years of the constitutional Republic, the Federalists, led by President Washington and Treasury Secretary Hamilton, pushed the limits of federal power, particularly with Hamilton’s idea of a national bank which was seen as favoring the financial interests of the North to the detriment of the more agrarian South.

The Jeffersonians, coalescing around Jefferson and Madison, fiercely opposed Hamilton’s national economic planning though the differences often seemed to be driven by personal animosities and regional rivalries as much as by any grand ideological vision regarding government authority. The Jeffersonians, for instance, were sympathetic to the bloody French Revolution, which made a mockery of the rule of law and the restraint of government power.

Nevertheless, history has generally been kind to Jefferson’s enthusiasm for a more agrarian America and his supposed commitment to the common man. But what is left out of this praise for “Jeffersonian democracy” is that Jefferson’s use of the word “farmers” was often a euphemism for his actual political base, the slave-owning plantation aristocrats of the South.

At his core, despite his intellectual brilliance, Jefferson was just another Southern hypocrite. He wrote that “all men are created equal” (in the Declaration of Independence) but he engaged in pseudo-science to portray African-Americans as inferior to whites (as he did in his Notes on the State of Virginia).

His racism rationalized his own economic and personal reliance on slavery. While desperately afraid of slave rebellions, he is alleged to have taken a young slave girl, Sally Hemings, as a mistress.

Jefferson’s hypocrisy also surfaced in his attitudes toward a slave revolt in the French colony of St. Domingue, where African slaves took seriously the Jacobins’ cry of “liberty, equality and fraternity.” After their demands for freedom were rebuffed and the brutal French plantation system continued, violent slave uprisings followed. Hundreds of white plantation owners were slain as the rebels overran the colony. A self-educated slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture emerged as the revolution’s leader, demonstrating skills on the battlefield and in the complexities of politics.

The ‘Black Jacobins’

Despite the atrocities committed by both sides of the conflict, the rebels – known as the “Black Jacobins” – gained the sympathy of the American Federalists. L’Ouverture negotiated friendly relations with the Federalist administration under President John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, a native of the Caribbean himself, helped L’Ouverture draft a constitution.

But events in Paris and Washington soon conspired to undo the promise of Haiti’s emancipation from slavery. Despite the Federalist sympathies, many American slave-owners, including Jefferson, looked nervously at the slave rebellion in St. Domingue. Jefferson feared that slave uprisings might spread northward. “If something is not done, and soon done,” Jefferson wrote in 1797, “we shall be the murderers of our own children.”

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the chaos and excesses of the French Revolution led to the ascendance of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant and vain military commander possessed of legendary ambition. As he expanded his power across Europe, Napoleon also dreamed of rebuilding a French empire in the Americas.

In 1801, Jefferson became the third President of the United States – and his interests at least temporarily aligned with Napoleon’s. The French dictator wanted to restore French control of St. Domingue and Jefferson wanted to see the slave rebellion crushed. President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison collaborated with Napoleon through secret diplomatic channels. Napoleon asked Jefferson if the United States would help a French army traveling by sea to St. Domingue. Jefferson replied that “nothing will be easier than to furnish your army and fleet with everything and reduce Toussaint [L’Ouverture] to starvation.”

But Napoleon had a secret second phase of his plan that he didn’t share with Jefferson. Once the French army had subdued L’Ouverture and his rebel force, Napoleon intended to advance to the North American mainland, basing a new French empire in New Orleans and settling the vast territory west of the Mississippi River.

Stopping Napoleon

In 1802, the French expeditionary force achieved initial success against the slave army, driving L’Ouverture’s forces back into the mountains. But, as they retreated, the ex-slaves torched the cities and the plantations, destroying the colony’s once-thriving economic infrastructure. L’Ouverture, hoping to bring the war to an end, accepted Napoleon’s promise of a negotiated settlement that would ban future slavery in the country. As part of the agreement, L’Ouverture turned himself in.

But Napoleon broke his word. Jealous and contemptuous of L’Ouverture, who was regarded by some admirers as a general with skills rivaling Napoleon’s, the French dictator had L’Ouverture shipped in chains back to Europe where he was mistreated and died in prison.

Infuriated by the betrayal, L’Ouverture’s young generals resumed the war with a vengeance. In the months that followed, the French army – already decimated by disease – was overwhelmed by a fierce enemy fighting in familiar terrain and determined not to be put back into slavery. Napoleon sent a second French army, but it too was destroyed. Though the famed general had conquered much of Europe, he lost 24,000 men, including some of his best troops, in St. Domingue before abandoning his campaign. The death toll among the ex-slaves was much higher, but they had prevailed, albeit over a devastated land.

By 1803, a frustrated Napoleon – denied his foothold in the New World – agreed to sell New Orleans and the Louisiana territories to Jefferson, a negotiation handled by Madison that ironically required just the sort of expansive interpretation of federal powers that the Jeffersonians ordinarily disdained. However, a greater irony was that the Louisiana Purchase, which opened the heart of the present United States to American settlement and is regarded as possibly Jefferson’s greatest achievement as president, had been made possible despite Jefferson’s misguided – and racist – collaboration with Napoleon.

“By their long and bitter struggle for independence, St. Domingue’s blacks were instrumental in allowing the United States to more than double the size of its territory,” wrote Stanford University professor John Chester Miller in his book, The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. But, Miller observed, “the decisive contribution made by the black freedom fighters … went almost unnoticed by the Jeffersonian administration.”

Consequences of Racism

Without L’Ouverture’s leadership, the island nation fell into a downward spiral. In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the radical slave leader who had replaced L’Ouverture, formally declared the nation’s independence and returned it to its original Indian name, Haiti. A year later, apparently fearing a return of the French, Dessalines ordered the massacre of the remaining French whites on the island. Jefferson reacted to the bloodshed by imposing a stiff economic embargo on Haiti. In 1806, Dessalines himself was brutally assassinated, touching off a cycle of political violence that would haunt Haiti for the next two centuries.

Even in his final years, Jefferson remained obsessed with Haiti and its link to the issue of American slavery. In the 1820s, the former president proposed a scheme for taking away the children born to black slaves in the United States and shipping them to Haiti. In that way, Jefferson posited that both slavery and America’s black population could be phased out. Eventually, in Jefferson’s view, Haiti would be all black and the United States white.

While the racism of Jefferson and many of his followers may be undeniable, it is not so easy to distinguish between Right and Left in those early years of the American Republic. Though Hamilton was more open-minded toward freedom for black slaves, there were elements of his government intervention on behalf of the fledgling financial sector that might today be regarded as “pro-business” or elitist as there were parts of Jefferson’s attitude toward greater populism that might be seen as more “democratic.”

Stumbling toward War

Yet, as the first generation of American leaders passed away and the nation expanded westward, the issue of slavery remained a threat to America’s unity. The South’s aggressive defense of its lucrative institution of slavery opened violent rifts between pro-slave and pro-free settlers in territories to the west.

The modern distinctions between America’s Right and Left also became more pronounced, defined increasingly by race. The North, building a manufacturing economy and influenced by the emancipationist movement, turned increasingly against slavery, while the South, with a more agrarian economy and much of its capital invested in slaves, could see no future without the continuation of slavery.

Politically, those distinctions played out not unlike what Anti-Federalists George Mason and Patrick Henry had predicted at Virginia’s ratification convention in 1788. The North gradually gained dominance in wealth and population and the South’s barbaric practice of slavery emerged as a hindrance to America’s growing reputation in the world.

So, a key divide of U.S. politics between Right and Left became the differences over issues of slavery and race. The racist aspects of the Anti-Federalists and the “Jeffersonian democrats” became a defining feature of the American Right as captured in the argument for “states’ rights,” i.e., the rights of the Southern states either to nullify federal laws or to secede from the Union.

Though the concentration of power in Washington D.C. gave rise to legitimate questions about authoritarianism, the federal government also became the guiding hand for the nation’s economic development and for elimination of gross regional injustices such as slavery. Federal action in defense of national principles regarding justice eventually helped define the American Left.

But the slave-owning South would not go down without a fight. After the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860, 11 Southern states seceded from the Union and established the Confederate States of America with the goal of perpetuating slavery forever. It took four years of war to force the Southern states back into the Union and finally bring slavery to an end.

However, the Southern aristocracy soon reclaimed control of the region’s political structure and instituted nearly a century more of racial oppression against blacks. During this Jim Crow era, racism – and the cruel enforcement of racial segregation – remained central elements of the American Right.

An Anti-Government Coalition

In the latter half of the Nineteenth Century and the early Twentieth Century, other political and economic factors bolstered the Right, particularly a class of Northern industrialists and financiers known as the Robber Barons. Their insistence on laissez-faire economics in the North – and their opposition to reformers such as Theodore Roosevelt – dovetailed with anti-federal attitudes among the South’s white aristocracy.

That coalition, however, was shattered by a string of Wall Street panics and other economic catastrophes culminating in the Great Depression. With millions of Americans out of work and many facing starvation, Franklin Roosevelt’s administration initiated the New Deal which put people back to work building national infrastructure and imposing government regulations on the freewheeling ways of Wall Street.

Under Roosevelt, laws were changed to respect the rights of labor unions and social movements arose demanding greater civil rights for blacks and women. The Left gained unprecedented ascendance. However, the old alliance of rich Northern industriasts and Southern segregationists saw dangers in this new assertion of federal power. The business barons saw signs of “socialism” and the white supremacists feared “race-mixing.”

After World War II – with the United States now a world superpower – the continued existence of institutionalized racism became an embarrassment undermining America’s claim to be a beacon of human freedom. Finally, spurred on by Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists, the federal government finally moved against the South’s practice of segregation. That reignited the long-simmering conflict between federal power and states’ rights.

Though the federal government prevailed in outlawing racial segregation, the Right’s anger over this intrusion upon Southern traditions fueled a powerful new movement of right-wing politicians. Since the Democratic Party led the fight against segregation in the 1960s, Southern whites rallied to the Republican Party as their vehicle of political resistance.

Opportunistic politicians, such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, deftly exploited the white backlash and turned much of the Dixie-crat South into solid Republican Red. This resurgence of white racial resentments also merged with a reassertion of “libertarian” economics as memories of the Great Depression faded. In essence, the late Nineteenth Century alliance between segregationist whites in the South and laissez-faire businessmen in the North was being reestablished.

This right-wing collaboration reached a new level of intensity in 2008 after the election of the first African-American president whose victory reflected the emergence of a multi-racial electorate threatening to end the historic white political domination of the United States. With the election also coming amid a Wall Street financial collapse – after years of reduced government regulation — Barack Obama’s arrival also portended a renewal of federal government activism. Thus, the age-old battle was rejoined.

Yet, given the cultural tenor of the time, the Right found it difficult to engage in overt racial slurs against Obama, nor could it openly seek to deny voting rights to black and brown people. New code words were needed. So Obama’s legitimacy as an American was questioned with spurious claims that he had been born in Kenya, and Republicans demanded tighter ballot security to prevent “voter fraud.”

Today’s Right also recognized that it could not simply emphasize its Confederate heritage. A more politically correct re-branding was needed. So, the Right shifted its imagery from the “Stars and Bars” battle flag of the Confederacy to the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag of the American Revolution. That way, Americans who don’t overtly see themselves as racist could be drawn into the movement. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Right’s Re-Branding: 1860 to 1776.”]

However, the historical narrative that the Right constructed around the nation’s Founding was not the one that actually happened. In seeking to present themselves as the true defenders of the Constitution, the Right had to air-brush out the failed experiment with the Articles of Confederation, which had made the states “sovereign” and “independent” with the central government just a “league of friendship.”

The Constitution represented the nation’s greatest transfer of power into federal hands in U.S. history, as engineered by Washington, Madison and Hamilton. Indeed, Madison favored even greater dominance by the central government over the states than he ultimately got in the Constitution.

However, in the Right’s revisionist version, the Articles of Confederation are forgotten and the Framers were simply out to create a governing system with strong states’ rights and a weak federal government. That fabrication played well with an uneducated right-wing base that could then envision itself using its Second Amendment rights to fight for the Framers’ vision of “liberty.”

As this right-wing narrative now plays out, Barack Obama is not only a black Muslim “socialist” oppressing liberty-loving white Christian Americans but he is a “tyrant” despoiling the beautiful, nearly divine, God-inspired Constitution that the Framers bestowed upon the nation — including, apparently, those wonderful provisions protecting slavery.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

(Originally posted at Consortium News)

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I wrote a piece yesterday arguing that Bill Maher’s lampooning of Wayne Brady for not being ‘black’ enough went too far. I tweeted the piece to Brady (who I started following) and noticed some awful comments on his feed that he had retweeted. This one stuck out from black militant Jennifer@JennyWOKE:

Brady replied to her saying something along the lines of “My daughter feels sorry for you”(although the tweet is no longer there), which then prompted the following response:

For some reason, I felt the need to respond to Jennifer and take her to task for her extraordinary ignorance and racism. I should have known  better. The argument descended into a slanging match with me calling her a stupid racist and her calling me a ‘fucking talking meatball’ and asking me to pass her ‘a bagel to nosh on’. (you can check the argument on my twitterfeed for the blow by blow).

I left the conversation recommending she read all of Malcolm X, rather than the first half which went down predictably well (“white people are so helpful. Where would we be without their guidance?” she tweeted back).

While my blood boiled and I wanted to carry on, it dawned on me that engaging with incomprehensibly stupid people on Twitter was not the best idea for the following reasons:

1. It’s on Twitter. You have 140 characters per message – hardly enough to articulate anything meaningful other than insults.

2. Some people really are stupid beyond belief. Anyone spouting racial purity ideology in America in 2013 clearly doesn’t have much brain power.

3. Jennifer@JennyWOKE has 33 followers (and that’s after being retweeted by Wayne Brady, who has 145,439 followers). She isn’t exactly a leading figure in the black community. I might as well have been tweeting to thin air.

4. It’s better to not give racist idiots a platform to air their views. Engaging with Jenny only meant she got to spout her offensive views to a wider audience. She’s had her one-tweet-of-fame moment, and that’s enough.

5. I had left my clothes in the washing machine all day and needed to get them out. Now they need washing again.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Daily Banter Mailbag! Today, Bob, Ben and Chez discuss Margaret Thatcher, the “Accidental Racist” song, and the Point Break remake.

The questions:

1) I never much liked Margaret Thatcher but I think the reaction of some liberals to her death has been disgusting. They all but pissed on her grave. What do you guys think?
– Brian

Chez: Thatcher did a lot of really terrible things in England that hurt A LOT of people and the consequences of her political decisions are still being felt today. She stood for almost everything I stand against. But that being said, I agree with you — with a few rare exceptions I can’t imagine rejoicing in somebody’s death. Certainly not because I happened to disagree with that person’s politics. I was thrilled when Bin Laden was killed, but he was a terrorist who, among other things, killed 3,000 Americans with one shot. Yeah, there’s probably an argument to be made that Thatcher too caused pain and suffering, but it’s not a fair comparison. It’s ghoulish to openly mock the very recently deceased and it’s also a bad idea from a PR standpoint. I don’t like it when those who disagree with my politics do the Snoopy dance when something terrible happens to someone I admire; we expect people to react like civilized, decent human beings and not behave that way and we make comments like “stay classy” when they don’t. Best not to set yourself up to be a hypocrite when you’re on the other end of that situation.

Bob: I can certainly understand the notion of celebrating a deplorable political leader leaving office, but, like Chez, I don’t grasp why her death was somehow a victory for anyone. It’s not like her post-political life was a disaster for liberalism and she needed to be stopped, so hooray for death! All of that said, I didn’t necessarily see a systemic display of liberal jubilation — just the usual internet-age gaggle of anonymous trolls and instigators.

Ben: I wrote about this earlier during the week and argued against celebrating Thatcher, or anyone else’s death. A personal story – I grew up with a kid in my area who used to pick on me and some of my friends. He was a nasty bully who became a time drug dealer (and from what I heard), did time in prison for stabbing someone. We would see each other on and off for years, and the majority of the  interactions were pretty horrible. The last time I saw him, we ended up in a very nasty confrontation when I refused to take any nonsense from him. I won’t go into detail, but I was a grown man by then, and it didn’t end well for him. Days after the altercation I received some pretty serious threats, and spent several years watching my back around my neighborhood. Then one day, I heard he had died from a drug overdose aged 25. It was a strange feeling given our history, but I couldn’t help feel sad for him. He had spent most of his life being unpleasant to people, and had caused a lot of pain. I obviously don’t miss the guy, but I hope that if there is any sort of existence after our life on earth, he is at peace. Why do I feel that way? Because I think death itself is nothing to be happy about, regardless of who it is . Thatcher may have done some terrible things while in office, but she at least deserves dignity in death.

2) I just finished listening to that new Brad Paisley song. I know it’s terrible but what I can’t understand is why southerners have all this pride they CAN’T suppress. This gets asked a lot, but what is it with the south? Why do they continue to revel in their confederate flags and their “heritage?” They lost the Civil War. The cause they were fighting for was wrong to begin with? Why can’t they get over it?
– Lydia

Bob: That’s a fantastic point, and I could write volumes about all of this so I’ll keep my answer as short as possible. Funny how we never hear about Northeastern pride or Pacific Northwest pride — certainly not to the degree we hear from Southerners about their beloved region. And, naturally, it all has to do with the Lost Cause Mythology, which involves the wistful memory of what could have been: a Southern nation and the loss of their war for independence. That’s how they see it, while the rest of us understand that the war was all about their desperate and bloody defense of slavery as a socioeconomic necessity. And because they lost the war, and lost their chance at self-government, militant Southerners continue to share a sense of loss and victimization. Since the end of the war, and throughout the last 150 years, the South has lashed out at African Americans and northerners who they blame for everything bad. Brad Paisley and way too many other white southerners don’t realize that the Civil War wasn’t the end of the road for African American oppression. The consequences of Southern slavery are alive and well today — in fact, one of our two major political parties still uses racial dogwhistles and the “Southern Strategy” to win elections. Make no mistake: Southern Pride is mostly about White Southern Pride, even though many Southerners don’t realize it or won’t admit it.

Ben: I wasn’t born in this country, so I don’t really feel comfortable taking pot shots at particular regions. I can talk shit about areas in England I don’t like, but I’m English and have a born right to do so. I’ve met quite a few Southerners in my time in America, the majority of whom have been exceptionally friendly. I will say this thought – I’m not a fan of their politics.

Chez: It’s because they did, in fact, lose the Civil War. You’ve got the dumbest, most patriarchal and pretend-macho region in the country being completely emasculated at the hands of those pussies to the north, and not only were they crushed but basically progress has left their way of thinking in the dust. So like the bully who just got his ass kicked on the playground, they keep trying to act tough to save face. The other thing is that, again, many of them still believe the wrong-ass ideals that led to the war in the first place and while they pretend they don’t — that the Confederate flag is just a shout-out to southern gentility or whatever-the-hell — they secretly love the idea of the South becoming a powerhouse again, something worthy of respect instead of mockery. I don’t know — I feel like my IQ is just dropping steadily as I continue to talk about that part of the country.

3) Why are they remaking “Point Break”?!? WHY?!?
– J. Utah

Chez: I honestly have no idea. My girlfriend and I have a joke that there’s never a time when we turn on the TV that we can’t find “Point Break” playing on at least one channel. Actually, it’s not really a joke since it’s true. It’s one thing to remake an older movie, maybe one that could benefit from today’s action pacing and updated special effects and shooting technology and techniques, but “Point Break” looks amazing even by today’s standards and although it’s not considered a “classic” it really is the kind of movie that caught lightning in a bottle. You can’t make that happen again and I think the studio trying to is going to be in for an unpleasant surprise.

Bob: Because too Americans spend money on films that are familiar instead of elevating truly original films. Hollywood only ever gives us what we want. And right now, we want mindless recycling of ideas instead of new ones.

Ben: It’s Hollywood in a nutshell. The industry these days is almost entirely about profits rather than producing quality movies. I mean, what do you expect from a town that churns out cinematic masterpieces like  Transformers 4 and Big Mommas House 3? There have actually been some pretty good movies recently, but the big studios don’t like to take risks and would rather pump money into titles they know will sell. Point Break the remake may not be a massive hit, but it will do the numbers given the name recognition. 

—–

Got a question for the mailbag? Email us at TheDailyBanter@gmail.com!!!

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Let’s be honest: Country songs aren’t exactly written with repeated playings at Mensa meetings in mind. With a few very notable exceptions, country music “artists” tend to eschew analogy and subtext in favor of just coming out and saying whatever the hell it is they’re trying to get across. When the guy who won this year’s Academy of Country Music award for Entertainer of the Year sings “Rain Is a Good Thing,” he’s not talking about a metaphoric rain that will wash away his pain so that a bright new day can dawn; he’s talking about rain. Rain that makes corn, which makes whiskey, which makes his baby feel frisky. And that’s, you know, a good thing. There’s not much depth to country music, and when a Hail Mary pass at profundity is attempted, it usually winds up sounding like the kind of thing you’d imagine coming from a frat boy who’s had too much to drink and is suddenly unleashing some of the sad poetry he secretly writes on you at 3am.

Which brings us to the new song by Brad Paisley. It’s called Accidental Racist and it’s about — get ready for the surprising wordplay — accidentally being viewed as a racist. In the song, Paisley laments how hard it for him these days as a white man who loves the South and is proud of it and of his Southern heritage. See, Paisley wants to be able to wear his confederate flag t-shirt, but he wants to make sure people know that by doing it he’s just saying, “Hey, I’m a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan.” (For the record, I’d be less embarrassed to say that I flaunt the stars-and-bars because I think black people should be kept as property than to admit that I like Lynyrd Skynyrd, but whatever.) He also says that he feels caught between “Southern pride and Southern blame,” cranking the melodramatic self-pity to unimaginable levels and creating what I can’t deny might be the very first emo country song.

In keeping with country music tradition I’ll dispense with the irony and sarcasm that risks going over people’s heads and just flat out say it: Accidental Racist is an unimaginably awful song, the kind of thing that’s so batshit insane that as you’re hearing it, you can’t believe you’re actually hearing it. And that’s before LL Cool J inexplicably comes in to provide an ebony-and-ivory-style counterbalance of racial misunderstanding by bemoaning the fact that white people apparently think he’s a hood because he wears gold chains. The point, I guess, is that everybody’s to blame and everybody needs to just put their prejudices and stereotypes away in the name of creating a better America, or at least one where white people can be free from the persecution that’s apparently dogged them for centuries. Can’t we all just get along, y’all?

I’m all about bucking political correctness, but to put the comically ridiculous conceit of white oppression to a crappy, “Freedom Costs a Buck-Oh-Five”-style country melody and try to sell it as a sober meditation on racism and a plea for social harmony is cynical at best, offensive at worst. Yeah, I know it sucks that Paisley and his fans can’t plaster the backs of their pick-ups with “The South’s Gonna Rise Again” bumper stickers without at least a couple of people thinking they’re redneck assholes, but trust me, it beats being on the other side of the history they’re claiming to honor. You know, being the people who were bought and sold at auction and who were regularly beaten whenever they stepped out of line. I’d try to wrap my head around why LL Cool J would have anything at all to do with such a mind-boggling endeavor, but I guess it’s important to note that this is LL Cool J we’re talking about — he’s not exactly known for being discerning when it comes to picking projects.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m pretty sure that Brad Paisley’s heart was in the right place with this. I think he probably really does believe he’s extending a “cotton branch” from the tradition-steeped South to the 21st century in the name of building bridges of racial understanding. But comparing white Southern pride with a love for the New York Yankees — claiming that they’re alike in passion and are equally benign — makes you either woefully misguided or monumentally fucking stupid. And if I’m wrong and Paisley’s in fact doing nothing more than tawdrily pandering to an audience that’s constantly looking for cultural absolution for sins it doesn’t really believe it committed in the first place, then Accidental Racist is even more repugnant than it seems to be at first blush.

As it stands, the song is a lunkheaded defense of the better parts of Southern history that masquerades as a halfhearted apology for the worse.

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I spent some time this morning familiarizing myself with the Republican Party’s “Growth and Opportunity Project” document, or “GOP” for short. Get it? It’s an unintentionally hilarious report that seeks to repair the demographic hemorrhaging at the federal level of the party — the accelerating marginalization of Republicans due to the same nonsense we witnessed over the weekend at CPAC.

RNC chairman and Mos Eisley cantina alien Reince Priebus introduced the report over the weekend in time for the conservative cosplay gathering in Maryland, and it sounds as if he’s ballyhooing the plan as the centerpiece of his legacy as chairman. Even though it was authored by Henry Barbour, Sally Bradshaw, Ari Fleischer, Zori Fonalledas, and Glenn McCall, it’s Priebus’ magic wand for fixing everything — I mean everything — that’s devouring the party.

Now, it’s important to preface by agreeing with one thing about this document: Priebus is well aware that his party is kicking ass at the state level, and it’s a claim that can’t be denied. Thirty states are controlled by Republican governors, that’s 315 electoral votes, and many of those states also boast Republican-controlled legislatures. It’d be a huge mistake to categorically write off the Republican Party because, at least for now, they appear to be dominating state and local politics, as evidenced by the daily blotter of awfulness from various state capitals, including union-busting, reproductive rights infringements, electoral tampering and so forth.

That said, at the national level, a majority of Americans generally wouldn’t cross the street to piss on a Republican’s shoe. In fact, the “GOP” (zing!) report included a brief description of two focus groups, one in Ohio and another in Iowa, in which Republican voters described their own part as “scary,” “narrow minded,” “out of touch” and the party of “stuffy old men.” Yikes.

Consequently, the party has only won the popular vote in one presidential election throughout the last 20 years and, in 2012, even though it retained control of the House of Representatives, more people voted for Democratic House candidates than Republicans. The national voting dynamics are lining up significantly against the party, and Priebus believes this “GOP” document (har-har) can solve the crisis.

So rather than trying to dissect all 100 pages (whatever happened to the GOP demand for short, easy-to-read documents?) I’ll hit the top-level section, “Demographic Partners,” and perhaps tackle further sections in the coming days.

The line that immediately jumped off the page was this — and try not to laugh:

“The Republican Party is one of tolerance and respect, and we need to ensure that the tone of our message is always reflective of these core principles.”

Hmm. Is it me or is this a strange thing to write, since the party’s grip on its base is entirely dependent upon intolerance and disrespect? As we’re all aware by now, the party routinely exploits Southern Strategy race-baiting as one of its primary campaign tactics as a means of getting its base out to the polls. A considerable section of the party wants to round up a deport undocumented workers, while others would like nothing more than to eliminate programs for the poor. Likewise, state level Republican success has much to do with returning women to second class status, while their reproductive organs are being hastily sanctioned as the purview of men who don’t mind condescending to women about what’s best for them.

And just in case anyone wants to accuse me of seeing racial dog-whistles and disrespect where it doesn’t exist, here are some very recent examples.

–During a panel at CPAC titled “Trump the Race Card: Are You Sick and Tired of Being Called a Racist and You Know You’re Not One?” an attendee stood up and, among other things, implied that Frederick Douglass and other former slaves should’ve been grateful to their former masters for providing them with “food and shelter.” Additionally, the attendee, a member of “Towson’s White Student Union,” asked the African American speaker, “Why can’t we just have segregation?” Other attendees applauded and cheered. Yeah, so much for the title of the lecture. Shocker: the Republican Party is loaded with racists.

–Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh said, “Young people have this almost romantic attachment to civil rights, civil liberties.” Oh those young dreamers and their silly romantic notions.

–One of the rising stars of the Republican Party and the best-received CPAC speaker, Rand Paul, is a nullification zealot whose roots extend back to John C. Calhoun and the states’ right pro-slavery fire-eaters of the early to mid 19th Century. Oh, and Rand Paul is opposed to key sections of the Civil Rights Act.

–Speaking of which, the party’s hero on the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia infamously referred to the Voting Rights Act as being a “racial entitlement.”

–Straight-talking Jersey maverick Chris Christie referred to an African American attendee at a town hall meeting as “boy.” During a contentious exchange about privatizing public schools (Christie supports vouchers — a back-door path to privatization), an black constituent shouted, “Fix the public schools.” Christie, in full dick-move fashion, “Yeah, I hear ya’ boy.”

The list goes on and on. The “GOP” report itself intends to lie to African American voters about its history:

“The African American community has a lot in common with the Republican Party, and it is important to share this rich history.”

And…

“Engage historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) with the goal of educating the community on Republican ideals and the Party’s history.”

Clearly, all of this refers to the fact that a Republican president freed the slaves and how southern Democrats supported segregation and Jim Crow laws. But what the modern Republicans probably won’t tell the so-called “HBCUs” is that southern Democrats were conservatives, and Lincoln had considerably more in common with modern center-left Democrats. He supported a strong central government (he raised troops and went to war to protect it), he staunchly opposed nullification and states’ rights, he authorized spending for the first transcontinental railroad (infrastructure!), he started the first national bank and he instituted the first federal income tax — all measures that would’ve made Lincoln a pariah in the eyes of today’s Republicans, especially the Rand Paul style libertarian Republicans. Coupling Lincoln with today’s Republicans is nothing short of a lie.

The very notion of entering “HBCUs” and “educating” them about the party’s history is utterly condescending — as if students at these universities aren’t aware of all of the above already, as if they don’t know what the Republican Party is all about when it comes to matters of race and reconciliation.

Tomorrow, I’ll cover more nonsense from the “GOP” report, though I can’t imagine it being more outrageous and absurd than the minority outreach section.

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When the Republicans determined that ACORN had somehow helped President Obama win the 2008 presidential election, and following a heavily-doctored video prank by James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart, the Republicans began a legislative witch hunt that ended with the total eradication of ACORN even though it really hadn’t done anything wrong — other than being conspiratorially associated with the Obama campaign. Oh, and it helped poor people, and Republicans will have none of that.

With the ACORN victory under its belt, the GOP aimed its crosshairs at Planned Parenthood. In this case, it wasn’t necessarily because it was associated with the Obama White House, but because of yet another selectively edited and therefore highly deceptive O’Keefe/Breitbart video. The de-funding campaign by the Republicans hasn’t yet been successful at the federal level, but Republican-controlled state legislatures are hard at work on the process, too, with successes in Ohio, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin — all of which have cut funding to the organization.

I’m sure you recall a video that circulated around the tubes before the election of an African American woman who was attending a roadside rally for the Obama campaign. In the video, the woman ranted somewhat incoherently about her apparently free “Obamaphone.” As soon as Drudge plastered her face above his logo, far-right Republican heads began to immediately explode over the notion of “minorities” receiving free phones from the White House as alleged bribes for volunteerism and votes.

Yesterday, Rep. Tim Griffin (R-Ark) announced that he and Michele Bachmann were co-sponsoring legislation to eliminate the so-called Obamaphone program.

The calculus is that everyone who votes for hooples like Griffin and Bachmann will believe that taxpayer money is being funneled by President Obama into fancy-shmancy cellphones for lazy, shiftless poor people (“lazy, shiftless” dog whistle words intentional). Why do they get a free iPhone (they don’t) when they can’t be bothered to get a job? And why do I have to pay for it with my money that I earned?! Makers and takers! Makers and takers!

The truth is that the Lifeline program has been around since 1984 when, that’s right, Ronald Reagan helped to create it. In 1996, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) set up a non-profit outfit called the Universal Service Administrative Company, which receives financial backing via the Universal Service Fund. According to its website, money for the program is contributed entirely by “long distance companies, local telephone companies, wireless telephone companies, paging companies, and payphone providers,” and none of the funding comes from taxpayers via the federal government. It’s all privately donated money.

Wingnut conspiracy theorists might ask how Reagan could possibly have anything to do with cellphones way back in 1984. Well, some time later, TracPhone Wireless created SafeLink, a cellphone service that was tacked onto the Lifeline program. SafeLink provides the minutes and TracPhone provides the phones. And, again, not a penny in funding comes from the federal government in any way, shape or form — in the same way that government funding isn’t used for Planned Parenthood abortion services. So when exactly did the SafeLink cellphone service begin? 2008, when George W. Bush was president.

Fact: President Obama has nothing to do with the program, that is unless he owns a time-traveling Delorean and traveled back to 1984.

Of course the goal of the program is to make sure low income Americans have access to an affordable telephone in case of emergency or for the job search process. Sure, it’s possible that some recipients have abused the service and used it for… who knows what. But there are abuses everywhere. It’d be like shutting down a soup kitchen because a few people went back for seconds of the corn casserole.

Instead of going after oil companies that receive massive taxpayer subsidies while earning record profits and simultaneously charging us high gas prices, the Republicans much prefer demagoguing and eliminating services like Lifeline and ACORN because it’ll score them points with their mouth-breathing, racist base. And party is all too willing to flat-out lie to its base in the process, knowing full well that the Drudge-fueled conspiracy theory was thoroughly debunked the second it appeared. But that doesn’t matter when there’s racial resentment and hatred to be exploited for a few more votes.

And so what happens if they succeed in eliminating the program? The federal budget and the deficit will remain unchanged in its absence; welfare recipients will lose access to affordable phone services making it more difficult to call an ambulance or to get job; and Bachmann and Griffin will get to say they snatched away those evil Obamaphones from evil, lazy and shiftless poor people who probably hate America, too.

By the way, while traditional news media pundits concern-troll the president’s recent approval ratings, perhaps they ought to take a good look at what the American people think of the congressional Republicans who only seem motivated to play grabass with legislation like this Griffin/Bachmann bill. Truth be told, the president’s approval rating is the same as it was on Election Day: 50 percent, with a 46 percent disapproval rating. The congressional Republicans on the other hand have a 23 percent approval rating and a whopping 72 percent disapproval.

Yeah, I wonder why. Hmm. What could it be?

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In a relative sense the American Civil War wasn’t that long ago. Soon after I was born, my parents took me to visit my great grandfather, Charles Davis, who everyone called “Pappy.” Pappy was living in a VA hospital in Aspinwall, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh and it was his 93rd birthday when he was photographed holding me in his arms. Pappy was a veteran of the Spanish-American War and Pappy’s father, Richard B. Davis, was a corporal with a Zouave regiment, the 155th PA, in the Union Army and fought at Little Round Top during the battle of Gettysburg, among other engagements.

That’s how recent the war was. As a baby I was once held by the son of a Civil War veteran.

But on the other hand, 150 years or so is a very long time when we consider post-war racial equality. As many of us observed in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in America for good, passed through Congress on its way to ratification in the states in early 1865. Yet the real struggle for racial equality had only just begun and, to this day, still hasn’t been fully realized.

On February 7, 2013, after all this time, the state of Mississippi finally ratified the amendment that abolished slavery.

The state House and Senate voted to ratify it back in 1995, but it wasn’t officially and legally recorded as a ratification until it was delivered by Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann (real name) to Charles A. Barth, director of the Office of the Federal Register. Last week. And this might not have happened at all if Dr. Ranjan Batra, an associate professor at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, hadn’t seen the movie Lincoln and been inspired to check on the status of the state’s approval of the amendment — again, an amendment that had been ratified by most of the states by the end of 1865.

Somehow, when I read this news yesterday, I wasn’t surprised. After all, over the weekend, one of the most discussed news stories was about a racist, slack-jawed hoople named Joe Ricky Hundley (also, real name). On the day after Mississippi finally ratified the 13th, Joe Ricky was traveling aboard Delta Flight 721. Seated behind him was Jessica Bennett and her two-year-old son. When the plane began to descend for landing, the boy began to cry.

Stop here. Whenever we read a news story like this, we automatically begin to imagine what we might’ve done in this situation. Flying is mostly a nightmarish exercise in humiliation and indignity. We’re all in the same predicament, though, so we struggle to put up our best attitude, our happy-faces, and endure it. But there’s always that one guy who thinks he’s in his own living room and everyone else is deliberately inconveniencing him. And he’s not afraid to say so. Joe Ricky is one of those guys times a thousand.

In an FBI affidavit, Bennett testified that Joe Ricky allegedly said to her, “Shut that nigger baby up.”

Classy. But that’s not all. CNN reported: “Hundley then turned around and slapped the 2-year-old in the face with an open hand, which caused the child to scream even louder, the affidavit said.”

And now, I think we can safely assume that if there’s one man in America who just about everyone wants to pummel about his soft, misshapen head, it’s Joe Ricky Hundley.

Yes, I know. We just re-elected our first African American president within a relatively short period of time since the Civil War and an even shorter span of time since the end of Jim Crow and the subsequent era of the Civil Rights Act. That said, we still have a considerably long way to go before the notion of racial intolerance and outright anti-black hatred is abandoned as a terrible relic of our collective past. Over the weekend, Matt Drudge invoked the “lazy and shiftless” racial stereotype against the president when he emphasized his golf trip with Tiger Woods, using the headline: “SPRING BREAK.” Again, this can only be a racial dog whistle since President Obama has taken fewer vacations than any modern president since Truman, other than Bill Clinton who holds the record for the fewest vacation days.

It’s not just Drudge and other members of the conservative entertainment complex, one of the two major political parties in America — the party that currently enjoys a majority in the House of Representatives and filibuster-strength in the Senate — continues to engage in the politics of racial fear. The most recent Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, went further than most recent Republican candidates, going back to the days of Lee Atwater, in his exploitation of the Southern Strategy — using coded language to scare whites into voting against an African American president.

Republican racism goes deeper than that. As Sam Tanenhaus wrote last week, the nullification movement in the Republican Party is on the rise again — the states’ rights and 10th Amendment-driven doctrine that claims to allow for states to overturn or to simply ignore federal laws that are deemed by the state as unconstitutional. John C. Calhoun, the pro-slavery states’ rights firebrand of the pre-Civil War era, not to mention the mortal foe of Abraham Lincoln, is the great-great-great-grandfather of the cause. Calhoun once called slavery “a positive good” and used the idea of nullification as a cudgel to oppose any federal government effort to abolish it.

In the 20th Century, nullification was revived by William F. Buckley in the pages of The National Review in response to the civil rights movement, and it was carried forward by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, who was one of the hand-picked nullification spokesmen of the conservative far-right. It was the 1950s and 1960s when the conservative movement began to control the Republican Party, dragging it further to the right.

Today, Tanenhaus wrote, Republican politicians like Rand Paul and others are carrying on the legacy of an idea that had its origins in the very attitudes that Lincoln and many others in his footsteps attempted to eradicate. And until mainstream Americans and members of the press truly recognize that the Republican Party is nothing more than a cartoonishly sinister cabal of outdated, disgusting racial scaremongers, we can never hope to cure our society of hate-mongers like Joe Ricky and everyone else of his ilk.

Oh and I almost forgot. Here’s that photo of Pappy and I.

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There’s an old saying that I used to live by but which I let fall by the wayside years ago because it kept getting me into trouble: It’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. I’m sure you understand how this philosophy works, particularly if you’re married. Basically you just go ahead and do whatever the hell you want, even if you know it’ll infuriate your partner, and pretend to be sorry later. Sure, you’ll spend some time in the dog house, but you got to do whatever it was you wanted to do in the first place. Beats asking if it’s okay ahead of time and risking him or her telling you no. Nobody wins there. Well, you don’t win, and that’s really all that counts. (See why I eventually abandoned this way of thinking?)

Asking for forgiveness instead of permission is the selfish asshole’s credo. If you are indeed a selfish asshole, it should be tattooed across your upper back.

With that in mind, I can’t help but wonder why so many of the various companies paying a bloody fortune for ad space at this year’s Super Bowl have decided to prerelease their commercials on the internet in the run-up to the game. From a financial standpoint it doesn’t seem to make much sense to have so many of these ads available well before the time they’re actually slotted for, but a nasty little by-product of going with an early release is that any person or group on the lookout for something to be offended by can pick through your commercial and see if it meets their exacting standards — and if it doesn’t they can pitch a fit and demand that you change the ad before it airs in front of a hundred million presumably drunk people.

Certainly, controversy can create drama and drama can lead to publicity, which often leads to a nice financial payoff for those trying to move product. But this year, so far, two commercials have come under fire for their supposed “racism,” and you can’t help but wonder if the headache some are causing over them is worth the potential windfall given that Super Bowl ads are typically huge anyway.

A couple of days ago it broke that Volkswagen was being accused of racism over its upcoming ad which features a goofy white guy walking around his office trying to cheer up his coworkers, his happiness the result of driving a Volkswagen. The problem, apparently, is that the goofy white guy is speaking in Jamaican patois and throwing out terms like “irie,” which is leading people like the normally reasonable Charles Blow of the New York Times to call the commercial “blackface with voices.” Then today comes word that Coke is facing a backlash from some Arab-American groups over its Super Bowl ad, which features a race through the desert that includes an Ararbic guy in white desert-style robes and a keffiyeh who’s pulling a stubborn camel. According to Imam Ali Siddiqui of the Muslim Institute for Interfaith Studies, the spot is racist because it portrays Arabs as “backward and foolish camel jockeys” who have “no chance to win in the world.”

I’m sure I’ll be accused by some of engaging in a grotesque display of white privilege — or at the very least an ignorance of the oppression dominant races inflict on supposedly subordinate ones — but have we really become that quick to take offense, that willing to seek out things to be pissed about, and so utterly humorless in the name of attempting to make sure we offend no one? Make no mistake: a commercial for a global product — one aimed at making money from as many people as possible — isn’t going to even inadvertently antagonize an entire race or ethnicity because doing so would be unbelievably stupid. And as for the demands of a select few who believe that their sensibilities should be catered to at all times, the companies behind these commercials simply can’t plan for every single eventuality or worry about each individual taste.

The Volkswagen commercial is funny. Its tone is sweet and charming and I can’t imagine how anyone could possibly be offended by it. If it’s simply because it’s a white guy doing a spot-on Jamaican accent and that’s somehow not allowed — even when there isn’t a damn thing insulting about the depiction, and it’s actually pointed out within the commercial that the guy doing the accent is from Minnesota and therefore looks ridiculous — then it’s not the makers of the ad who need to adjust their thinking. As for the Coke commercial, it’s full of movie tropes, including a bus full of Vegas showgirls, a bunch of horseback-riding cowboys and even some Mad Max-ish leather-clad mutants on motorcycles — all racing along with the Lawrence of Arabia character to see who can get to the Coke first. I happen to think it’s a bit silly, but word has it there’s more to the ad and its meme that will be developed both on TV and online — and to have your takeaway from it be that it makes Arabs look like hapless dummies really seems like a hell of a reach.

The good news is that neither Volkswagen nor Coke plan to pull its ad. The stink over the Volkswagen spot has already diminished, with most people understanding and accepting that it’s harmless. As for Coke, the concerns of those who’ve spoken out against the commercial are apparently being salved a little by the news that there’s more to the thing than meets the eye. But there are those who still think Coke made a mistake with the commercial.

Chris Lehtonen, who’s the president of a San Francisco-based marketing firm that specializes in creating ads geared toward LGBT and multicultural audiences says, “The problem with the ad is that it relies on stereotypical characters… While it may not be blatantly racist, the fact that it pits these groups against each other in the ad is insensitive. It is trying to sell their product at the expense of these groups. There are much better ways to tell the story.”

Pitting a bunch of people against each other is insensitive — in a commercial that airs in the middle of the Super Bowl. And the product is being sold at the expense of these groups? Yeah, I can only imagine the hell there’ll be to pay when the post-apocalyptic community complains about how it’s being stereotyped.

If either of these commercials offends you then you’re absolutely entitled to voice that offense — the same way others are entitled to tell you they think you need to pick your battles much, much better. Save your indignation for something that isn’t completely inconsequential.

I can’t help but wonder whether Volkswagen and Coke are now basking in all the attention these ads are getting or wishing they’d just run the damn things and then asked for forgiveness.

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President Obama was officially sworn in yesterday for his second term as chief executive and, this afternoon, he’ll be ceremonially sworn in with all of the usual Capitol fanfare and speeches. While not as historically striking as his first inaugural, I couldn’t help but to rewind back to January 20, 2009, and the thoughts that were spinning through my head as I watched the first African American family enter the White House as President, First Lady and First Daughters.

Needless to say, it was an electrifying day.

Earlier, in 2008, HBO released their phenomenal mini-series John Adams, and there was a particularly poignant and extended sequence in which the second president, having just been defeated by Thomas Jefferson, arrived at the still-under-construction White House for the first time — his new office and home for the remaining months of his term. As John and Mrs. Adams traveled by carriage toward the iconic North Portico, the couple observed with noticeable disdain that slaves were busily finishing work on the grounds, streets and actual construction of the executive mansion. [Watch the video here.]

As well as giving us a glimpse at a primordial Washington, DC and White House, the scene primarily highlighted the hypocrisy of the nation’s founding: the building that would go on to house the leader of the free world was being built by men and women who were denied their freedom. I think we can all agree that the inability of the founders to work out a settlement on the holocaust of American slavery was their greatest mistake, and it’s a failure that boiled over into a gruesome civil war and still haunts us today.

As we watch the president’s motorcade travel down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House today, we’ll witness yet another extraordinary moment, signifying, among other things, how America continues to turn a corner on race — a corner that could never have been envisioned by the founders and even the Adamses, especially as they walked through the creaky, drafty White House staring with incredulity at the slaves who were laboring finish work on the new seat of executive power in America. Today is great day for America and American freedom. Not the bogus freedom of 1800, but real freedom.

When Barack Obama was elected, it goes without saying that he was acutely aware of the history he was making — how his electoral victory and inauguration echoed back in time to the nation’s original sins. He was also aware that too many Americans considered the election of the first African American to be a bit of an experimental fluke. But his re-election affirmed his abilities as a leader irrespective of his skin color, not to mention his national popularity as he handily defeated the best candidate the Republicans could put up.

This sense of vindication has given the president a striking new confidence, both in terms of how he carries himself and especially how he deals with the childish congressional Republicans. Even prior to beginning his second term, the president has resoundingly defeated the Republicans on the fiscal cliff and has warned in no uncertain terms that he plans to kick their asses on the debt ceiling as well. Furthermore, he’s taken up the issue of gun control with a remarkably bold set of initiatives including a slate of 23 executive orders on the issue, while also planning to push new anti-assault-weapon legislation through what could be a hostile Congress. On top of everything else, the president appears to be readying a legislative agenda featuring both the climate crisis and immigration reform.

If he’s able to achieve half of his second term goals, and if the economy continues to grow and recover from the Great Recession that marked the beginning of his first term, it’s likely that four years from now we’ll be writing about how the nation elected the first African American president twice, sure, but his legacy will be grounded firmly on his leadership, his considerable list of accomplishments, and the fact that he achieved these things in an era of nearly unprecedented opposition party sabotage, obstruction and divisiveness.

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