Accidental Racist

So what made you throw up?

I see.
Doesn't take a whole lot to make you throw up, does it?

When I saw the title of the thread I thought it was about Rand Paul.

Rand Paul Goes to Howard

By CHARLES M. BLOW

The Republican Party is struggling with its future. Will it be a regional, Congressional party fighting a last-gasp battle for a shrinking base in a David and Goliath war against ominously expanding federal government? Or will it become a national, presidential party capable of adapting to a new American reality of diversity and expression in which the government serves an essential function in regulating public safety, providing a safety net and serving as a safeguard against discrimination?

Senator Rand Paul is trying to find a balance between the two. The same week that a dozen defiant senators threatened to filibuster any new gun control legislation, Paul ventured across Washington to historically black Howard University and gave a speech aimed at outreach and bridge building.

The man is mulling a presidential run after all.

The speech was a dud. It was a clipped-tail history lesson praising the civil rights record of the pre-Southern Strategy Republican Party, while slamming the concurrent record of the Democrats.

It completely ignored the past generation of egregious and willful acts of insensitivity by the G.O.P. toward the African-American community.

During the speech Paul asked, rhetorically and incredulously:

“How did the party that elected the first black U.S. Senator, the party that elected the first 20 African-American Congressmen, how did that party become a party that now loses 95 percent of the black vote? How did the Republican Party, the party of the Great Emancipator, lose the trust and faith of an entire race? From the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement, for a century, most black Americans voted Republican. How did we lose that vote?”

You can’t be serious, Senator Paul. In fact, I know that you’re not. No thinking American could be so dim as to genuinely pose such questions.

Let me explain.

Republicans lost it when Richard Nixon’s strategist Kevin Phillips, who popularized the “Southern Strategy,” told The New York Times Magazine in 1970 that “the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”

They lost it when Nixon appointed William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court, a man who, while he was a law clerk in Justice Robert Jackson’s office, wrote a memo defending separate-but-equal during Brown v. Board of Education, saying, “I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by my ‘liberal’ colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.”

They lost it in 1976 when Ronald Reagan adopted the racially charged “welfare queens” trope. They lost it when George Bush used Willie Horton as a club against Michael Dukakis. They lost it when George W. Bush imperially flew over New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when people were still being plucked from rooftops and were huddling in a humid Super Dome.

They lost it when the McCain campaign took a dark turn and painted Barack Obama as the other, a man “palling around with terrorists,” a man who didn’t see “America like you and I see America.”

They lost it when Republican Representative Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at the president during a speech to a joint session of Congress. They lost it when a finger-wagging Republican Gov. Jan Brewer publicly chastised the president on an Arizona tarmac.

They lost it in 2011 when a Republican presidential candidate, Newt Gingrich, who was the front-runner for a while, falsely and preposterously claimed that: “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.”

They lost it when another Republican presidential candidate, Rick Santorum, he of “blah people” infamy, accused President Obama of “elitist snobbery” and “hubris” for supposedly saying “under my administration, every child should go to college.” (For the record, the president never actually said that.)

The Republicans lost the black vote when Herman Cain, an African-American candidate for the Republican nomination, began using overt slave imagery to suggest that he had left “the Democrat plantation.”

They continued to lose it when the African-American Republican of the moment, Dr. Benjamin Carson, echoed Cain and said of white liberals:

“Well, they’re the most racist people there are. You know, they put you in a little category, a little box. You have to think this way. How could you dare come off the plantation?”

The Republican Party has a tarnished brand in the eyes of the African-American community, largely because of its own actions and rhetoric. That can’t be glossed over by painting the present party with the laurels of the distant past.

Glad you asked.
There is nothing in the article to lead me to believe that Rand Paul is a racist. I thought it might have been about a Rand Paul lying about his record on the civil rights movement.
http://www.politicususa.com/rand-paul-questioning-gop-vote-suppression-laws-demeaning-civil-rights-movement.html
Anybody who questions or whines about the Civil Rights Act and then lies about his record on it, is a racist, IMHO.

Here ya go jack, THIS constitutes racism: "I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant—but, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership."
In other words your boy thinks that because he is the private owner of a business he has the right to exclude somebody because of their race.

Question:
You agree with Rand Paul?

It's very simple jack, when you support and condone a racist act, discrimination based on race, you are then a racist....and don't forget, he's also a proven liar.

Right.
Must be why he picked Christopher Hightower as his campaign spokesman.
http://www.kentucky.com/2009/12/18/1064489/rand-paul-spokesman-resigns-over.html

Rand Paul supports discrimination based on race which in my opinion is a racist ideology.

Quote :

"But he doesn't support and condone it - he quite clearly regards it as
abhorrent"

Yes he does and like I said, he's a liar.

Quote :

He feels it should be acceptable for any business owner to pick and choose who
they want to serve in their restaurants, bars and movie theatres. Presumably,
following this line of thinking, if business owners wished to align
seating/service/restroom areas within their establishments according to the
perceived 'race' of their clientele, that would be fine, too. Paul asserts that
this should be the right of business owners: that the federal government has no
right interfering in the private choices of any establishment, whether they be
'white' owned or 'black' owned. Both could discriminate to their hearts'
content, without anyone official being able to force them to do otherwise...
Segregation - illegal under the 14th amendment - allowed business owners to herd blacks into inferior accommodations, dirty restrooms and separate-but-unequal everything. It wasn't until the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed over the howls of southern states that things changed for the better. For Rand Paul to suggest that this is the way things ought to be goes well beyond ignorance. It is beyond an oversight on his part. This is pandering to the racist elements of his state, pure and simple, and for him to claim it is the right way is facetious. It is racist in intent. He is racist in intent, plain and simple.

http://www.helium.com/debates/365087-was-rand-pauls-statement-about-1964-civil-rights-act-racist/side_by_side

The only thing that is bullshit is conservatives denying that racism still exists. Yeah I guess Colin Powell is just imagining all this right along, right?
Colin Powell Calls Out The GOP’s Racism Problem: There Is ‘A Dark Vein Of Intolerance’

By Igor Volsky on Jan 13, 2013 at 11:16 am

On Sunday, during an appearance on Meet The Press, Colin Powell condemned the GOP’s “dark vein of intolerance” and the party’s repeated use of racial code words to oppose President Obama and rally white conservative voters.
Without mentioning names, Powell singled out former Mitt Romney surrogate and New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu for calling Obama “lazy” and Sarah Palin, who, Powell charged, used slavery-era terms to describe Obama:

POWELL: There’s also a dark — a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party. What do I mean by that? I mean by that that they still sort of look down on minorities. How can I evidence that?
When I see a former governor say that the President is “shuckin’ and jivin’,” that’s racial era slave term. When I see another former governor after the president’s first debate where he didn’t do very well, says that the president was lazy. He didn’t say he was slow. He was tired. He didn’t do well. He said he was lazy. Now, it may not mean anything to most Americans, but to those of us who are African Americans, the second word is shiftless and then there’s a third word that goes along with that. The birther, the whole birther movement. Why do senior Republican leaders tolerate this kind of discussion within the party?

Watch it:

Powell added that the Republican Party is “having an identity problem,” noting that its significant shift to the right has produced “two losing presidential campaigns.” “I think what the Republican Party needs to do now is a very hard look at itself and understand that the country is changed,” he said. “If the Republican Party does not change along with that demographic, they a going to be in trouble.”
Powell also called on Republicans to focus on a more equitable and progressive economic policies that help middle and lower income Americans, as well as immigration reform. “Everybody wants to talk about who is going to be the candidate,” Powell said. “You better think first about what’s the party actually going to represent.”

And hey jack, how 'bout those segregated proms, eh?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/10/segregated-prom-naacp-lob_n_3052985.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24prom-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

...and then of course we have this gem from a republican in Kansas:

Jim Gile, Kansas County Official, Apologizes For Racist Comment





Huffington Post ‎- 3 days ago
Saline County Commissioner Jim Gile (R) used the term "nigger-rigging" during a commission discussion April 2 about hiring an architect to ...

Good to see you conveniently ignored the segregated proms and the racist in Kansas.

Quote :

"A half-dozen staged examples from one hick town..."

No sir, nothing was staged. Those are typical conservative southern rednecks that vote republican that you can find anywhere down south and even here in Indiana.

Quote :

"...supposed to be some sort of proof of widespread racism in this
country"

Nah, nobody made the claim there is "widespread racism" in this country.

Quote :

"I know you're desperate to make your case, but come on -
really."

Nope, just simply pointing out the reality that you obviously can't handle.

Quote :

"Now, what leads you to assert that he's somehow an expert on this topic?"

So you're the expert?
Nah, it doesn't take an expert or PhD to identify bigotry and racism that still exists in this country