A newspaper falls from the sky: Yesterday morning, the Washington Post ran this news report at the top of its front page. The report, by Ashley Halsey III, concerned an airplane incident involving the first lady.
Was Michelle Obama ever in danger? Below, you see the news report’s first three paragraphs. According to the Post, Michelle Obama’s plane “came dangerously close” to a cargo jet, although it was “never in danger.”
Remember, this appeared right at the top of the Washington Post’s front page:
HALSEY (4/20/11): A White House plane carrying Michelle Obama came dangerously close to a 200-ton military cargo jet and had to abort its landing at Andrews Air Force Base on Monday as the result of an air traffic controller's mistake, according to federal officials familiar with the incident.Ultimately, controllers at Andrews feared that the cargo jet was not moving quickly enough to clear the runway in time for the White House plane to land, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak for their agencies.Officials with the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed Tuesday that the first lady was aboard the plane and said that "the aircraft were never in any danger."
We know, we know—we all make mistakes. Having said that, what’s your point?
O’Donnell knows all about race: It was pretty much “all Trump all the time” on last evening’s Hardball. As we told you yesterday, the program’s host likes it dumb—and he likes it very repetitive. Here’s how the birthkrieg started:
MATTHEWS (4/20/11): Good evening. I’m Chris Matthews, down in Washington.Leading off tonight: Birther control. The Republicans are now divided into three groups, really. First come the birthers: Count Sarah Palin and of course count Donald Trump, lots of Tea Partiers and a growing number of Fox News hosts as part of that jamboree.Then there’s the "have it both ways" crowd—Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal—where their stand depends on who they’re with at the time. And finally, there are the serious Republicans who don’t feel like a nut and worry that birtherism will take the whole party down.Birther madness, our top story tonight.
As he closed his first segment, he teased the next: “Coming up: Let’s shine the klieg lights on the number one birther, Donald Trump…This guy is the Pied Piper, well, of the loony bunch.”
Chris has always liked it dumb, and it doesn’t exactly have to be accurate. Chris will ride this hobby-horse right to the end—and no, his work won’t be edifying.
In truth, the rise of birtherism gives us a chance to contemplate a very important, remarkable problem in our political culture. Here it is: In our current tribalized state, we the people will believe any fool thing about The Other Side. As Digby noted yesterday, we believed that Bill Clinton was a drug-runner—and we believed all that Whitewater crap. We believed that he and his wife were killers. (Jerry Falwell said so! And Matthews gave the ludicrous Gennifer Flowers a half hour to pimp this around.) We believed Gore was a delusional liar—that he was “today’s man-woman,” that he didn’t know who he was. After that, we believed the Swift Boat crap about Candidate Kerry.
Now, we the people are birthers. We believe that damn-foolishness too.
The birther episode has been quite edifying. As recently as a few years ago, we wouldn’t have believed that you could get so many people to believe so many ludicrous things. This is a terrible problem for our political culture, of course. And of course, Chris Matthews was working the other side of the room in the Clinton/Gore years. No one worked harder to help us believe all that damn-fool crap about them.
In those days, Chris was kissing the ring of Jack Welch, the man who made him quite rich.
Then too, there’s Lawrence O’Donnell. How many unfortunate things will we the people believe? Last night, O’Donnell also devoted several segments to Trump—and he dropped the race card around the whole thing. O’Donnell said he believes this:
O’DONNELL (4/21/11): [Trump’s] fake campaign will be over by May 16th, when NBC announces Trump’s position in next season’s prime time schedule.In the meantime, he will continue, knowingly or not, to fan the flames of hatred in this country, hatred of an imagined foreign born president, a hatred that is born by many who simply hate that we have our first African-American president.There is something very ugly in what Donald Trump is doing. And it is built on a base of racism and paranoia. I’m not saying Donald Trump is racist or paranoid. He doesn’t have to be to do the damage he is now doing to this country.He just has to be vulgar enough to keep barking out the lies that the racist paranoid Obama-haters want to hear. And in doing that for them on major network television talk shows, he legitimizes their feelings, their hatreds, their racism.The millions out there who seethe with the madness that Donald Trump stokes watch him and say, “Hey, it’s not just me who thinks this; Donald Trump thinks this. And he’s a smarter guy than me, and I know he`s a smarter guy than me, because he says he`s smarter than me. He’s made a lot more money than me. And that proves he’s smarter than me.”Those people who agree with what Trump is saying about the president’s birth aren’t going to be bothered by his grammatical mistakes. There are just going to feel validated in every bit of the hatred they feel for Barack Obama.There are viewers of this program that wish I would never mention the name Donald Trump. They’ve had enough. So have I. I wish May 16th was coming tomorrow. But as long as Trump continues to try to influence our thinking about American politics and the presidency, I believe his lies must be fought.Because Trump’s position in our culture now is sadly no longer simply a television entertainer who lies about nothing more important than how much money he has. When Donald Trump said, quote, "I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks," end quote, a black friend of mine e-mailed me saying, "One clue that you might not have a great relationship with the blacks is that you call them the blacks."No, Trump is not just an entertainer any more. He is now a very dangerous man who must be stopped from doing the damage to this country he may or may not know that he’s doing. Donald Trump has become America`s front man for the legitimizing of hatred and racism.
Trump may be our biggest fool. But O’Donnell isn’t far behind.
In our book, O’Donnell has been a fool for a very long time now. In Campaign 2000, he too was pimping the lies about Gore; he kept it up right through October 2000, reciting howlers about Big Liar Gore from the McLaughlin’s Group’s “liberal” chair. In short, Matthews and O’Donnell once promoted the types of lies that have them so upset today. They have been paid to repurpose themselves—or maybe they’re just stupid.
Note the way O’Donnell played race and class cards in last night’s speech.
To O’Donnell, when people believe the birther nonsense, that seems to mean they’re racist. He forgets that they also believed all the crap about Clinton, Kerry and Gore. He even forgets that he himselfbelieved that crap—or at least, that he pretended.
The history of the past twenty years shows that people will believe any fool thing, as long as it serves their tribal view. As one example, O’Donnell thrills us liberals with the race card—and we can’t wait to believe it.
Please note the way these boys play. O’Donnell gives a pass to Trump on the subject of race, explicitly saying that the great man himself may not be racist. “I’m not saying Donald Trump is racist,” O’Donnell grandly declared; this is the deference millionaires pay to those with even more money. But O’Donnell never grants such deference to the millions of average people who believe the damn-fool things Trump says. Nowhere does O’Donnell have the decency, or the intelligence, to say that many of those gullible people probably aren’t racist either. Were they racist when they believed the stupid crap O’Donnell pimped about Gore?
Do some people believe this shit because hate Obama’s race? Presumably, yes. But it’s very bad politics, and it’s dumb on the merits, to keep insisting that that’s all there is. Our problem is much, much broader than that. O’Donnell, playing us liberals for fools, will never tell us that.
Final point: Did you see Ed Schultz’s special broadcast about race—the show that got buried at noon on a Sunday? Many blacks were offended by that.
Leading white liberals didn’t say squat. Could it be that we’re racist?
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