Why Black America Is Pissed At White Progressives Bashing The POTUS Open Letter

I've pointed out here at TransGriot why I and many African Americans TBLG/SGL people are angry with rainbow community white liberal progressives over their dismissive and disrespectful attitudes toward President Obama and why you need to chill with that nekulturny behavior. 

And white progressives, don't even think about pouring gasoline on that smoldering discontent in our community and primary challenging the POTUS next year.  You can try to hide behind Dr West and Tavis Smiley all you want in an attempt to CYA in organizing that effort, but they long ago lost credibility in the African American community over their personal animus toward President Obama and are drifting dangerously close to becoming pariahs in our community..

Heed my words.  If you even dare attempt a primary challenge of President Obama and it is successful in getting the white presidential candidate you seek, the African American community will sit at home on November 6, 2012

Melissa Harris-Perry broke it down in an article she wrote for the Nation articulating those feelings and the perception we have in the African American community about the lukewarm support of the POTUS in white progressive circles which Salon's Joan Walsh responded to.

A letter appeared in the Salon comments section of Joan's piece which masterfully breaks it down

Race and Racism — Why Joan doesn’t get it
Let me begin in the simplest way. Race and Racism are two different things. What happens in discourse, especially internet discourse, is that those two issues become conflated.

This is dangerous for both sides. On the one hand, you have the dismissive white response that is typical. “Just because I criticize the president doesn’t make me a racist.”

But on the other side, you have an equally troubling trend to classify something (ex. discourse, comment, language choice, meme, etc.) as racism without unpacking it or without fully comprehending the term.

Racism is a charge which is a conversation ender. It stops discourse and should, because of this, be used sparingly and only in the most obvious and egregious cases.
However, racialized speech, which is speech that is often dehumanizing, condescending, and aggressive- passively so quite often, must be examined in terms of who is saying it, and what is being said.

Sounds a little confusing? Let me humor you and Joan with specifics:
1) The President is a coward.
This meme exists in the progressive ranks almost as pervasively as the meme that he is a Muslim and wasn’t born here exists in the GOP Tbag ranks.
Why do I liken this expression of frustration with two examples of “Othering” done by the hard right? Because like those examples of otherness calling the President a coward is racialized speech.

History lesson. The first black cadet at West Point was dismissed in his fourth year for cowardice after being strapped to a chair and tortured all night by white classmates who couldn’t imagine him graduating.

The argument against integration of the military was that blacks were cowards. That we lacked the fundamental grit to stand up to hard fighting. All evidence to the contrary in every war fought. From the black regiments of the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WWI and WWII, black soldiers were some of the hardest hit, used and bravest. A history that is almost impossible to convince people of, because of the hidden stereotype of racialized thinking and speech. So calling the president a coward is like calling an accomplished woman “a chick” or “a girl”. It is condescending and aggressively so. And it is NOT an accident of speech.

2) His name is not Obama, it is President Obama, and the number of white commentators on TV, in print, and on the blogs that refer to him this way is legion. I heard an hour of Fox News where they referred to President Bush and Obama. Not President Bush and President Obama. But President Bush and Obama. It struck me that white commentators didn’t care to afford the President the respect he EARNED by winning the election.

The Right has spent three years being casually disrespectful of the President, and instead of rallying around him and being hyper sensitive to it or hyper respectful, progressives, White Liberals, have gone right along with the practice. Even one-upping the right on sites like the Huffington Post where they have even gone so far as to call him a dick.

3) Women vs Black — starting with Gerry Ferraro the argument has been:
a) Which is tougher?
b) What can women get from the President? And…
c) How sexist is he?

These subtle messages of discontent in the face of all the facts that refute the claims is part of the larger historical white woman/black man meme. It is a convoluted but racialized binary and it exists, pervasively, persuasively, and dominantly in the liberal psyche.

The constant chatter of white liberals about a primary challenge aside, it is the Hillary love and nostalgia that is most offensive to blacks, men and women. The argument about how “tough, strong and competent” Hillary is as a juxtaposition to how “weak, cowardly, and incompetent” the president is smacks of something more than simple political hyperbolic speech.

4) The LGBT community was insane. From the threat to wear sheets to the first inauguration, to the “Truman integrated the military with the stroke of a pen,” to the “he should get it because he’s black,” ism of their entire argument. It has been the wild west out there and it has come at a cost.

5) By any metric that is reasonable, the President has been wildly progressive. Wildly. We can take legislation apart piece by piece, level by level, and he has been strong on every core progressive metric, including education, civil rights, health care, energy, unions, women’s reproductive health, women’s rights, immigration, and core issues like credit card reform, financial reform, needle exchange, etc.

Let me explain – President Obama took office in 2009 without 50 locked votes in the senate. I know everyone thinks we had 60, but not only did we NEVER actually have 60, those votes we did have were, for a couple of basic reasons, unreliable. Start with the hyper blue of the Blue Dogs: Lincoln, Landrieu, Dorgan, Conrad, Johnson, Bacchus, Bayh, Lieberman, Tester, Nelson.

Those senators represented states Obama lost by an average of 10 electoral votes. For every close state like Montana, there is a blow out state like Arkansas. Bayh (Indiana) and Lieberman (Connecticut) O won, but Lieberman’s hatred was personal and impossible to bridge. So, the entire process of passing legislation is complicated by these ten votes.
Add to that Ted Kennedy was dying and not voting. Byrd was dying and rarely voting. Franken wasn’t seated until June.

That begins the President’s term with 45 reliable Dem votes. We’re OK because the GOP only has 41 republican votes. But those 10 senators had out-sized power. The President was wildly popular out of the gate but he had lost many of those senator’s states by double digits. They had no reason to back his play. So, he started the process compromised and the only thing that could make it worse was to lose these tough close fights.

Add to that the unprecedented number of filibusters and why the GOP filibustered. They determined, because Rush told them to, that it would be better for the country to FAIL than pass anything that might be good for the citizens. They said it clearly. They booed his acceptance speech for the Nobel (Peace Prize), they cheered when Chicago lost an Olympic bid, they violated the Logan Act, demonstrably, by engaging in negotiations with Israel to the detriment of the US Foreign Policy of the President of the United States.

Through all of this the progressive wing was silent or was half hearted in their defense. They had a list of must haves that was insane and unreasonable, and any deviation from that was treasonous.

I understand clearly why the average progressive didn’t get this, didn’t understand this. But my question to you all is why didn’t the pundits, the people paid to observe and write about politics, why didn’t they get what was happening and fight back? Well, there are a couple of reasons.
The NYTimes, the people who would normally lead this kind of charge, spent three years savaging the president instead. Rich, Krugman, Dowd, etc., savaged him. Add to that the progressive blogs, likewise, spent almost every column inch attacking the President rather than supporting progressive policies or attacking the GOP. Part of this was because they had all been so completely (with the exception of Dowd) in the bag for Hillary. But part of this was racialized thinking. Robert Reich has been particularly insane as has Glenn Greenwald, but Greenwald’s attacks are principled in that he is a purist and true believer and he can’t be swayed no matter the president or person. Reich isn’t that, he is a critic for the sake of profile it seems, and he is the least reasonable person of the entire bunch.

Finally, blacks are a key constituency in the Dem party. We are taken for granted, however, and there are long term consequences for that. O won this last time because Donna Brazile halted a coup by women and Hillary supporters. She said, plainly, that blacks would flee the party. It worked, and it had real consequences.

Blacks are quiet for the most part because we got the girl here. We won and we’re taking yes for an answer but the anger and frustration the black community feels towards white progressives is real, and it is major. It is a game changer and perhaps even a coalition ender.
Peace

H/T Jack and Jill Politics

Happy 50th Birthday President Obama

He's had a more stressful than necessary month leading up to it no thanks to the Republifools playing games with our debt ceiling and putting our AAA credit rating at risk, but today is the big 5-0 birthday for President Barack H. Obama!  

His enemies on the left and right still hate him, but yet he still rises, survives and thrives as he continues to outflank, outsmart, and outstrategize them while continuing to do what's right for the country.

Happy 50th birthday Mr. President!.    May you celebrate many more as a resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the 44th president of the United States of America.

President Obama's Left Wing Haters

TransGriot Note: This one's not mine.  It was posted to a Democratic Facebook group I'm on and I did a little cleanup editing to it.  

The author is unknown, but it calls out the so-called progressives that absolutely hate President Obama.

It’s not news that there are people on the “progressive” side who cannot stand President Barack Obama.  Now the angries have got themselves a plan, and maybe even a poster child. But do they have a candidate?

In recent weeks, the increasing vitriol between progressive/liberal/libertaria​n opponents and supporters of President Barack Obama have been lighting up the Twittersphere.

There’s the growing rift over racial insensitivity in some of the anti-Obama critique – centering on who is Obama’s “base”. It has pitted black and white Twitterzens led by Balloon Juice blogger AngryBlackLady and her supporters against Salon editor Joan Walsh and her supporters, including most recently, a ThinkProgress blogger named Zaid Jilani.

There’s Glenn Greenwald’s rather Nixonian enemies list, which he says consists of 30 Twitterzens who spend all their time attacking him (for spending so much of his time attacking the president while sliming anyone who doesn’t attack the president as mindless Obama cultists) though he refuses to name names.

And there’s the ongoing Obama-slam by big-time Tweeters like filmmaker Michael Moore (@MMflint) and liberal radio talk host David Sirota (@davidsirota), with Moore even launching his own conspiracy theory that the Pakistanis gave the U.S. Osama bin Laden to be “executed”, because he had outlived his usefulness to the “war on terror.”

The most aggressive anti-Obama action is to be found in three places: among a group of highly influential blogs connected to Jane Hamsher’s Firedoglake and its associated FDL Action PAC and knit together via Hamsher’s advertising network; from Greenwald, Moore and other libertarian-leaning activists who oppose Obama’s war and national security policies (which they say are too close to George W. Bush’s); and from Adam Green’s Progressive Campaign Change Committee PAC, which has spent as much time attacking the president as it has advertising against Republicans.

Jane Hamsher, also has a new group called "Dump Obama", and she calls herself a progressive?

To pro-Obama liberals, Hamsher and company are the “firebaggers” — as vehemently and reflexively anti-Obama as any tea partier, and when confronted, often just as nasty. It’s thought that some of them, like Hamsher, are into Obama-bashing for the link bait and the cash, while others appear to be true believers in the third party cause, including Greenwald and former Ralph Nader supporters like Michael Moore.

Up to now, one of the things the anti-Obama progressive movement has lacked is diversity, giving them the appearance of an all-white jihad against the first black president. (Hamsher’s history, punctuated by her now infamous “blackface” post attacking Joe Lieberman, doesn’t help.) 

In a way, that’s a function of the fact that for decades, the leading voices on the left, from its magazines to its radio shows to to its top bloggers, have been conspicuously monochrome. 

A recent Forbes list of the 25 most influential liberals in the U.S. contained only four people of color: Oprah Winfrey, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (who is Salvadoran and Greek), Matthew Yglesias (who is of Hispanic and Jewish background) and Fareed Zakaria (who on the list has the distinction of being both Indian, and not really a liberal)

The liberal talk network Air America, from which MSNBC drew part of its on-air liberal lineup, had no solo black or Hispanic hosts until it signed daytime talk host Montel Williams just before the network folded in 2010.  The only black nationally syndicated liberal talk radio host: is Joe Madison, AKA  The Black Eagle' (who is syndicated by African-American owned Radio One)

For the “FDLers,” the perception of theirs being an “all white” attack on the first black president presents a particular problem, since Democratic candidates, including Obama, are typically propelled into office on the strength of the unanimous support of black voters, and the two-thirds backing of Hispanics.

Last week, the anti-Obama progressives saw an opening to change that white-only dynamic when the ongoing verbal war that African-Americans:pundits Tavis Smiley and his mentor, Princeton professor Cornel West have been waging against President Barack Obama since 2007 boiled over.

A long-time coming

Smiley and West have disliked Obama since he announced his run for the presidency in Springfield, Illinois on the same day Smiley hosted his annual “State of Black America” conference.

Skipping the State Of the Black Union conference earned then Senator Obama Smiley’s enduring disdain.  He and West became even more vehemently anti-Obama after he rebuked Rev. Jeremiah Wright over the inflammatory sermons which surfaced in the midst of the Democratic primary (and were wielded by the Clinton campaign as they hunted for superdelegates.)  

I (the writer) attended a talk Smiley gave in the wake of Obama’s historic 2008 Philadelphia speech on race, in which an embarrased Smiley silenced the room at the Broward Convention Center with a broadside aimed at then Sen. Obama that was so angry and personal, it left people gasping.   

Smiley’s rage at Obama became so pronounced he eventually resigned from his twice weekly commentary spot on the Tom Joyner Morning Show after drawing criticism from TJMS listeners.   He later seemed to burn down the bridge to Joyner entirely when he was invited back on the TJMS in 2010 and went on a tirade that prompted the first of many flare-ups with Rev. Al Sharpton. 

Undeterred, Smiley, who had been a Hillary Clinton supporter during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, has continued to slam the president, including during his weekly show for Public Radio International, and in a podcast series he and Dr. West put out periodically, called “Smiley and West.”

West’s critiques of Obama as ignoring not just black Americans, but also poor people, have ebbed and flowed over the years. According to the book “The Bridge” by David Remnick, after an intervention by Harvard professor Charles Ogletree in 2007, West softened his opposition, and even held a series of discussions with Obama and other black intellectuals, including Michael Eric Dyson, in which the then-candidate tried to create detente.

It didn’t hold. West reportedly fumed at a lack of access to the newly elected president (and to his inability to get inaugural tickets.) He was upset about Obama naming his former Harvard nemesis Larry Summers as the president’s top economic adviser over West’s strong objections. 

By late 2010, he began denouncing Obama in increasingly vitriolic terms; calling his policies racist against blacks, and calling the president a black “mascot” of Wall Street and a “black puppet” of the oligarchs, leading to further condemnation of West by fellow African-Americans, and culminating in this eye-opening slight against something Obama cannot control; his parentage:  

"I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West said. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white…When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening.”

West unleashed an equally undignified slur that President Obama feels most comfortable around “upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want.”

West's most recent attacks have led to blistering counter-attacks by the Rev. Al Sharpton in the wake of a heated debate on MSNBC in which West also tossed the "mascot" smear at Sharpton.   Rev. Sharpton struck back with a Huffington Post piece in which he called out those who are tossing spitballs at the president from their ivory tower while real activists work in the trenches. 

Former fellow Princeton professor Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry's penned a blistering takedown of Dr. West, to which Dr. Boyce Watkins responded with an innuendo-laced personal attack on Professor Harris-Perry.   

Ironically, West's broadsides have made him the perfect -- er -- mascot, for the "progressive" anti-Obamaites, one of whom, an FDL diarist who goes by the handle "Metamars" -- even saw an opportunity to put West on the front lines, to "educate" ... the "Afro-Americans" to understand that Obama is "not their friend.".

Primary the president!

West’s ongoing vitriol included a call last November for someone to step forward and primary Obama from within the Democratic Party.  The call roughly coincided with an “election” held by a group of activists whose goal was to do just that: field a potential “progressive” primary candidate against Obama.

Indeed, the idea of primarying the president has been a hot diary topic on FDL since 2010. In February of that year, in response to the signing of the healthcare reform bill, a 527 called the New Progressive Alliance was formed:

In February 2010, even before President Obama formally approved his party’s gift of 40 million more customers to Big Insurance, blogger “Masoninblue” posted this invitation to readers of The Seminal, a site at FireDogLake (FDL), to join him in forming a new Progressive party. In late March, he and five other Seminal bloggers and readers formed an online group to incubate the process. They supported strict adherence to the basic tenets of Progressivism, and even chose a name – New Progressive Alliance.

This means as Liberals-True Democrats, we have to work much harder, and while it may seem impossible at the moment, let's try to bridge our differences with the angry left and work for the nation's good as a whole.

In the meantime maybe you want to make others aware of these movements so we can unite and work against them.