DemocRATS: The party of race

Iraq and the Party of Race

Published 2/16/2007 12:09:01 AM

"What do ex-New York Times editor Howell Raines, ex-Duke rape case
prosecutor Mike Nifong, former Edwards for President blogger Amanda
Marcotte, Delaware Senator Joe Biden and the call by Democrats to get
out of Iraq have in common?

Raines, of course, made a mess of things at the New York Times because
of his insistence on judging reporter Jason Blair not by his
journalistic skills but his race. District Attorney Nifong now faces
the possibility of losing his license to practice law because of his
assumption that a charge of rape put forth by a black stripper against
three white guys simply had to be true because they were white and she
black. Ditto with blogger Marcotte, who now famously phrased her own
assumptions of the Duke case in a particularly memorable fashion:
"Can't a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without
people getting all wound up about it?" Biden casually assessed the
candidacy of Illinois Senator and African-American Barack Obama by
suddenly burbling that the first serious black presidential candidate
was "clean." And, of course, lots of leading Democrats, including many
of those who demanded the US quit Vietnam, are loudly demanding that
we now quit Iraq, where, they assert, we never should have been in the
first place.

What links each and every one of these incidents? What could possibly
connect Raines and the Blair saga to the travails of DA Nifong and
former John Edwards blogger Marcotte, and the ever garrulous Biden?
What about the War in Iraq with the War in Vietnam?

In a word, a sad word: race.

If one were to look at the history of the Democratic Party as one
would that of an individual (and any political party is, of course,
composed of real people who represent a way of thinking handed down
person-to-person through that party's history) it is hard not to
escape a troubling conclusion: just as individual adults can manifest
disturbing behavioral patterns developed in childhood, so too can a
"mature" political party manifest its own political version of what
one well-known mental health expert calls "cumulative trauma."

Dr. Jane Middleton-Moz, Phd. is a therapist who studies and speaks
internationally on "topics of multi-generational grief and trauma, and
cultural and ethnic self-hate." In this capacity she has authored a
book called "Children of Trauma," in which she explores how "lingering
emotional trauma from our childhood blocks the normal developmental
process." When this happens, says Middleton-Moz, "we get stuck."

While it is understandably pushed under the rug at all those Jefferson-
Jackson Day dinners, not to mention seemingly ignored altogether at
party gatherings, the hard, inescapable fact of life for Democrats is
that the Party's "childhood" or formative years was brutally
traumatized by the support of slavery. Just as an individual child
could be traumatized for life by growing up in a home where a pattern
of alcoholism or drug addiction later created an adult incapable of
maintaining healthy relationships, one looks at the seemingly
instinctive if not unconscious reactions by Democrats -- almost any
Democrat -- to any issue involving race and sees a very distinctive
pattern.

They are stuck on race.

What, after all, do the varied situations cited at the beginning of
this article have in common? If the subject is journalism at the
Times, the problem was editor Raines's obsessive determination about
Blair's color. According to Blair's immediate superior, Jonathan
Landman, race was "the decisive factor" in the young reporter's
promotion by Raines. Raines, of course, was famously a well-known
liberal from Birmingham, Alabama who made much of his supposedly
"progressive" views on race, admitting freely that he had in fact
promoted Blair twice for racial reasons.

If the subject is crime in Durham, North Carolina, it is hard to
summarize Democrat Nifong's point of view better then the way Nifong
did himself: "The circumstances of the rape indicated a deep racial
motivation" was his almost immediate response to a "crime" that
certainly now seems to be considerably in doubt. Yet whether it was
Nifong's bizarre prosecution that may now end his own legal career, or
the sarcastic ruminations of Edwards's former blogger Marcotte it is
all too clear that here, too, race was the obsessive center of a
Democratic partisan's mind at work.

Look again at Marcotte's unintentionally revealing statement: "Can't a
few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people
getting all wound up about it?" The key word in this thought is
"anymore". Clearly it signifies that there was once a time in America
when "a few white boys" sexually assaulting a black woman was no big
deal. That is correct. There was just such a time and such a
psychology. And who, exactly, was responsible for that? What political
party fought ferociously to defend and keep slavery, to build and
insist on a social system of segregation, with both slavery and
segregation giving a social, moral and legal thumbs up or wink-and-a-
nod to "a few white boys" sexually assaulting black women?

The Democratic Party.

Is it any wonder why there is ground to view this party as a party of
race, its political childhood so cumulatively traumatized that it is
incapable of seeing almost any subject foreign or domestic without
seeing race?

Biden's verbal gaffe is particularly illustrative of the problem that
the Democratic trauma with race produces. A child of the sixties, a
Northerner, like journalist Raines, prosecutor Nifong and blogger
Marcotte the Senator from Delaware fancies himself a "progressive" on
issues of race. Yet out of the blue surfaced an unconscious tribute to
Senator Obama as being "clean." Clean? Physically, which is to say
Biden has a subconscious that thinks most blacks are not? Or did he
mean "clean" as in not corrupt? In either instance, it is decidedly
unlikely that one or the other image sprang to Biden's mind unformed
by quiet conversations over the years with his fellow Democrats, be
they the elites of Delaware or his peers in the Senate. One of those
latter peers, just to remind, is now President Pro Tempore of the
Senate Robert Byrd, the former member of the Ku Klux Klan that Biden
has agreed to install as the fourth heartbeat away from the
presidency.

The Iraq connection? As President Bush ever so delicately touched on
the subject in a press conference with then-Canadian Prime Minister
Paul Martin: ""There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe
that people whose skin color may or may not be the same as ours can be
free and self-govern. I reject that stronglly...I believe that people
whose skins are a different color than white can self-govern."

Left unsaid by Bush is the very, very long record of the Democratic
Party in believing precisely that "people whose skins are a different
color than white" cannot govern. It was, after all, Abraham Lincoln's
famous Democratic opponent for both the Senate and the presidency,
Stephen A. Douglas, who said: "I believe this government was made on
the white basis. I believe it was made by white men, for the benefit
of white men and their posterity for ever, and I am in favor of
confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent,
instead of conferring it upon Negroes, Indians and other inferior
races."

Is it any wonder that a political party that has such sentiments as
its founding principles moved seamlessly from slavery to segregation
to racial quotas, whose prominent adherents promote a journalist
because of race, prosecute athletes because of race or rate a
presidential candidate because of race, would unsurprisingly craft
their foreign policy because of race? The "cumulative trauma" of their
political party's childhood would not allow anything else.

Are critics of the Democrats insistence that Iraq is another Vietnam-
style quagmire missing an all too obvious sign of the party
traumatized by race? What, after all, do Vietnamese and Iraqi's have
in common? They are people of...color. It is striking that Democratic
Party history shows a repeated pattern of wanting to declare failure
and come home in the Civil War, Vietnam and Iraq or opposed
involvement in Grenada, the first Gulf War over Kuwait or stopping the
genocide in Rwanda - all wars that involved liberating non-whites.

How in the world does a political party that once had white
Southerners voting for it as a block (the so-called "solid South")
reach the point where they continually get 90% of the vote opposite
race? Is it not a learned ability that is at once insidious, skillful
and persistent to play out the politics of race, the very heart of the
trauma that has been at its cumulative center from the beginning of
its history?

Quite literally, the history of the Republican Party is based on its
original premise of ending slavery and supporting the equality of the
races. The mindset between the two parties is radically different,
especially today. There is no sense of racial trauma in a Republican
Party that is responsible for the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment that ended
the nightmare that was the Democrat's formative experience -- slavery.
It is the Republican Party that provided the black man the right to
vote in 1870 with the Fifteenth Amendment -- and the Democrats who
fought that right viciously until 1964, doing everything they could to
abort, suppress or eradicate that vote. Doing this all the while they
elected presidents from Cleveland to Kennedy and thousands of lesser
federal, state and local officials as well. Is it any wonder that a
party so racially traumatized produces black candidates (would Joe
Biden call them "unclean"?) like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton?
Candidates who have mysteriously learned from somewhere that the key
to their power is -race? The Jackson-Sharpton era roughly coincides
during the same period of modern history that the GOP has produced
public officials who universally view their race as a genetic reality
rather than a qualification for office. Is there any wonder why
Democrats are so manic over the appearance at long last of a serious
political figure in their midst who is taken as seriously as Colin
Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas or Michael Steele?

The problem for Americans who believe, as Democrat Robert Kennedy used
to say, that America should be "color blind," is that the Democratic
Party itself demonstrates repeatedly a pathological inability to judge
anything without seeing color.

Because of this cumulative trauma, the party of race followed its
support for subjugating millions of black Americans to slavery with
support for a hundred years of segregation. After abandoning millions
of people of color in their struggle against Communism, it now seeks
to do the same as Iraqis struggle against Islamic fascists.

Is it any wonder that after watching events unfold from the New York
Times newsroom to a North Carolina court room, from a blogger
affiliated with John Edwards and a Senatorial musing to Democratic
foreign policy proscriptions from Vietnam to Rwanda -- that the
question of exactly what place race has in the Democratic view of
American foreign policy in Iraq should -- finally -- be asked?

If the Democratic Party were a child raised with the trauma of drug
addiction or alcoholism, questions would be asked. The problem that
seems increasingly obvious is that it is a political party raised with
a cumulative trauma over race, a trauma that it seeks continually to
inflict on both America and the world.

Isn't it time to "just say no?"

"Pajamas O'Donovan" wrote in message news:
...

Iraq and the Party of Race
snip


Feb. 15, 2007
Associated Press

TYLER, Texas - A 73-year-old car dealership owner has been sentenced
to 10 years in prison for attacking a customer with a machete.

Robert "Jack" Parker, who must serve five years before he is eligible
for parole, was convicted Wednesday of aggravated assault with a
deadly weapon after a jury deliberated for less than two hours.

According to police, Gerald Davis, 53, had purchased a car from Time
Auto Sales and went back to the dealership to pick up his license
plates.

Please note: The page is still readable. [Accessibility statement]
Haggis Hunt
[Skip to navigation]

On Feb 17, 7:43 am, "PJ O'Donovan" wrote:
Iraq and the Party of Race

How in the world does a political party that once had white
Southerners voting for it as a block (the so-called "solid South")
reach the point where they continually get 90% of the vote opposite
race?


This article ignores that in the 1960's, when the Democratic party
finally embraced civil rights, racist politicians and voters switched
to the Republican party, where they remain to this day. The
Republican "Southern Strategy" of using veiled racism to attract votes
has been a mainstay of American politics for decades.

Complaint about these off-topic posts to rec.travel.europe lodged with the
address indicated in the properties for Mr O'Donovan's postings.
Contributors to other NGs in which they are equally off-topic may choose to
tak ethe same action.

Please, Mr O'Donovan, stop posting off-topic political matter to a group
dedicated to discussion of recreational travel in Europe.

Alan Harrison

"PJ O'Donovan" wrote in message
oups.com...

Iraq and the Party of Race

Published 2/16/2007 12:09:01 AM

"What do ex-New York Times editor Howell Raines, ex-Duke rape case
prosecutor Mike Nifong, former Edwards for President blogger Amanda
Marcotte, Delaware Senator Joe Biden and the call by Democrats to get
out of Iraq have in common?

Raines, of course, made a mess of things at the New York Times because
of his insistence on judging reporter Jason Blair not by his
journalistic skills but his race. District Attorney Nifong now faces
the possibility of losing his license to practice law because of his
assumption that a charge of rape put forth by a black stripper against
three white guys simply had to be true because they were white and she
black. Ditto with blogger Marcotte, who now famously phrased her own
assumptions of the Duke case in a particularly memorable fashion:
"Can't a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without
people getting all wound up about it?" Biden casually assessed the
candidacy of Illinois Senator and African-American Barack Obama by
suddenly burbling that the first serious black presidential candidate
was "clean." And, of course, lots of leading Democrats, including many
of those who demanded the US quit Vietnam, are loudly demanding that
we now quit Iraq, where, they assert, we never should have been in the
first place.

What links each and every one of these incidents? What could possibly
connect Raines and the Blair saga to the travails of DA Nifong and
former John Edwards blogger Marcotte, and the ever garrulous Biden?
What about the War in Iraq with the War in Vietnam?

In a word, a sad word: race.

If one were to look at the history of the Democratic Party as one
would that of an individual (and any political party is, of course,
composed of real people who represent a way of thinking handed down
person-to-person through that party's history) it is hard not to
escape a troubling conclusion: just as individual adults can manifest
disturbing behavioral patterns developed in childhood, so too can a
"mature" political party manifest its own political version of what
one well-known mental health expert calls "cumulative trauma."

Dr. Jane Middleton-Moz, Phd. is a therapist who studies and speaks
internationally on "topics of multi-generational grief and trauma, and
cultural and ethnic self-hate." In this capacity she has authored a
book called "Children of Trauma," in which she explores how "lingering
emotional trauma from our childhood blocks the normal developmental
process." When this happens, says Middleton-Moz, "we get stuck."

While it is understandably pushed under the rug at all those Jefferson-
Jackson Day dinners, not to mention seemingly ignored altogether at
party gatherings, the hard, inescapable fact of life for Democrats is
that the Party's "childhood" or formative years was brutally
traumatized by the support of slavery. Just as an individual child
could be traumatized for life by growing up in a home where a pattern
of alcoholism or drug addiction later created an adult incapable of
maintaining healthy relationships, one looks at the seemingly
instinctive if not unconscious reactions by Democrats -- almost any
Democrat -- to any issue involving race and sees a very distinctive
pattern.

They are stuck on race.

What, after all, do the varied situations cited at the beginning of
this article have in common? If the subject is journalism at the
Times, the problem was editor Raines's obsessive determination about
Blair's color. According to Blair's immediate superior, Jonathan
Landman, race was "the decisive factor" in the young reporter's
promotion by Raines. Raines, of course, was famously a well-known
liberal from Birmingham, Alabama who made much of his supposedly
"progressive" views on race, admitting freely that he had in fact
promoted Blair twice for racial reasons.

If the subject is crime in Durham, North Carolina, it is hard to
summarize Democrat Nifong's point of view better then the way Nifong
did himself: "The circumstances of the rape indicated a deep racial
motivation" was his almost immediate response to a "crime" that
certainly now seems to be considerably in doubt. Yet whether it was
Nifong's bizarre prosecution that may now end his own legal career, or
the sarcastic ruminations of Edwards's former blogger Marcotte it is
all too clear that here, too, race was the obsessive center of a
Democratic partisan's mind at work.

Look again at Marcotte's unintentionally revealing statement: "Can't a
few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people
getting all wound up about it?" The key word in this thought is
"anymore". Clearly it signifies that there was once a time in America
when "a few white boys" sexually assaulting a black woman was no big
deal. That is correct. There was just such a time and such a
psychology. And who, exactly, was responsible for that? What political
party fought ferociously to defend and keep slavery, to build and
insist on a social system of segregation, with both slavery and
segregation giving a social, moral and legal thumbs up or wink-and-a-
nod to "a few white boys" sexually assaulting black women?

The Democratic Party.

Is it any wonder why there is ground to view this party as a party of
race, its political childhood so cumulatively traumatized that it is
incapable of seeing almost any subject foreign or domestic without
seeing race?

Biden's verbal gaffe is particularly illustrative of the problem that
the Democratic trauma with race produces. A child of the sixties, a
Northerner, like journalist Raines, prosecutor Nifong and blogger
Marcotte the Senator from Delaware fancies himself a "progressive" on
issues of race. Yet out of the blue surfaced an unconscious tribute to
Senator Obama as being "clean." Clean? Physically, which is to say
Biden has a subconscious that thinks most blacks are not? Or did he
mean "clean" as in not corrupt? In either instance, it is decidedly
unlikely that one or the other image sprang to Biden's mind unformed
by quiet conversations over the years with his fellow Democrats, be
they the elites of Delaware or his peers in the Senate. One of those
latter peers, just to remind, is now President Pro Tempore of the
Senate Robert Byrd, the former member of the Ku Klux Klan that Biden
has agreed to install as the fourth heartbeat away from the
presidency.

The Iraq connection? As President Bush ever so delicately touched on
the subject in a press conference with then-Canadian Prime Minister
Paul Martin: ""There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe
that people whose skin color may or may not be the same as ours can be
free and self-govern. I reject that stronglly...I believe that people
whose skins are a different color than white can self-govern."

Left unsaid by Bush is the very, very long record of the Democratic
Party in believing precisely that "people whose skins are a different
color than white" cannot govern. It was, after all, Abraham Lincoln's
famous Democratic opponent for both the Senate and the presidency,
Stephen A. Douglas, who said: "I believe this government was made on
the white basis. I believe it was made by white men, for the benefit
of white men and their posterity for ever, and I am in favor of
confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent,
instead of conferring it upon Negroes, Indians and other inferior
races."

Is it any wonder that a political party that has such sentiments as
its founding principles moved seamlessly from slavery to segregation
to racial quotas, whose prominent adherents promote a journalist
because of race, prosecute athletes because of race or rate a
presidential candidate because of race, would unsurprisingly craft
their foreign policy because of race? The "cumulative trauma" of their
political party's childhood would not allow anything else.

Are critics of the Democrats insistence that Iraq is another Vietnam-
style quagmire missing an all too obvious sign of the party
traumatized by race? What, after all, do Vietnamese and Iraqi's have
in common? They are people of...color. It is striking that Democratic
Party history shows a repeated pattern of wanting to declare failure
and come home in the Civil War, Vietnam and Iraq or opposed
involvement in Grenada, the first Gulf War over Kuwait or stopping the
genocide in Rwanda - all wars that involved liberating non-whites.

How in the world does a political party that once had white
Southerners voting for it as a block (the so-called "solid South")
reach the point where they continually get 90% of the vote opposite
race? Is it not a learned ability that is at once insidious, skillful
and persistent to play out the politics of race, the very heart of the
trauma that has been at its cumulative center from the beginning of
its history?

Quite literally, the history of the Republican Party is based on its
original premise of ending slavery and supporting the equality of the
races. The mindset between the two parties is radically different,
especially today. There is no sense of racial trauma in a Republican
Party that is responsible for the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment that ended
the nightmare that was the Democrat's formative experience -- slavery.
It is the Republican Party that provided the black man the right to
vote in 1870 with the Fifteenth Amendment -- and the Democrats who
fought that right viciously until 1964, doing everything they could to
abort, suppress or eradicate that vote. Doing this all the while they
elected presidents from Cleveland to Kennedy and thousands of lesser
federal, state and local officials as well. Is it any wonder that a
party so racially traumatized produces black candidates (would Joe
Biden call them "unclean"?) like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton?
Candidates who have mysteriously learned from somewhere that the key
to their power is -race? The Jackson-Sharpton era roughly coincides
during the same period of modern history that the GOP has produced
public officials who universally view their race as a genetic reality
rather than a qualification for office. Is there any wonder why
Democrats are so manic over the appearance at long last of a serious
political figure in their midst who is taken as seriously as Colin
Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas or Michael Steele?

The problem for Americans who believe, as Democrat Robert Kennedy used
to say, that America should be "color blind," is that the Democratic
Party itself demonstrates repeatedly a pathological inability to judge
anything without seeing color.

Because of this cumulative trauma, the party of race followed its
support for subjugating millions of black Americans to slavery with
support for a hundred years of segregation. After abandoning millions
of people of color in their struggle against Communism, it now seeks
to do the same as Iraqis struggle against Islamic fascists.

Is it any wonder that after watching events unfold from the New York
Times newsroom to a North Carolina court room, from a blogger
affiliated with John Edwards and a Senatorial musing to Democratic
foreign policy proscriptions from Vietnam to Rwanda -- that the
question of exactly what place race has in the Democratic view of
American foreign policy in Iraq should -- finally -- be asked?

If the Democratic Party were a child raised with the trauma of drug
addiction or alcoholism, questions would be asked. The problem that
seems increasingly obvious is that it is a political party raised with
a cumulative trauma over race, a trauma that it seeks continually to
inflict on both America and the world.

Isn't it time to "just say no?"

Let is be knownst that on Sat, 17 Feb 2007 20:38:16 -0000, "ALAN
HARRISON" writted:

Complaint about these off-topic posts to rec.travel.europe lodged with the
address indicated in the properties for Mr O'Donovan's postings.
Contributors to other NGs in which they are equally off-topic may choose to
tak ethe same action.

Please, Mr O'Donovan, stop posting off-topic political matter to a group
dedicated to discussion of recreational travel in Europe.

You could try complaining to Google Groups, but you will just get the
brush off.

So much for 'don't do evil'.
--
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