Molly Ivins: Race Card Backfires on Republicans

[Jack Rabbit]

From TruthDig.com
Dated Wednesday May 3

Race Card Backfires on Republicans
By Molly Ivins

Dec. 16, 2005, is a day that will live in infamy in the Hall of Fame of Unintended Republican Consequences.

A bunch of the guys were just noodling around in the House of Representatives in Washington, see, kind of fooling around with the idea that they might get some traction out of immigration as a hot-button issue. The old hot buttons have kind of cooled off here lately, with people up in arms about Iraq, oil, health insurance and all this other stuff that makes the boys say, “Who me?” Where’s a good divisive social issue when you need one? They weren’t that far wrong—some variation on the race card usually works.

Trouble is, they played the card, tried to make every illegal worker in the country a felon and woke up the Sleeping Brown Giant, instead.

Who knew? Unions, organizers, community workers, priests and preachers, and Lord knows the Democrats have been trying to wake the Sleeping Giant for years. That it would happen someday was an article of faith when I first started watching Texas politics 40 years ago. Who knew all it would take was one softly played, very ugly, very nasty little piece of racial political pandering. And there was the Giant, out on the streets in the millions. For those who know the Latin emphasis on respect and dignity, maybe it’s not such a surprise after all.

Read more.

[acmavm]

1. Actually what happened is they poked a hot flaming stick at

both sides of this issue and got everyone's shit in an uproar.

[Dudley_DUright]

2. Thanks Jack, I just turned in my grades today and

I am done for the semester (as Alice would say, "School's out for summer..."). :-) This is an especially good column.

on edit: Corrected as per JR's advice. :-)

[Demeter]

3. Unintended Republican Consequences

Another definition: Reality will get you in the end, the nose, the arm, the leg, the ass....

[Jack Rabbit]

4. Moynihan trumps anonymous White House aide again

Ron Suskind in The New York Times:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, American scholar and statesman:

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts.

[tired of the right]

5. I don't know how many of you read Molly Ivins,

but she should be required reading. She is nearly always great.