Posted on 01/11/2012 9:40:45 AM PST by presidio9
Those who are professional media enemies of the Republicans are having a fine time catching the elephants lying. The only problem to me is that they do not always follow the same rules when a supposedly oppressed group proves that it, like all others, is a contradictory bundle of human realities.
Yet Rachel Maddow, for one, is remarkable when it comes to proving in high quality intellectual detail how often the elephants do and say irrational things for the sake of pure ideology. Her proof that President Ronald Reagan did things contrary to what he supposedly believed is perfectly executed with hard facts — such as the fact of Reagan raising taxes 11 times.
Though professional right-wing liars like Dick Armey of FreedomWorks and the Fox News crew will dismiss what she says, we can be sure that neither in public nor on television will they take her on, because Maddow can bring it. Her research is superb and the time she is willing to give to making an idea or a pattern of activities clear brings a high level of sophistication to what could easily be no more than howling at the elephants as though they are cartoon monsters, which is a favorite tactic of lazy liberals who would rather rely on slogans than actually do the mental work that objectively supports an idea.
She is not afraid to look into the snake pit of racism that is hidden beneath the conservative rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh and his troops. Maddow knows that what we are seeing over and over is a development of redneck attitudes that began to emerge as soon as the South lost the Civil War and created a mythology with lies like D.W. Griffith’s toxic masterpiece “The Birth Of A Nation,” which depicted black people as quasi-monkeys. Insidiously, those ideas continue to this day.
I should say that Maddow’s interest in American women would be deepened if she were to read “Mightier Than the Sword” by David S. Reynolds. It is a stunning look at the importance of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which rednecks fought against with every paranoid fantasy about black people because her novel did not depict them as anything other than human, the greatest sin in the eyes of bigots.
And she would better understand redneck Tea Party elephantiatis if she were to read William C. Davis’ “Look Away!: A History of the Confederate States of America.” Davis explains how the redneck South was threatened by the diminishment of what has been called “the slavocracy.”
Davis writes, “If slavery could not spread as new states were formed, then the existing slave states would be doomed to perpetual minority in the representation in Congress, guaranteeing that if the day came when Northern antipathy to slavery itself became hot enough, the majority could use the government to subvert the Constitution and abolish the institution where it already existed. In short, the South could not afford to lose any battle over slavery, nor even over issues on its periphery.”
That is how deeply we are still connected to the underlying mental forces that drove the slave-owning South to take on the entire country and bring about the deaths of more than 600,000 people. Those forces are still at work — they were at work in Griffith’s racist film, and they are at work today on Roger Ailes’ “news” channel.
The truth is that there are hustlers and truth-distorters on both ends of the spectrum. That is the American way, at least for now. Rachel Maddow is better than both ends. And she can push up her batting average. That is what the best of us do.
That’s certainly an unbiased and balanced article...
LOL! Awww, yer killin' me!
Thanks for the laugh today. I needed that.
New York Daily News-Obama playing the race card in defense of Madcow.
So this Crouch guy just tried to tie Roger Ailes and Fox News to D.W. Griffith and 1850s plantation owners. And people wonder why we call the left “moonbats?”
}:-)4
I like how he calls conservatives racists in one sentence, and then in the very next one, he refers to rednecks.
Correction; That would be “Bacon of Reason”.. as in PIG
irrational things for the sake of pure ideology.
Talk about run-away delusions. This writer is clearly on opium or worse.
Stanley Crouch and Rachel Maddow, both reside in a bizzaro world, where facts are lies and lies are facts, and the voice of reason is the insanity which underlies their ideology.
You forgot the barf alert, slthough upon reflection, the title itself is a strong emetic
New policy?
Maddow still pushes her economic theory that welfare recipients are the nations job creators as fact ('consumer's demand is the engine of job growth') even after the Obama/Pelosi stimulus failed to create jobs or a recovery. In fact she rarely mentions the Obama/Pelosi stimulus that was hawking nightly on her show in early 2009 as the sure cure to our employment problem/.
Rachel Maddow, he is FAR from being a beacon of reason or ANYTHING of reason for all that matters.
Rachel Man-now's interest in women needs no deepening.
"Rachael Maddow" and "intellectual" used in the same sentence. he he ... he he ... he he ...
A rare example of a title that needs no “Barf Alert” because the title is a barfer in and of itself.
Why do I never see anyone counter this myth of Reagan the tax raiser? If someone lowers the rate from 70 to 28%, and then increases it a couple percent, are they a tax cutter or a tax raiser? Also did those increases not coincide with a commitment to real spending cuts? Where are Obama’s cuts? He refuses.
Our side refuses to stay on the offensive.
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