The tide may be turning
I feel that my life thus far has not been sufficiently devoted to paying attention to Mark Meadows. I hope to do better.
Kashana Cauley wrote about his dramatic tantrum at the Cohen hearing in the Times:
“You and I,” he said to Representative Elijah Cummings, the Oversight Committee chairman, who is black, “have a personal relationship that isn’t based on color.” He insisted that he couldn’t be racist because he had nieces and nephews of color.
It was a performance that he’s clearly hoping will win him one of next year’s Oscars. He defended his record on race, so we should cast aside that time in 2012 when he embraced the racist birtherism theory to his supporters by saying that “2012 is the time we’re going to send Mr. Obama back home to Kenya or wherever it is.”
Is that something people commonly say about white presidents or senators or representatives? Do people talk about sending the senator back to Ireland or Germany or Cornwall? Not a lot. No, the whole “Kenya hurrhurr” thing was always intensely racist, and Mark Meadows is a revolting hypocrite for putting on that display.
Mr. Meadows threw a fit during a hearing where Mr. Cohen claimed the president had said black people were too stupid to vote for him and had called African nations “shithole” countries. There was actual proof of Mr. Trump’s racism on offer, and Mr. Meadows chose to flip out about an accusation instead. It appears that to him, accusations of racism are more dangerous than racist acts themselves.
Priorities. He’s showing us what his are.
Mr. Meadows’s hissy fit and Ms. Tlaib’s words feel like a microcosm of where we are right now in America on race. The tide may be turning. The increased visibility of people of color in all sectors, including Congress, and the fearlessness of people of color to speak out about racism are moving us forward.
It’s all too easy, given the past demographic and ideological makeup of Congress, to picture a version of yesterday’s hearing where there was no Rashida Tlaib there to remind us that racist acts outweigh accusations of racism.
Where no woman of color stood up against a white man’s insistence on trying to distract us from evidence of racist acts by focusing on his hurt feelings.
Mr. Cummings, in his closing remarks, said that he thought America was “better than this,” a statement that referred to Mr. Trump’s alleged crimes. But it could have also been applied to Mr. Meadows’s belief that accusations of racism are worse than the real thing.
As a country, are we better than this? Yes — Rashida Tlaib showed us that we can be.
Yep. Rock on.
Well, some of us are better than this. But as a country, I often wonder if we are.
A worryingly large segment of the country is not better than that.
Speaking of racism, does the name Paul Le Page ring any bells? He’s panicking like a fly trapped in a web because of a proposal in Maine to make changes to the Electoral Colleges influence. In short, the proposal is about tying the state electors to the popular vote, and LePage is claiming that this will mean being ruled by black people…..for ever.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a26575193/paul-lepage-electoral-college-white-people-say/
Ah, yes, LePage, the monumentally unpopular former governor, first elected in a four-way race, re-elected in a three-way race, wants to avoid making elections more representative of the population. He hasn’t changed a bit.
Well, if we’re going to chat about disgusting, regressive lawmakers….
https://www.bustle.com/p/idaho-bill-ending-child-marriage-before-age-16-was-voted-down-in-the-state-house-16440963
Freemage, that’s pretty…. startling. NZ made 16 the minimum age in 1933 (16 is also our age of consent for non-commercial sex) and requires Judicial consent (as of August 2018) at 16 or 17 to prevent forced marriages.
Rob: Yeah, it’s pretty vile. Part of the issue is the relatively unique problem of “states’ rights” we have here in the U.S.. Since most laws governing ‘domestic’ issues are left to the states, you can have vast levels of holdouts, depending on the local culture. Conservative states tend to drag behind the rest of the country for years, if not decades. A big part of it is that they’d rather teens get pregnant and “have” to get married than have safe pre-marital sex. And of course, Idaho, like Utah, has a large Mormon population, where there’s a strong tendency, even outside the polygamy advocates, for older men to marry younger women. If you’re in a religious community, as a man in your mid-20s, and all the women in your age category are already married to 40-year-olds, well, you start looking at girls fresh out of high school–which means the guys in their late teens are then encouraged to go after teens. And since there’s all the usual patriarchal bullshit about how the man is supposed to be the provider/breadwinner, the women are groomed to favor older men (who are more likely to have financial resources at their disposal).