Republicans are objecting to some of Joe Biden's appointments. Jennifer Rubin writes that most of them are women of colour. For instance, they
attacked Neera Tanden, President Biden’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, declaring that her “allegiance is not to America and it’s not to President Biden, it’s to Secretary [Hillary] Clinton.” The Indian American, you see, is not loyal to this country.
Other women of colour are in the Republicans' sights:
The Post reports, “Many of the president’s Black, Latino, Asian and Native American nominees are encountering more political turbulence than their White counterparts, further drawing out the process of staffing the federal government.” When someone like Tanden is treated so differently — accusing her of disloyalty and making up a new standard never employed for Republicans or White males (mean tweets) — that “turbulence” becomes indistinguishable from racism.
The GOP is now going after two nominees for key spots in the Justice Department, Vanita Gupta for associate attorney general and Kristen Clarke for head of the civil rights division. And — no shocker — both are women of color. The Post reports: “Kristen Clarke, a Black lawyer who has been nominated to lead the Civil Rights Division at Justice, has been accused of being insensitive to Jewish people because she invited the author of an antisemitic book to speak at Harvard. She has said she regrets this decision.” She was 19 years old at the time. That’s it.
Clarke has spent her career fighting religious discrimination — from her work in New York to launch the Religious Rights Initiative. Clearly, Republicans’ opposition to her is not about some newfound concern about antisemitism. It’s about making a woman of color, whose qualifications are beyond question, into a scary, radical figure.
Meanwhile, right-wing groups have launched a campaign calling Gupta “dangerous,” falsely claiming she advocated defunding the police in a speech. They have also claimed that she wants to lessen punishment for violent white supremacists, an absurd distortion of her opposition to the federal death penalty — a view many elected officials hold.
Republicans have been throwing fits about “cancel culture” and disinviting controversial speakers on campus. Their own party includes a House member who has spread antisemitic conspiracy theories (Jewish lasers?!). Are we’re supposed to believe they care one whit about antisemitism?
It's not hard to decipher what's going on:
Take a woman of color who is an outspoken advocate for her views. Call her dangerous, radical, extreme, disloyal. Find some scrap of something that proves nothing and seems to contradict their enabling of a racist, disgraced ex-president. It is as blatant as their attempts to disenfranchise Black voters, their refusal to disown white-supremacist groups and their lionization of Confederate imagery. Forget the “Party of Lincoln”; this is the party of Jim Crow.
The Republican Party has become a social disease. Like syphilis, it eats brains and ends in insanity and death.
Image: Amazon.com
6 comments:
Not to mention Deb Haaland the first Native American Women to hold any post let alone the secretary of the interior. If memory serves me well that position in the past used to carry some position of a certain heavy handedness over First Nations Peoples.
The old prejudices are alive and well down there, zoombats.
Former GOPer Tom Nicols writes in the Atlantic that the GOP has become like the Soviet Breznyev-era Communist Party - disconnected from reality, cynical about its ideology, authoritarian, and controlled by a failing old man. In short, the party's on the verge of collapse. It would be nice if he were right, but I'm not so sure.
As it goes, the GOP's looking for people to blame and coming up with the usual suspects: racial minorities, women and the LGBT. It's the same bigoted ideology that was defeated in 1865 and 1945. The problem then and now is wealthy people who profit from social division. The ideology doesn't go away and it takes a wholesale loss of lives to beat it back into the shadows. The US is entering very dangerous times.
Cap
I agree, Cap. The Republican Party is on the verge of collapse. But it will take lots of innocent people down with it.
” When someone like Tanden is treated so differently — accusing her of disloyalty
I have read very little that was favourable about Tanden but the criticisms were basically the same as criticisms about many other candidates, that is, policy and performance based.
I have noticed that people in the USA are amazingly fast to call an opponent's loyalty into question and to attribute any and all evils to malignant FOREIGN plots and have been since roughly 1780(?). It often seems the default critique---sorry I don't remember the specific instances but this Harper's article The Paranoid Style in American Politics has some excellent examples. Ninety percent of the hysteria around Russiagate seems to be the same thing. Always blame a foreigner!
Many US commentators discussing the Confederate statues issue usually call the various Confederate generals and politicians "traitors" and do not seem to realize that this means that George Washington and Benjamin Franklin also qualify.
I noticed that Derek Sloan did the same thing when slandering Dr Theresa Tam. The Cons have been sinking badly since the days of Joe Clark or even Brian Mulroney.
The Party of Joe Clark and Brian Mulroney was the PROGRESSIVE Conservative Party, jrk. When Harper seized the reigns they dumped the word progressive. That tells you who they are.
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