Quotes of the Morning: Hugging the Tar Baby

“Here's the unmentionable secret: Racism isn't that big a deal any more. No sensible person supports it. Nobody of importance preaches it. It's rapidly becoming an ugly memory.”
-Tony Snow, October 6, 2003

“Racism is gone! Gone I tell you! Anything that you see that resembles racism is an illusion. Of course, Mr. Snow said that years ago when he still worked for Fox News, the home of ‘fair and balanced’ reporting.”
-Skippy

“On May 10, the Washington Post ran a front-page story on a new census report that said 45% of the nation's children under the age of five are racial or ethnic minorities, and that the percentage is increasing primarily because the Hispanic population is growing so rapidly. If you read those facts carefully, you'd probably find them interesting, but not necessarily sufficient to draw any sweeping conclusions about the demographic and cultural future of the country.
If, however, you wanted to make a point about the dangers of illegal immigration, you might interpret the findings in your own particular way. On May 11, John Gibson of Fox News implored viewers to, ‘Do your duty. Make more babies... half of the kids in this country under five years old are minorities. By far the greatest number are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic. Why is that? Well, the Hispanics are having more kids than others. Notably the ones Hispanics call gabachos, white people, are having fewer.’"
-TIME.com, May 17, 2006

“Well… That’s just Fox News. Other news networks can actually be fair about this kind of thing.”
-Skippy

“MATTHEWS: How can conservatives go back to their basically gerrymandered Republican districts of people, our native Americans, who are upset about too much illegal immigration going on and say, yes, I signed the president‘s bill, he leaned on me a little bit, so I did it? How do you defend that?
[…]
MATTHEWS: What about the argument that Pat makes that they want the road not just to citizenship for the illegal immigrants but the road to membership in the Democratic Party.
FINEMAN: Well, of course they do. But they figure they are going to get that eventually. They would like to see, to use a phrase from the Nixon days, the Republicans twist in the wind for a while, divided between their business constituency and the pro-Hispanic outreach that Bush is trying and the native American who are concerned about.
BUCHANAN: Bush had such an opportunity. He could have come in with a strong border security...
MATTHEWS: Native Americans meaning European Americans generally. I was using your phrase, yes. That wasn‘t exactly my phrase.”
-Hardball with Chris Matthews, May 15, 2006

“You see ‘Native Americans’ are actually white people. I realize that this may come as a surprise for people. You will also notice that conservatives are going back to their districts of ‘Native Americans’. Apparently, and I’m just basing this in the Quote above, Republicans only represent white people. That might help explain Texas.”
-Skippy

“McLennan County [Texas, home of Crawford] commissioners on Tuesday declined to adopt a resolution apologizing for lynchings in the area in the 1800s and early 1900s.
[…]
At least two commissioners have said they oppose an apology because the lynchings happened before current leaders and residents were born. They also have said the murder or rape victims of the black men who were lynched should not be forgotten.
[…]
The current 800-word resolution says the city and county "apologize for the failure of past leadership to uphold and defend lynching victims' most basic rights to life, liberty, and due process under the laws of our cherished democracy."
It also mentions the 1916 lynching of 17-year-old Jesse Washington, who was dragged from the courthouse, cut with knives and dangled over a fire as half the town's population - some 15,000 people - cheered. Washington's trial and sentencing for killing a white woman were conducted in less than 90 minutes, and his lynching was one of the few photographed in progress.”
-Associated Press, May 16, 2006

“Yep. A 90 minute trial before they strung them up. And now two of the commissioners are concerned that people should remember the victims. Now, while I’m obviously not an expert in the case in question, I’m willing to believe that that trial was probably at least as rigged as Dubya’s military tribunals…
You see racism is only a problem if we have someone to hate. If we could just figure out some way to get rid of all of the Mexicans (and blacks, and Asians, and all of those other non-Anglos) we wouldn’t have all these people upset about them. We need a solution to this problem. Some kind of a final solution… Hmmm…”
-Skippy

“And he [Dubya] will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: ‘Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it's just not going to work.’
Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.”
-‘Vox Day’, WorldNetDaily, May 15, 2006

“So Tony, it certainly appears that there is such a thing as racism in the United States still. What do you have to say about that?”
-Skippy

“Tony Snow said he didn't want to ‘hug the tar baby,’ and then he did just that by using the expression in his first televised White House press briefing yesterday.
The tar-covered doll that Br'er Fox used to ensnare Br'er Rabbit in an 1881 Uncle Remus story is used as a metaphor for a sticky situation, but for some it also carries vague racist connotations — it has been used as a derogatory term for a black. In a society where a District of Columbia councilman can be accused of racism simply by using the word ‘niggardly,’ most politicians and TV commentators prefer to avoid tar baby references. When a reporter playfully asked him to explain the term, Mr. Snow mumbled that it could be traced to ‘American lore.’"
-New York Times, May 17, 2006