CA-04: Grand Dragons For McClintock

Perennial candidate Tom McClintock is a beloved figure on the far right. We just didn't know how far.

It turns out that in 2003, when McClintock was running for his eleventy-teenth political office in the California governor recall election, he was endorsed by none other than the KKK.

Dateline: September 27, 2003

Ku Klux Klan Announces support for Tom McClintock

The Imperial Klans of America, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (IKA) have announced their full support for Tom
McClintock’s bid for the governorship of California. Their support is announced in what they term “the
lesser of all evil candidates.”

When interviewed, Mr. Chris Johnson (Grand Dragon or State Director of the IKA’s California chapter) had this to say regarding the announcement, “While Mr. McClintock is not the perfect candidate for California Governor, we have more in common with his ideology than any of the other candidates. We are in congruence with his stand on illegal aliens infecting our land and his courage in standing up to the invasion.” Mr. Johnson went on to say that, “Mr. McClintock echoes our anti-abortion stand, and our opposition to oppressive taxation.”

I guess the McClintock campaign can spin this by saying that at least the KKK called him evil, even if he was the lesser of all the rest?

Here's the thing: organizations can choose to endorse anybody they want, and the candidates have no control over that. But McClintock never said a peep five years ago when he got this endorsement. And there's a Chris Johnson on McClintock's donor list from that 2003 gubernatorial race. Chris Johnson is obviously a common name, and the donation is $100, so take it with a grain of salt. But certainly, McClintock needs to answer the question of why he never rejected the endorsement and why they never sought out and returned money that would even have the appearance of coming from the Klan.

More to the point, McClintock is just the kind of guy to demonize an opponent's associations. In fact, when running for governor in 2003, McClintock compared then-Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante's association with the Hispanic student group MEChA to, you guessed it, the KKK.

State Sen. Tom McClintock, a conservative Republican rival, recently likened the Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan, also known as MEChA, to the Ku Klux Klan.

"It's like saying, 'Oh, I was a moderate member of the Klan,'" McClintock said last month on the San Diego radio station KOGO. "It's incumbent on Cruz Bustamante to clearly and completely renounce ...

The idea that the KKK finds ideological kinship with McClintock is pretty much a no-brainer. His demonization of illegal immigrants as the cause of so much of the nation's economic woes plays to the baser instincts of the racist right. He's running a campaign against Charlie Brown that has recently seized on Brown's appearance at an anti-war rally before the invasion of Iraq as somehow un-American. It's really not too much of a logical leap here.

Stay tuned for more on this...

De-Swifting

The Obama campaign has pretty much figured out that the current media landscape is going to give credence to the same set of prevaricators and liars that they allowed to shape the election in 2004. There's no internal debate over whether or not to give something like Jerome Corsi's book oxygen - it's the media world we live in that he will appear all over cable news (not just the right-wing outlets) and in everyone's newspapers. The reason given by the media is always that "it's a best-seller," but that's a system the conservative movement has been gaming for years, and frequently after the boom cycle of early publicity to get their wingnuts onto the teevee the books get remaindered and available for purchase for a penny.

So instead of hoping that these smears go away, the campaign and its allies are fighting back. Chief among them is Media Matters, and Paul Waldman was brilliant with Corsi on Larry King's show last night.



They've also unearthed Corsi's latest media appearance, on a pro-white radio show. I'm guessing that wasn't a hard booking for him to nail down.

In an appearance on the August 13 edition of CNN's Larry King Live, after Media Matters for America Senior Fellow Paul Waldman noted that Jerome Corsi, author of The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, had "put up on right-wing Web sites a whole series of bigoted and hateful posts," Corsi replied that "you haven't mentioned all my apologies for those statements." But notwithstanding Corsi's apologies for his comments, Corsi is reportedly scheduled to appear with host James Edwards on the August 17 edition of The Political Cesspool Radio Show, which, according to its "Statement of Principles," "represent[s] a philosophy that is pro-White" and which "heartily endorse[s] and accept[s] as our own, the founding tenets of the Council of Conservative Citizens [CCC]." According to a Fall 2007 article in the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, " 'The Political Cesspool' in the past two years has become the primary radio nexus of hate in America." Corsi previously appeared on the July 20 edition of the show, in which he promoted The Obama Nation and criticized Sen. Barack Obama.

There's also a concerted pushback inside the campaign as well, consisting of mau-mauing the media in the same way that conservatives ensure their message is heard.

Obama advisers say that whenever they hear that Corsi has been booked for an appearance on a network program, they are quickly contacting the program's producers to rebut the book's charges in phone conversations and giving them a whole run-down of past Corsi quotes that are controversial.

Obama aides also vow to insist that the producers allow them to have on a campaign surrogate to attack the charges, and are expecting to recruit more campaign surrogates, well plied with talking points, to push back against the book.

They've put out a 40-page document outlining all the falsehoods in the book. And they're using a viral email strategy to push the facts along.

There's no question that Obama's team is better prepared for this than John Kerry's was, but of course that's a low bar. What's notable is how a few of the media fish aren't totally biting at this one. They're giving Corsi publicity, sure, but they are feeling the pressure to present the other side. And Joe Klein, who has been eating his Wheaties lately, is making his disgust known and connecting it directly to the McCain campaign.

I know that people like me are supposed to try to be fair...and balanced. (The Fox mockery of our sappy professional standards seems more brutally appropriate with each passing year.) In the past, I would achieve a semblance--or an illusion--of balance by criticizing Democrats for not responding effectively when right-wing sludge merchants poisoned our national elections with their filth and lies. And it is true, as John Kerry knows, that a more effective response--and a bolder campaign--might have neutralized the Swiftboat assault four years ago. It is also true that Corsi's book this time is far less effective than his Swiftboat venture, since it doesn't come equipped with veterans willing to defile their service by telling lies to camera.

But there is no excuse for what the McCain campaign is doing on the "putting America first" front. There is no way to balance it, or explain it other than as evidence of a severe character defect on the part of the candidate who allows it to be used. There is a straight up argument to be had in this election: Mcain has a vastly different view from Obama about foreign policy, taxation, health care, government action...you name it. He has lots of experience; it is always shocking to remember that this time four years ago, Barack Obama was still in the Illinois State Legislature. Apparently, though, McCain isn't confident that conservative policies and personal experience can win, given the ruinous state of the nation after eight years of Bush. So he has made a fateful decision: he has personally impugned Obama's patriotism and allows his surrogates to continue to do that. By doing so, he has allied himself with those who smeared him, his wife, his daughter Bridget, in 2000. Those tactics won George Bush a primary--and a nomination. But they proved a form of slow-acting spiritual poison, rotting the core of the Bush presidency. We'll see if the public decides to acquiesce in sleaze in 2008, and what sort of presidency--what sort of country--that will produce.

It still has a hint of that Village aroma, but the words "character defect" are pretty strong.

We'll see how this progresses, and if the coverage changes when the inevitable TV campaign gets matched to the book, but for now, it's actually important that we all keep on top of this. The right is extremely good at character assassination, and the only way to counteract it is to punch right back and expose them.

* BTW, Corsi has some other beliefs that I'll bet you won't see on your average cable news hour...

...wow, the AP punked WorldNetDaily:

Corsi writes for World Net Daily, a conservative Web site whose lead headline Thursday was "Astonishing photo claims: Dead Bigfoot stored on ice.

The Double Bind Of Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric

Despite failure at the polls in 2006 and 2007, the Republicans think they have a magic bullet headed into the next election year with the issue of immigration. If they can only demagogue the issue enough, the theory goes, they can tap into nativist fears of a brown horde sweeping across the nation and eke out a victory. It doesn't matter to them that immigrants actually underuse the health care system instead of "stealing health care" away from real Muricans, or that children of immigrants actually grow fluent in English in the second generation, because they understand that learning the language is the key to economic success. They would rather demonize the other, despite the historical blunder of alienating the record numbers of immigrants entering the country (One in eight people living in this country is an immigrant, the highest percentage since the 1920s).

Most Republican candidates, even the so-called revolutionary ones, are banking on this strategy (Paul is actually much further to the right than the rest of the field, seeking to abolish birthright citizenship - some Constitutionalist). I'm not so sure. I think Republican immigrant-bashers are in a double bind. Their first problem is that the immigrant experience is too tied to America for candidates to wall themselves off from it. And so we get the stories that Tom Tancredo loves Mexican food, and had illegal immigrants renovate his house:

When Tancredo hired a construction crew to transform his drab basement into a high-tech pleasure den in October 2001, however, he did not express concern that only two of its members spoke English. Nor did he bother to check the workers’ documentation to see if they were legal residents of the United States. Had Tancredo done so, he would have learned that most of the crew consisted of undocumented immigrants, or “criminal aliens” as he likes to call them.

Instead, Tancredo paid the crew $60,000 for its labor and waited innocently for the completion of his elaborate entertainment complex.During the renovation process, two illegal workers hired by Tancredo were alerted to his reputation for immigrant bashing. They went straight to the Denver Post to complain. Tancredo “doesn't want us here, but he'll take advantage of our sweat and our labor,” one of the workers complained to the Post on September 19, 2002. “It's just not right.”

There's little way to avoid the immigrant experience, and so these kinds of hypocritical stances are unavoidable. Romney's been caught up in this as well. The other trap the Mittster has fallen into is favoring one set of immigrants over another, which is a political necessity in certain parts of the country, and again raises the charge of hypocrisy.

“I can tell you my inclination would be to say as many Cubans as want to come here should come in,” Romney said in an interview Tuesday with The Tampa Tribune editorial board. […]Romney replied that Cuban Americans are exemplary citizens who have brought “great vitality, skills and energy to the American experience.”

“In my opinion, the more the merrier,” he said.

The problem for these candidates is that, if they take a pure line on immigration, they end up attracting the ugly bigotry of white supremacy.

Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) has attracted a primary challenge from former RNC member Buddy Witherspoon, who is running to Graham's right on illegal immigration. As it turns out — and despite Witherspoon's recent denials — he has been a proud member of a white supremacist organization, the Palmetto Scoop has uncovered.

Witherspoon recently said claims that he had been a member of the segregationist Council of Conservative Citizens were "totally absurd" and that he had only ever been to one meeting. But in 1999, he told the Washington Post that he was a member, and that "Everything to me is fine from what I see and hear." Furthermore, this was at the same time as he was a Republican National Committeeman in good standing.

The truth is that voters appear to recoil when these politicians cross the fine line between the so-called "rule of law" and open racism. This is even true on the Republican side.

I was a little bit surprised that both Huckabee and McCain got applause with their relatively human responses on the interminable immigration questions. The debate was in Florida, which probably explains it, but I think it shows once again that even the Republicans are not monolithic on this question [...]It seems to me that if you can get applause (and no boos) for a comment like that on immigration at a GOP debate then Democratic consultants should relax just a tiny bit about the breathless responses they are getting in their focus groups and tell their candidates to sound reasonable too. They aren't going to be able to out-hate the Tancredo wing of the party so there's no margin in helping the Republicans set the political agenda by pushing bad legislation and even worse rhetoric.

That's the key. Democrats have to understand that a little compassion and a little sensibility will win the hearts of what I feel is a silent majority in favor of comprehensive and respectful immigration solutions. Most Republicans are either coming off as liars or racists on this question; those like Huckabee and McCain who sound like rational human beings are rising in the polls. The Lou Dobbs wing of the country is very vocal and very shallow. There's no need to give in to the nativism it promotes.

Freed: The Jena Six

Mychal Bell is out on bail, the way most juveniles accused of aggravated second-degree battery would be, I gather. And he won't be tried as an adult, either. I do wonder if he will be tried as a black devil, however.

GIBSON: So, this is -- what they're worried about is a mirage of 1950s-style American segregation, racism from the South. They wanna fight the white devil. I -- you know, there's no -- you can't go fight the black devil. Black devils stalking their streets every night gunning down their own people -- can't go fight that. That would be snitchin'.

Apparently, racism is over. Hm. Tell that to the white supremacists converging on Jena right now.

First came the word that a neo-Nazi Web site was under investigation by the FBI for purportedly publishing the home addresses of the six young black men involved in the case.

Now there's this report from Abbey Brown at the Clarion-Ledger about how they're exploiting the whites involved with the case too:

The beating victim in the “Jena Six” case has given an interview to a group that has been labeled as white supremacist, but his parents now say they feel duped.

Richard Barrett, who described himself to a reporter as “pro-majority,” said he spent Wednesday evening with Justin Barker and his family. Barrett said his goal was to publicize Barker’s side of the story.

Barker, who is white, was beaten last December at Jena High School, allegedly by six black teens. The charges filed in the case, including attempted murder and conspiracy, drew international attention and sparked a protest Thursday in Louisiana by tens of thousands of people from across the country who said the six teens were being persecuted because of their race.

“People need to realize what is going on, speak up and speak their mind,” Barker told Barrett, editor of a publication called Nationalist.

“I’ve got to work every day,” Barker said, “while the attackers sit there on a couch, or sit on some bench with sleeping-pants on. Something needs to be done.

Yeah, it's over all right...