Amazing. Just amazing. The Washington Post Editorial Board has put out this editorial titled "For Republicans, bigotry is the new normal." The editorial is an assault on, well, just about everybody in GOP land, saying this, in part:
“THE REPUBLICAN Party, once small government’s champion, is now the party that breeds presidential contenders who would monitor schools and mosques, shut down parts of the Internet and exclude certain immigrants for no reason beyond the faith they profess. In the GOP debate Tuesday, those ideas — along with can-you-top-this rhetorical barrages aimed at illegal immigrants and Syrian refugees — received a generally polite reception, with constitutional, legal and practical questions contemptuously dismissed as “political correctness.”
True, the extremism that now passes for mainstream Republican thought, robbed of its shock value by the unfiltered ravings of Donald Trump, was punctured from time to time with expressions of dismay, incredulity and doubt.
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) skewered Mr. Trump’s plans for the United States to ban all Muslim immigrants or murder the families of terrorists, and Mr. Paul, along with Ohio Gov. John Kasich, rightly dismissed Mr. Trump’s blithe suggestion that he could somehow censor the Internet in parts of the world where jihadist sentiment runs deep.
By and large, though, these ludicrous proposals went unremarked on by the Republican contestants, for whom bigotry, hatred and magical thinking are the new normal.”
Amazing. Let’s take a look at the remarkable hypocrisy on display here in this jewel. Why? because, to borrow from the Post, bigotry is the always normal for the Democratic Party. How normal?
Here is this front-page story from the very self-same Washington Post published on May 1, 1997. The headline:
The FDR Memorial's Deeper Meaning
The story, as you may gather from the headline, is about the dedication of the new memorial in Washington to liberalism’s favorite president - Franklin D. Roosevelt. After interviewing a woman who said that FDR “was the greatest president that lived on Earth”, among other things the Post was dishing out this, bold print print for emphasis supplied:
Unlike the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, the tribute to Roosevelt does not revolve around a solitary statue of one man. (Landscape architect Lawrence) Halprin says in a forthcoming book on the memorial that he wanted "to highlight the experience of living through the FDR presidency" as well as the influence FDR had on the country.
"Somehow I needed to evoke in each visitor a deep and emotional understanding of how these years changed the lives of the people who lived through them," he said.
Two days later the Post was rhapsodizing about President Bill Clinton’s speech at the dedication of FDR’s monument. The Clinton/FDR story was headlined:
Clinton Dedicates Memorial,Urges Americans to Emulate FDR
That story glowed about Clinton’s FDR speech, and said in part this, bold print for emphasis supplied:
“The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial honors the 32nd president as one of the great leaders of this country—in the company of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln—and pays tribute to the jaunty inspiration that marked the unique 12-year span of Roosevelt's presidency.
Clinton urged the country to reclaim the confidence they found in themselves under FDR. ‘We need the faith of Franklin Roosevelt in an entirely different time,’ Clinton said. ‘My fellow Americans, every time you think of Franklin Roosevelt, put aside your doubts, become more American, become more like him.’”
Got all that? According to the Post and its gushing coverage of FDR’s career in the White House the FDR years were just swell. FDR was a great leader. And they admiringly quote Clinton for saying that Americans should “become more like him.”
Yet what was curiously left out of these gushing Post stories on FDR? Things like this:
-- The day after Pearl Harbor FDR signed presidential proclamations 2525, 2526 and 2527, successively titled “Aliens: Japanese”, “Aliens: Germans” and “Aliens: Italians.” In which the liberal hero instantly suspended the naturalization of every Japanese, German and Italian in America who was on the proverbial “path to citizenship.” The proclamations banned these three populations from going more than five miles from their home - if they had a job six miles away they lost it. They had to register with the US government. They could not own cameras, flashlights or shortwave radios. And there was more.
-- FDR signed Executive Order 9066, which forced 110, 000 Japanese Americans -- American citizens -- out of their homes into internment camps in remote areas of the United States. As Mark Levin noted in Men in Black this decidedly racist executive order was a blatant violation of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution - that amendment reading in part that “no person shall be …deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Worse, as if worse were possible, when the FDR executive order drew a legal challenge in the case known as Korematsu v. United States FDR’s Supreme Court appointees upheld the clearly unconstitutional order, with the opinion conveniently written by Justice Hugo Black. Justice Black, a progressive former Senator from Alabama, held a lifetime membership in the Ku Klux Klan. (When Black’s ties to the Klan were revealed after his Court nomination, FDR, according to Black himself, breezily dismissed Black’s Klan membership by saying that “some of his best friends and supporters in the state of Georgia were strong members” of the Klan.”)
--FDR’s political coalition depended on frequent and blatant appeals to out and out bigotry and racism. Typical of this alliance was Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo, a passionate FDR supporter who was both a proud Klan member and sponsor of a plan to forcibly deport every black American back to Africa where, said this key FDR ally, “he ( a black American) could live under a government of his own people.” But hey, Bilbo was big on creating Social security, so no Big Deal in the New Deal over him.
One could go on, and on, and on here. In today’s world of Democrats this culture of dividing by skin color is glaringly apparent in everything from support for racial quotas to illegal immigration. In terms of the latter, as noted here in this New York Times editorial, opponents to illegal immigration are accused of being opposed because of the illegals “having brown skin”. Hey. No bigotry there. Right? Uh-huh.
In short, first last and always, from the days when the Democratic Party was on record supporting slavery, segregation and lynching to the internment of Japanese-Americans to the harshly divisive racial rhetoric used to support illegal immigration, it is Democrats -- more than Republicans -- who, to borrow from the recent Post editorial swam in a cultural swampland of “bigotry, hatred and magical thinking.” It's not something that should be cynically excised from history by the historically informed partisans of The Washington Post.
One could always hope that when it comes to exploiting racial resentments, their editorial board would take a hint from the old biblical adage from Matthew 7:5:
"Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' and behold, the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye…”
One could hope. But even now, the Post happily celebrates a president who played the bigotry of the race card with a vengeance, a president who put a Klan member on the Court who in turn proudly upheld a presidential decision to forcibly intern an entire segment of the American population based on race, a president who attracted to his coalition the likes of Theodore Bilbo, a president who issued proclamations declaring entire racial and ethnic American populations “Aliens” and removing their constitutional rights - there quite candidly doesn’t seem to be much hope to be had.
