First there is Donald Trump speaking of President Obama and police shootings, “There’s something going on. Look, there’s something going on,” and then there is Rush Limbaugh claiming that when Obama says the “criminal justice system is racist…he’s lighting a match…he’s encouraging the actions that follow.”
Watch courtesy of Media Matters for America:
“Obama rolled out a litany of junk statistics to prove that the criminal justice system is racist. Blacks are arrested at twice the rate of whites, he complained, and they get sentences almost 10 percent longer than whites for the same crime. Look, Obama said this a couple of days before the five cops in Dallas are assassinated. When the president says this kind of stuff he’s lighting a match. When the president says these kind of things he’s encouraging the actions that follow. And don’t for a minute think he doesn’t know it. Missing from Obama’s address was any mention of the massive racial differences in criminal offending and criminal records that fully account for arrest rates and sentence lengths. Blacks, for example, commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined.”
To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
The alternative for Republicans is that like them, we just pretend racism is dead and we live in a “post racial” society. Only it isn’t so. Racism is with us still, and Rush Limbaugh is living proof.
Conservatives love to push the meme that we had licked racism until President Obama somehow reintroduced it into our culture. They can’t explain how this might be true when it was racist white folks who got bent out of shape by Obama’s election, but then this is conservatism we are talking about: facts are the last things that matter to their argument.
As ever for Limbaugh and his fellow racists, simply saying it makes it true.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
