Missing the Point By a Parsec Award

David Weigel has been making a good job of failing strategically upward for many weeks now, but if he wants to maintain the impressive arc of his awesome professional trajectory, maybe he should stick to secretly poking bleating idiots in the eye (Edgy!) avoid saying hilariously ignorant shit like this in his Outside Voice:

When I said the NAACP's move would backfire, I meant things like this would happen. I didn't mean they were wrong to go down that road. It's just that they should know that calling out a group for "racism" is pointless -- whoever's been targeted will simply claim to have been attacked unfairly and had his free speech threatened. Remember what happened when Eric Holder said that America had been a "nation of cowards" in discussing race. Boom: Backlash. Anger. Debate over why he said it, but not what he meant. A year and change later we have a ridiculous national debate over whether Holder's department hates white people because it won't draw and quarter the New Black Panther Party. This stuff is what he meant, of course. But saying it isn't actually starting the debate. It's pretty obvious that the NAACP failed here.

To say that "calling out a group for 'racism' is pointless" so spec-tac-ularly misses the point of the entire Civil Rights movement that it's really kinda breathtaking.

Where did you learn your craft, Davey?

See, in the 50s and 60s, everybody in the South fucking well knew that Klan terrorists ran the circus. Knew exactly how colorful goons like Lester Maddox kept the darkies in line. Knew what "law and order" meant to fascist thugs like Bull Connor.


Knew that professional demagogues like George Wallace weren't going to budge a fucking inch and would, in fact, use native, inbred Southern resentment and the presence of "communists", "nigger lovers" and "outside agitators" to consolidate their political power.

Which is why the long-term success of the Civil Rights movement (hell, any civil rights movement struggling to get the majority culture to take its side against against its oppressors) never rested on some weak, Pollyannaish hope that confronting despicable people with evidence of their perfidy would somehow compel them to suddenly evolve upwards from the racist sewers from whence they came and into the bright light of civilization.

Shit, if conquering and razing the Confederacy down to its root cellars couldn't persuade the Grand High Wizards of Crackervania to put down their noose-wrapped Bibles and join the human race, a bunch of kids dressed in their Sunday best peacefully marching for voting rights certainly wasn't going to do it.

Any more than it is going to change the minds of the dregs standing on the Right side of the Conservative movement today (from Wolcott):

Slave Trade
by James Wolcott
July 12, 2010, 6:18 PM

...because the more right-wing a Republican is, the more unambiguously, unashamedly racist they are.

As payback for slavery a century and a half ago, Obama intends to lash white people into slavery--that's the neo-Confederate message of Tea Party conservatism and its craven follow travelers.

The racism isn't coded anymore, subliminally slipped under the door, a secret ingredient poured into the mixing bowl, flirted with around the edges, inadvertently blurted into live mikes (though that too).

It's laid smack on the counter.

(See how I did that, Davey? Linking those two historical thingies together? Pretty impressive, no? Now for the closer...)

You see, Mr. Weigel, one, specific (and ultimately successful) tactic in the arsenal of the leaders of the long struggle for Civil Rights was to bring the ugly realities of what went on quietly and behind the scenes every day in the American South to a wider audience. To catch them firing up the fire hoses on camera and spewing their unhinged, Fundamentalist venom into the microphones of the world press.

To bring together the Big, Righteous Hammer of outraged public opinion and the Big, Righteous Anvil of federal legislation to inflict so much pain on the drooling mobs and their Glorious Leaders that would be compelled to do at the point of a sword were never, ever going to do out of the goodness of their hearts.

The story here is this larger, bait-the-bigots-into-the-daylight historical context within which the current Teabagger Outrage du jour takes place; a fact that you would think that a "journalist" reporting on some "news" would have taken the trouble not to get so horribly, horribly wrong.