Still Waiting, Ctd.

And if Jonathan Chait has anything to say about it, looks like we'll be waiting awhile longer. 

Joan Walsh, with whom I once spent a mescaline-fueled weekend of passion and violence in an abandoned mining camp outside Nederland, CO in 1983 who writes for Salon, documents how Mr. Chait beats the issue of race with the "Both Sides Do It" stick until it is mushy enough to be palatable to America's most beloved political demographic: The Centrists.

Jonathan Chait’s epic race fail: How a story about racism and Obama goes horribly wrong

New York magazine's cover story suggests liberals are paranoid, MSNBC is like stop-and-frisk -- and other oddities

...

Though Chait acknowledges that appeals to white racism have undergirded the modern Republican Party since the civil rights era, he insists liberals are bullies who refuse to “acknowledge that the ability to label a person racist represents, in 21st-century America, real and frequently terrifying power.” He singles out MSNBC for special scorn (full disclosure: I’m a contributor there), while never once mentioning Fox by name. “MSNBC has spent the entire Obama presidency engaged in a nearly nonstop ideological stop-and-frisk operation,” Chait writes.

See what he did with that “stop-and-frisk” reference? In case you’ve missed it, police departments in some cities have been accused of infringing the civil rights of blacks and Latinos by physically stopping them, and invasively frisking them, with little and sometimes no evidence of wrongdoing. It’s kind of a big deal to civil rights liberals, of every race. So Chait tweaks them by accusing MSNBC of stopping and frisking conservatives “ideologically” – as in metaphorically and without consequence, which technically means not stopping and frisking them at all.

If you liked that comparison, you’re going to love the whole piece.

Well, that’s if you can get past the opening anecdote, which features a clash between Bill Maher and Bill Kristol in which Maher claims the rise of the Tea Party is about having “a black president” and Kristol gets really mad and sad, and the whole mess is supposed to sum up the ugliness of American political debate. Clearly the angels are crying over poor Bill Kristol being hurt by charges of conservative racism made by a liberal comedian on TV. I think Reince Priebus ought to set the whole Kristol-Maher exchange to that Sarah McLachlan music the SPCA uses, and raise money for the RNC.

Here’s what Chait admits Republicans are doing wrong, with regard to race: Enacting restrictive voter laws in states where black turnout has risen. Refusing to expand Medicaid, which disproportionately hurts African-Americans (who vote Democratic). Lying about Obama cutting Medicare, which scares older whites (who vote Republican). Explaining the GOP’s opposition to a Western-style social safety net, he even admits: “The factor that stands above all the rest is slavery.”

And here’s what Chait claims liberals are actually doing wrong with regard to race: mostly telling the truth about all of those things, while occasionally exaggerating it.

...

Acknowledging that one of our two major political parties has gone mad, and that it has spent generations carefully constructing a media/electoral machine that is fueled by pandering to the lowest instincts of racists and homophobes and fundies is too horrifying for many people to admit. This is because such an admission would carry with it the terrible moral obligation to fucking well do something about it, starting with calling things by their true names.

This is not a burden that many people want to bear, and so they will pay people to tell them that it just ain't so.

These people are called Centrists, and without their compliance the power of the Right would be radically diminished.