Vice President Biden's complete speech before the NAACP Convention in Houston, Texas (VIDEO)

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Seriously, Mitt? Seriously??

From TPM:

Mitt Romney told Fox News Wednesday that black leaders support him, but are afraid to say so publicly.

After his speech to the NAACP national convention Wednesday, Romney said he connected with black leaders in private and was assured that the loud and sustained booing he got for promising to repeal the health care reform law didn’t represent the feelings of all African American voters, even if they can’t say so in public.

“I spoke with a number of African-American leaders after the event and they said, you know, a lot of folks do not want to say they will not vote for President Obama but they are disappointed in his lack of policies to improve the schools,” Romney told Fox, according to a rush transcript. “The president has not been able to get the job done and people want to see someone would can get the economy going so I expect to get the African American votes, and at the end of my speech having a standing ovation was generous and hospitable and I believe we disagree on some issues like ‘Obamacare’ on a lot of issues people see eye to eye, they want someone getting the economy going.”

Polls show Romney has made no inroads with the African American electorate. He’s pulling single-digit support among black voters in the PollTracker Average. But by Romney’s account, it’s possible black voters are simply afraid to tell pollsters their real feelings.

Why some black people continue to hate the Washington Post

Another, unfortunately ongoing series of overprivileged white bubble-dwellers telling African-Americans what do, say or think.

I now bring you Dana Milbank, who thinks its a bad idea for the NAACP to pick on the Tea Party.

Dana Milbank is a loathsome cockroach who should have been fired for his puerile video stunts with Chris Cillizza.  ("Mad Bitch Beer?"  And this guy is going to give me and my people advice on anything?)

The NAACP makes it plain: The Tea Party is a platform to anti-Semites, racists and bigots.

Following up on Tuesday's posting about the Grad Student who unilaterally declared that the Teabaggers were not racist (with the Washington Post's help), it seems that the NAACP officially begs to differ:

The NAACP reignited the debate over the extremism of Tea Parties on Wednesday, releasing a report alleging ongoing ties between hate groups and the movement, which the civil rights organization criticizes for giving a platform to anti-Semites, racists and bigots.

"The result of this study contravenes many of the Tea Parties' self-invented myths, particularly their supposedly sole concentration on budget deficits, taxes and the power of the federal government," reads the introduction to "Tea Party Nationalism," a joint project with the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. "Instead, this report found Tea Party ranks to be permeated with concerns about race and national identity and other so-called social issues."

On a call with reporters, NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Jealous was quick to point out that his organization has no problem with the Tea Party movement as a whole. "We have no problem with the Tea Party existing," he said. "We have no problem with the Tea Party expressing its views in the great debates in our great democracy. We do, however, have a problem when prominent Tea Party members who have direct ties to organizations like the Council of Conservative Citizens, are allowed to use Tea Party events to recruit people for those white supremacist groups. ... And most importantly, we have a problem when the majority of the Tea Parties stand silent and doesn't loudly condemn that sort of behavior."

The complete report/website is available here.

Like I said before, I have been on this earth for 40-plus years, I know what the code-words are.

MSNBC: Fox News is at it again.

Though I am solidly liberal, I have never been the biggest Rachel Maddow fan. I find she let's her own personal fears guide her coverage too much. So when she covers the Obama Administration, and she determines that they're not being Liberal enough, she doesn't bother to explain to her audience, why there might be a reason for their actions, or that there's a reason in the first place. It's a taste thing. I don't think she's bad at her job. I think she's pretty funny, and does cover stories that otherwise get ignored. We probably agree 99.9% of the time, but I find her willing too often to be the perfect be the enemy of the good.

But, when she gets it right, she gets it right.

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And she has an interview with Benjamin Jealous of the NAACP:

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Ta-Neishi Coates's final thought...

Published in its entirety:

Here is former head and current spokesperson for the Tea Party Express Mark Williams satirically responding to the NAACP:

Dear Mr. Lincoln

We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop!

In fact we held a big meeting and took a vote in Kansas City this week. We voted to condemn a political revival of that old abolitionist spirit called the 'tea party movement'.

The tea party position to "end the bailouts" for example is just silly. Bailouts are just big money welfare and isn't that what we want all Coloreds to strive for? What kind of racist would want to end big money welfare? What they need to do is start handing the bail outs directly to us coloreds! Of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is the only responsible party that should be granted the right to disperse the funds.

And the ridiculous idea of "reduce[ing] the size and intrusiveness of government." What kind of massa would ever not want to control my life? As Coloreds we must have somebody care for us otherwise we would be on our own, have to think for ourselves and make decisions!

The racist tea parties also demand that the government "stop the out of control spending." Again, they directly target coloreds. That means we Coloreds would have to compete for jobs like everybody else and that is just not right.

Perhaps the most racist point of all in the tea parties is their demand that government "stop raising our taxes." That is outrageous! How will we coloreds ever get a wide screen TV in every room if non-coloreds get to keep what they earn? Totally racist! The tea party expects coloreds to be productive members of society?

Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house. Please repeal the 13th and 14th Amendments and let us get back to where we belong.

Sincerely

Precious Ben Jealous, Tom's Nephew
NAACP Head Colored Person

Williams has since taken the original down and posted a half-hearted justification. Mark Williams is the same man who has denounced Barack Obama as "Indonesian Muslim" and a "welfare thug." If Mark Williams is not a racist, then there are no racists in American society--a position which many, some liberals among them, no doubt find plausible.

It's been asked in comments, a few times, what good has come of the NAACP's resolution. I would not endeavor to speak for anyone but myself when I say that I owe the NAACP a debt of gratitude. I have, in my writing, a tendency to become theoretically cute, and overly enamored with my own fair-mindedness. Such vanity has lately been manifested in the form of phrases like "it's worth saying" and "it strikes me that..." or "respectfully..."

When engaging your adversaries, that approach has its place. But it's worth saying that there are other approaches and other places. Among them--respectfully administering the occasional reminder as to the precise nature of the motherfuckers you are dealing with. It strikes me that this is a most appropriate role for the nation's oldest civil rights organization.

Ta-Neishi Coates says it for me...

This is starting to be a trend.

First Chris Bodenner (writing for the vacationing Andrew Sullivan) wrote this:

Ta-Nehisi, who has been critical of the NAACP in the past, can't side with me, Weigel, and others exasperated with the group's Tea Party resolution

...

For me the issue is a practical matter; was the NAACP resolution helpful for race relations? Based on the immediate and inflammatory backlash showcased in the MSM, I think not.

And then he followed up with this:

Perhaps the NAACP could have approached [Tea Party Movement] leaders in private first, offering to help with a PR strategy to purge the racist elements of the movement from its core, small government message. That would have been the Obama-esque approach. But publicly shaming the [Tea Party Movement] into doing so doesn't seem smart or pragmatic.

I cannot think of a more stupid (and yes, frankly...racist) sentence to write in the English language than that.

Why is it that every time there is racist action on the part of White Americans, and Black Americans have the temerity to protest it or just let folks know it happened; it always becomes our fault? It's never the people who committed the racist action, it's always something we should have done better.

I put the following in an email to Ta-Neishi Coates, the writer who touched off Mr. Bodenner's comments:

Perhaps the Rodney King could have approached L.A. Police in private first, offering to help with a PR strategy to purge the racist elements from their ranks and get them to stop beating the hell out of him. That would have been the Obama-esque approach.

Dave Weigel chimed in today, following through on the "the NAACP shouldn't have done this" meme :

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.

Suddenly, I find myself just a little less sympathetic to Mr. Weigel's dismissal by the Washington Post a couple of weeks ago.

But finally, Ta-Neishi stepped up, and wrote back to Mr. Bodenner and Mr. Weigel:

To the extent that the NAACP has, as Dave says, "failed," it is because the arbiters of facts have ceded ground, and reporters and writers dutifully, and uncritically, dispense the notion that an organization which helped birth modern America has "a long history of...racism." But it also fails because there is very little pushback on this notion from "sensible" liberal writers. (I don't include Dave among them, mind you.) Instead we're getting calls for the president to condemn the NAACP, essentially, for being the NAACP.

Dave concedes that the NAACP has a case, but concludes that they're wrong for making it. But they're only wrong for making it because the broader society, evidently, believes that objecting to a call for literacy tests is, in fact, just as racist as a call for literacy tests. This inversion, this crime against sound logic, is at the heart of American white supremacy, and at the heart of a country that has nurtured white supremacy all these sad glorious years.

It is the Founders claiming all men are created equal while building a democracy on property in human beings. It is Confederates crying tyranny, while erecting a country based on tyranny. It is Sherman discriminating against black soldiers, while claiming that his superiors are discriminating against whites. It's Ben Tillman justifying racial terrorism, by claiming that he's actually fighting against terrorism. It is George Wallace defending a system built on bombing children in churches, and then asserting that the upholders of that system are "the greatest people to ever trod this earth."

Those who employ racism are not in the habit of confessing their nature--inversion is their cloak. Cutting out the cancer means confronting that inversion, means not wallowing in on-the-other-handism, in post-racialism, means seeing this as more than some kind of political game. Someone has, indeed, failed here. It is not the NAACP.

Well said. (Though I do put Dave Weigel in the category of failed "sensible" writers.)