Thursday, July 3, 2008

Do “Conservatives” Tacitly Approve of Racism?

Dung Beetle & Tortoise

I ask the question because I’m genuinely curious in view of the fact that hardly, if ever, is a word of objection or protest uttered by any of the “Conservative” blogging community (most of whom are part of “The Blogging Tories”) whenever this highly popular right-wing termagant issues another one of her hateful, degrading screeds or smears a whole group of people with some calumnious insult or demeaning racist epithet.

Yesterday morning, for example, she started off the day by suggesting that segregation wasn’t so bad — “The back of the bus. Was it really so bad?” she asked. This question was posed in response to a jazz singer in Denver substituting the song “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which also is known as the “black national anthem,” at the local Mayor’s State of the City address — an act that was highly inappropriate, disrespectful and, quite frankly, dumb, but hardly anything that warrants the notion that the period of American history in which blacks suffered from sanctioned racial discrimination and disenfranchisement perhaps wasn’t “really so bad”…

Moving right along, in connection with the non-existent “outrage” in Scotland about the use of a dog in a public service announcement by the local police that had all the wingnuts up in arms, Shaidle said “Maybe [Muslims] ought to spend a bit of time thinking about how other people view them.” In other words, unnamed “other people” (including Shaidle, presumably) regard Muslims as unclean or even evil; quite literally hardly better than dogs. Or perhaps you can derive some different interpretation from her remarks. Subsequently, she accused moderate Muslims who expressed reasonable opinions about the controversy of “lying like they always do” and of having no balls.

Later in the day, stating more reasons “Why I hate my country (part of a continuing series)” in a post decrying the Court Challenges Program, she referred to homosexuals as “deviants” — an insulting term that most educated people should know hasn’t had any legitimate currency since 1987 — and just to add injury to insult, lumped them together with “criminals.”

Of course this is just scratching the surface, and indeed the examples above are actually fairly tame stuff by Shaidle’s standards. After all, a while back she wistfully pined for “the good old days” when reflecting on the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre in which over a 1,000 unarmed Indian men, women and children were killed and more than 2,000 were wounded. That was another shocking instance in which there was complete silence from the “Conservative” blogging community.

Now, I realize that “Five Feet of Fury” isn’t officially part of Stephen Taylor’s blogroll, but there’s no denying that she’s an ideological fellow traveler with the Canadian “conservative” movement, so there are definitely some issues of association there. Should the consistent and almost universal silence of the “Conservative” blogging community about Shaidle’s ongoing pattern of hateful racism be taken as perhaps speaking volumes about its own attitudes in this regard? Sad to say, but maybe there really is a widespread, tacit approval of the reprehensible sentiments routinely spewed by this acidulous midget. It’s difficult to arrive at any other conclusion.