Mark Levin went on a tirade about all the wonderful things the GOP has done for African Americans. Unfortunately for his thesis, Levin’s subtext was that blacks are just too stupid to get it.
Levin visited the Hannity show last night to do his part to get out the disaffected conservative vote, which was the show’s focus.
Right at the beginning, Levin undermined his later contention when he smeared Al Sharpton. After a clip of Obama calling into Sharpton’s radio show was played, Levin sneered, “I didn’t know Al Sharpton could speak in complete sentences and I’m still not certain that he can.”
Hannity didn’t object. Not long after, he complained, “I often point out that during every election, I see the Democrats play the race card. …What are we to make of that tactic? How should they (Republicans) respond?”
Levin offered this stuck-in-the-sixties diatribe as a defense of Republicans vis-à-vis race:
What we’re to make of it is this is a hateful race-baiting party that has really no good ideas, let alone new ideas and I hope African Americans around the country understand that the Democrat Party has always used them. The Democrat Party stood for slavery against Lincoln. It stood for segregation – all the way up from the Civil War into the 1950s and 60s. The first Civil Rights Act was actually 1957, Dwight Eisenhower. He sent the Army into Arkansas to open up that school when a Democrat governor was blocking the doorway, Faubus
You can look through the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Most Republicans voted for it. The 1965 Voting Rights Act – most Republicans voted for it. You can look at FDR’s first nominee to the Supreme Court, Hugo Black, was a former lawyer for the Klan in Alabama. You can look at Robert Byrd, that wasn’t that long ago when the Democrats rallied behind him and made them their majority leader in the senate – former Klansman.
Republicans don’t have a history of lynching anybody. They don’t have a history of blocking school doors. They don’t have a history of racism of any kind. And for once, I’d like a Republican to stand up and rub the Democrats face in their real history.
Besides the fact that Levin can’t seem to think of anything the Republicans have done for African Americans in the last 50 years (while accusing Democrats of having no new ideas), the underlying assumption is that if African Americans don’t vote Republican (which they don’t), they must either be too stupid or too ignorant or too gullible - or all three - to know better.
But Levin clearly doesn’t have a very sensitive hypocrisy detector. In the same segment in which he complained about President Obama being “very divisive,” Levin said that Obama’s “full Mussolini” will come out after the election. “He’s going to do everything he can in the last two years of his presidency to further screw up the country,” Levin predicted.
And just to prove how he’s such a uniter, not a divider, Levin concluded his ranting about how awful the Democrats are with, “They need to get a good swift kick in the ass in this election.”
“Well said,” Hannity said approvingly.
Watch it below, from last night's Hannity show, and see why Levin almost certainly did nothing to help get out the black vote for Republicans.
Enough said
I agree. But I am getting a kick out of how few people (I think only one or two) of the Levin fans who swarmed here actually understood or maybe even read what I was saying.
For the Mark Levin fans: I know you don’t care what I say because all you want to do is hate on me, but for the record, I never said Levin said anything untrue. I said that 1) Every single reason he listed that he thought was proof that blacks should vote Republican happened 50 years or more ago (when he ought to know plenty has happened to change that equation since) and 2) his UNDERLYING message was African Americans are too dumb to know why (according to Levin) the GOP is their better choice.
Say hi to Markie for me!
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was originally proposed by JFK, and eventually signed by LBJ.
Voting on the original House version of the Civil Rights Act of 1964:
Southern Democrats: 7–87 (7–93%)
Southern Republicans: 0–10 (0–100%)
Northern Democrats: 145–9 (94–6%)
Northern Republicans: 138–24 (85–15%)
Voting on the Senate version of the Civil Rights Act of 1964:
Southern Democrats: 1–20 (5–95%)
Southern Republicans: 0–1 (0–100%)
Northern Democrats: 45–1 (98–2%)
Northern Republicans: 27–5 (84–16%)
So the voting was much more North vs South than Democratic vs. Republican. However, exactly 0 of southern Rs voted for it, while 8 Ds did. Pretty small numbers either way.
If you want to look at D vs R:
Senate:
D: 46 Y, 21 N
R: 27 Y, 6 N
House:
D: 152 Y, 96 N
R: 138 Y, 34 N
So looking at the numbers, I guess the reason the South went so heavily R after passage of the Act was mainly because it was proposed by Ds, not necessarily because of the voting.
There’s more to it than that, of course, but this comment is long enough already.
One editorial note to right wingers: PLEASE stop pretending that Democrats in 1860 have the same views as Democrats today.
They came on here yelling the same BS, saying “libs” were so stupid, the “Democrat Party” was the “plantation”, we were “the real racists”, blah blah blah . . .
And — as was the case then — as soon as the Dems retain the WH and Senate and re-take the House, they’ll scuttle back under the rocks from whence they came . . .
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Guess what.. This will probably come as a shock to most of you, there isnt a country in the history of the world with a perfect history. Repeat..There isn’t a country in the history of the world with a perfect history. Every person on planet earth has ancestors somewhere who was treated bad. Every person on planet earth has ancestors somewhere who was treated bad.
My apologies Ellen. I wrote my comment quickly online (usually try to do them offline to catch typos and make sure my thoughts are clear) and I really should have distinguished between the few commentors who’ve heaped praise on Sharpton and your stated ambivalence which yes, I’ve noted before.
That said, it still puzzles me why you feel it necessary to make an issue every time someone on FNC takes a shot at Sharpton? As I said long time ago, this is going to happen quite often.
As long as Sharpton (and Jesse Jackson though less frequently and with far less bellicosity) rushes headlong into every incident involving real, or perceived, racism by police and others against blacks, he will be one of the favorite target on Fox.
As more information from the Ferguson grand jury is leaked — details that might just exonerate the cop — I predict many more and more frequent attacks on Sharpton; many of them as “gratuitous” as Levin’s attack. (Yes, Sharpton very rarely speaks in grammatically complete sentences and of course what has that got to do with anything?)
Maybe these attacks from the Fox bunch are due to the fact that most of them might feel that Sharpton’s transformation from a rabble-rousing anti-white and anti-Semitic agitator into a dignified spokeman for black Americans is as phony as a $3 bill. Some on the left, I might add, feel that way too.
Sharpton himself invites much of this by his obviously naked grab for power and influence. As I said earlier in this thread, I was sad to see that Obama feels it necessary to suck up to Sharpton.
Here in NYC, it’s a given that the “shadow Mayor” is, in fact, Sharpton. When he demands and gets his spokesperson, Rachel Noerdlinger a $170k job assisting de Blasio’s wife Chirlaine and she’s still on the job long after it’s revealed that Rachel Noerdlinger’s boyfriend is a convicted killer who disses cops, that she lives with him in New Jersey (despite NYC regulations requiring city residence) claiming it’s for the health of her disabled son, who’s been seen playing football, and the fact that she ignores parking rules (some $900 in unpaid tickets so far, I think)… then who is really in charge of City Hall?
Joe
I guess Southern Strategy, Jesse Helms, David Duke, Eli Watson, Edward Jackson, Lee Atwater, John McCain, Mitt Romney, the birther movement, Cliven Bundy, or any of the casually habitual racism on Fox News counts and Republican radio doesn’t count.
I guess things like the racist conservative militias, certain Republican governors hiring white supremacists for their advisors, the excessive right-wing racism against Obama, and the voter ID laws coming from the same Republicans who said black people voted for Obama because they thought he’d put them in charge don’t count, either.
I absolutely love that there’s so many people on this thread who think Republicans are just all kinds of pure, and that Democrats have been 100% of the bigotry in this country. The fact is that the racists in politics became republicans during the civil rights movement, and there’s a reason why.
Oh, and how about we end myths like Republicans were founded entirely to oppose slavery? If they were really so anti-slavery, they would have worked with the “free soil” groups, instead of helping them fail so that they could all join their banner, and thus be ranks for the agendas they endorsed as Whigs- Such as legalizing monopolies like the second Bank of America. Also, since the party began around the time slavery was ending, of course you won’t find any slave owners who were Republicans- The ones who owned slaves, or came from slave owning families owned them as whigs. In fact, when you own up to that part, your story falls apart pretty fast.
You see how little facts like those destroy your made-up little fantasy about being the maligned racially pure? Dems can own up to racists of the past in their ranks, and members who out themselves as racists now are shut out. The fact that ya’ll are here defending one racist Republican host who’s whitesplainin’ on the show of a more racist Republican host shows that the same can’t be said for you.
The Civil War pitted the democrat south versus the republican north. The President of the Confederacy was a democrat (Jefferson Davis). The republican party was born of the goal to end slavery! It was successful in its mission to end slavery when the first republican President (Abraham Lincoln) signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves and ultimately led to Lincoln’s assassination at the hands of an angry pro-slavery democrat (John Wilkes Booth).
A recent poll shows that nearly 94% of all blacks surveyed wrongly believe that Abraham Lincoln was a democrat!
Could the survey results be an indicator of why democrats want to deny school choice to black school children? Could it be that the substandard education of blacks attending bad inner city schools benefits the democrat party? Could it be that the opposition of democrats to school choice is simply to deny blacks the opportunity to an accurate narrative of American history? It seems democrats want to “keep ’em away from the good schools” where accurate American history is taught rather than the leftist propaganda of inner city bad schools, which teach blacks that they are “victims”.
Democrats have a long history of opposing the opportunity of a good education for blacks. That history dates back to the times when democrat slave owners severed the hands of blacks who tried to read or write; thru the times just a few decades ago when democrat Governors blocked the doorways to white segregated schools in the south to prevent black children from attending the better schools; thru today, when democrat politicians vehemently oppose allowing black inner city children the opportunity to choose which schools to attend so they can escape dysfunctional, crime-riddled inner city schools with the goal of attending the better schools of a city in their fight for a brighter future for themselves.
Imagine the shift in black voter sentiment if black students actually obtain school choice and learn that Lincoln was a republican, that his assassin was a democrat enraged because Lincoln ended slavery; or, that the Ku Klux Klan was made up of entirely of democrats; or, that Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated by a former Klan member and a democrat; or, that democrats oppose giving black children the opportunity to choose to attend the best schools; or, that democrats have lied to them and have used them all these years and that black communities are poorer now after seven years of a democrat President than any time since slavery. That’s the real truth of what the democrat party is all about. Mark Levin is exactly right.
Putting aside the fact that this was said on the show of Fox’s most racist host, that Levin’s known for his own racial insecurities, and that this load of crap was the immediate follow-up to running a raciallytinged smear of Al Sharpton… I don’t think it’s wise for you to tell people what they can’t see, or use the word “stupid.”
If I agreed with you then we’d both be wrong.
For those of you who haven’t heard of this one yet, Ben Marine is a Hispanic man who works for the election commission. Radio conservatives, led by Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze” and GBTV, where they took a security video of him holding a box of absentee votes, and used it to lie that he was committing voter fraud by bringing in votes cast by illegal immigrants. He is now in police protection because their lie led to a lot of death threats, and (unconfirmed) two people actually trying to kill him.
Not one conservative has condemned them for this. In fact, the ones who did bother to read links about it, or listened to it being discussed, their $0.02 was “Well, what if they were right? They’re just concerned…”
Accountability is a grand ol’ cherrypicking adventure with Conservatives. They have to come whine that Levin didn’t use the exact words Ellen said he did, but something like Marine? IOKIYAR.
To be fair, though… Conservatives are big fans of calling people liars if the headline isn’t an exact quote. Remember when that was literally the only thing they did on here?
Not to mention his putting aside his hatred of Glenn Beck to defend him, his asking what’s the problem with Rush Limbaugh’s racist comments, and his smirking on Hannity panels where someone says something racist and he clearly approves. Or his racist tirades against Oprah, Jamie Foxx, Juan Williams, and even his racist rant against Ben Carson using the “vicious white liberals” line.
Yeah, there’s clearly a lack of evidence against him.
And @doors: Was it Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift who sent eight seconds of static to the radio station, just to see if their fans would be dumb enough to make it a hit, and the media would defend them, and were all kinds of happy when they were proven right? That’s the way I see Mark Levin- He’s incredibly racist, and the only brains he has is that he at least tries to spin it, which is more than I can say for some hosts… But his fans would defend him just putting the mic next to a speaker for the entire airtime.