Racism-- Still A Pillar Of The Republican party

Ted Cruz's father might not be as much as a racist neanderthal as he comes off. I mean, some people think he just acts that way to make his son seem relatively less racist and neanderthal. Or, if that doesn't work… well, people look at the old man and say, "poor, Ted; no wonder he turned out that way. When right-wings-- father or son start talking about "the average black," you know you're in for some stomach churning.

The hate-filled preacher Rafael spoke at Western Wilco-- the Western Williamson County Republican Club in Cedar Park, an almost all white, almost all-Republican suburb of Austin. The medium household income is $67,527, considerably higher than the state average of $49,393.

During the speech, Cruz spoke at length about a recent conversation he said he had with a black pastor in Bakersfield, California.

“I said, as a matter of fact, ‘Did you know that Civil Rights legislation was passed by Republicans? It was passed by a Republican Senate under the threat of a filibuster by the Democrats,’” Cruz said. “‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ And then I said, ‘Did you know that every member of the Ku Klux Klan were Democrats from the South?’ ‘Oh I didn’t know that.’ You know, they need to be educated.”

Cruz cited a book Please Stop Helping Us by Jason Riley, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

“I am going to try to encourage everybody I can to buy a book written by a black journalist. His name is Jason Riley. He wrote a book called Please Stop Helping Us, talking about how all the handouts to blacks have kept blacks in the poorhouse. And I’ll tell you what, I am going to make it my task to buy 15 to 20 copies of that book and hand it out to some black leaders to read.”

“Jason Riley said in an interview, Did you know before we had minimum wage laws black unemployment and white unemployment were the same? If we increase the minimum wage, black unemployment will skyrocket. See, he understands it, but the average black does not.”

The elder Cruz added “every ethnic group” wants “the ability to succeed,” saying Democrats “sell this guaranteed utopia” that is “guaranteed mediocrity.”

“What we need to sell is the American dream,” Cruz said.

He pissed off Digby, who agreed that someone needed to be educated alright-- but not African-Americans. She dug up this video from another Texan, one who really did pass Civil Rights legislation… and not a Republican:

This truly is the stupidest right wing trope out there, and that's saying something. This silly thing ran over the week-end on the same subject. I don't know if they're idiots or think everyone else is an idiot but the idea that black people don't understand that the parties switched places-- due to civil rights!-- in the 1960's and 1970's is mind-boggling.

Here's a little friendly reminder of how the pre-eminent Republican strategist of the Reagan years explained the Southern Strategy and the evolution of the GOP on these issues:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”-- that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”



…By the way, Republican avatar Ronald Reagan opposed every major piece of civil rights legislation adopted by Congress, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. But he was cheery about it.

I know this is overkill. It's obvious to any sentient being that the racist Southerners who had been Democrats out of tradition stemming from the Civil War were disillusioned and adrift once the leadership of the Democratic Party endorsed civil rights for African Americans. And anyone with a 6th grade education knows that the Republicans then took advantage of that opening and grabbed on to that racist faction with both hands. Maybe Ted Cruz's daddy really doesn't know that. Somebody should tell him. He sounds like a fool.

He sounds like a less slick version of his son.