SkeeterVT1 Tea Party Express Founder and Chairman Accuses NAACP of Being Bigots for Denouncing Racist Elements Within the Broader Tea Party Movement, Ignoring His Own Well-Documented Record of Bigoted Rants and Raves; Meanwhile, New Black Panther Party ‘Scandal’ — Hyped for Months by Fox News and Other Right-Wing Media — Is Exposed As a Politically-Motivated Hoax
 IN DEEP DENIAL OF HIS OWN BIGOTRY — Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams, seen here during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, has come under increasing fire for making a series of highly inflammatory remarks that have been denounced as bigoted. But Williams is not only unapologetic, he’s actually accusing his critics of being bigots themselves, while ignoring his own well-documented rants. After the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil-rights organization, passed a resolution at its annual convention condemning expressions of racism within the broader Tea Party movement, Williams fired back, accusing the NAACP of being racist. Meanwhile, an alleged scandal surrounding claims that the New Black Panther Party engaged in voter intimidation — hyped by Fox News and other right-wing media outlets for months — has been exposed as a politically-motivated hoax aimed at inflicting racially-charged damage on the Obama administration. (Photo courtesy CNN)
(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 20, 2010)
NOTE TO READERS: This column is taking a two-week break after this issue, while I go on vacation. It will resume on Tuesday, August 10.Â
By SKEETER SANDERS
Stubborn. Bullheaded. Tart-tongued. Full of himself. A bigot.
These are some of the things that critics of Mark Williams, the founder and chairman of Tea Party Express, one of several groups in the broader conservative Tea Party movement, have been saying about him in recent months.
To that, you can add one more: A [bleeping] hypocrite.
The acerbic Williams has accused the nation’s oldest civil-rights organization, the NAACP, of bigotry — totally ignoring his own well-documented record of making highly inflammatory and bigoted statements.
Meanwhile, an alleged scandal in which the Justice Department was accused by conservatives of downplaying allegations of voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party — which the Fox News Channel and other right-wing media outlets had been playing up for months — was exposed as a politically-motivated hoax aimed at inflicting racially-charged damage on the Obama administration.
WILLIAMS RIPS NAACP FOR CONDEMNING ‘EXTREMIST ELEMENTS’ IN TEA PARTY
Williams had the gall to accuse the NAACP of being “professional race-baiters” after delegates to the NAACP’s annual convention in Kansas City passed a resolution last Tuesday condemning “extremist elements” within the Tea Party movement and calling on the movement’s leaders “to repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches.”
Addressing convention delegates, NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous said that his organization “has no issue” with the Tea Party movement itself. “We believe in freedom of assembly and people raising their voices in a democracy,” he said. “What we take issue with is the Tea Party’s continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements.”
Taking direct aim at Tea Party movement leaders, Jealous continued, “The time has come for them to accept the responsibility that comes with influence and make clear there is no place for racism and anti-Semitism, homophobia and other forms of bigotry in their movement.”
NAACP CITES SLURS AGAINST BLACK AND GAY LAWMAKERS AT TEA PARTY RALLY
In a statement posted on its Web site, the NAACP said the resolution was passed “after a year of high-profile media coverage of attendees of Tea Party marches” across the country “using vile, antagonistic racial slurs and images” against President Obama. Photos of some Tea Party protesters’ racially inflammatory anti-Obama signs were posted with the statement.
The NAACP statement also made reference to a Tea Party protest on Capitol Hill in March against the passage of the health-care reform bill, in which a black member of Congress, John Lewis (D-Georgia), was called the racist N-word and an openly gay member of Congress, Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts), was branded the six-letter homophobic F-word.
A second black congressman, Emanuel Cleaver (D-Missouri), was spat upon by a protester as he was walking toward the House wing of the Capitol Building. Fearing an assault, Capitol Police immediately hustled Cleaver into the building and subdued his would-be assailant. The person was later released after Cleaver chose not to press charges.
WILLIAMS CALLS NAACP ‘OLD FOSSILS MAKING A BUCK OFF SKIN COLOR’
In an interview on Wednesday with National Public Radio, Williams branded the NAACP “professional race-baiters . . . who make more money off of race than any slave trader ever. It’s time groups like the NAACP went to the trash heap of history where they belong with all the other vile racist groups that emerged in our history,”
That same day on CNN, Williams went further. Asked if the Tea Party movement should tell bigots that they’re not welcome, Williams replied, “Racists have their own movement — It’s called the NAACP! They’re a bunch of old fossils looking to make a buck off skin color!”
In a highly inflammatory posting on his blog, Williams wrote what he said was a “satirical” letter to the nation’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, from Jealous, in which Williams sought to take issue with the 100-year-old NAACP’s continued use of the now-outmoded term “colored people” in its formal name — the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — even though the organization has been popularly known and referred to by the media simply by its acronym for the last 30 years.
“We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing,” Williams wrote. “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!”
Williams concluded his “satire” with the following: “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!”
WILLIAMS TRIES TO DRAW ATTENTION AWAY FROM HIS OWN RECORD OF BIGOTED REMARKS
If Williams was trying to be cute, he failed miserably. He also failed in his apparent attempt to draw attention away from his own record of making highly inflammatory, bigoted remarks — a record that is well documented, despite his best efforts to sanitize it.
(Williams took his “satirical” NAACP letter off his blog site, MarkTalk.com, after it was reported by the mainstream media — but not before the liberal media watchdog group Media Matters copied the letter in full and posted it on its own Political Correction Web site.)
Indeed, so well-documented is Williams’ record of bigoted comments that his claims that the NAACP is a bunch of “professional race-baiters” is utterly without credibility — and at the same time reveals how deeply in denial he is about his own bigotry.
WILLIAMS SLAMS MUSLIMS, SAYS THEY WORSHIP A ‘MONKEY-GOD’ . . .
He’s certainly an anti-Muslim bigot. Williams made that abundantly clear in May, when he touched off a furor by blasting a proposed mosque and Islamic cultural center to be built in New York near Ground Zero, the site of the 2001 terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and killed more than 3,000 people.
The New York Daily News, citing a blog posting on his MarkTalk.com Web site, reported that Williams branded the project “a monument to the 9/11 terrorists” and wrote that Muslims “worship the terrorists’ monkey-god.”
The 13-story glass-and-steel building, which includes a 500-seat theater and athletic center, is under construction just two blocks from the where twin towers of the World Trade Center were destroyed on September 11, 2001, when two hijacked California-bound jetliners crashed into them and exploded in massive fireballs of jet fuel.
. . . ALSO HURLS INVECTIVES AT JEWISH POLITICIAN — AND THE PRESIDENT
Williams was just as incendiary in his condemnation of a New York politician, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who is Jewish and supports the planned mosque. Williams branded Stringer “a Jewish Uncle Tom who would have turned rat on Anne Frank for the price of an approving glance from Hitler.”
Stringer promptly fired back with a blast of his own at Williams, vowing that he’s not going to take “faith-based filth” from anybody.
“To use words around my religious beliefs, to use words calling me out about my faith, is just absolutely despicable,” Stringer told the Daily News. “This [mosque] is about tolerance and respect for diversity. He [Williams] can spew his hatred — and we’re going to hit right back. You don’t let people like this gain any ground.”
Williams has also made inflammatory anti-Muslim remarks about Obama — despite all evidence that the president is a Christian — calling Obama “an Indonesian Muslim-turned-welfare thug” and a “racist-in-chief.”
He’s also referred to the president as an “enemy of America,” lumping him with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — despite the Obama administration’s increasingly get-tough policy toward Iran’s nuclear program — the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and even former President Jimmy Carter, whose recent book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
So deep is Williams’ apparent Islamophobia that he’s even stepping down from his post as chairman of Tea Party Express to devote full-time to his drive to stop the construction of what local media in New York refer to as the “Ground Zero Mosque.”
ALLEGED ‘SCANDAL’ OF NEW BLACK PANTHERS EXPOSED AS PARTISAN HOAX
Meanwhile, the conservative Republican vice-chairwoman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, in an extraordinary interview published Friday by Politico.com, accused her fellow Republicans who hold a majority on the commission of a clear partisan bias against the Obama administration in their investigation into the Justice Department’s handling of allegations of voter intimidation by members of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP).
“This doesn’t have anything to do with the [New] Black Panthers; this has to do with [the GOP majority's] fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration,” said Abigail Thernstrom, who was appointed vice-chairwoman of the commission by President George W. Bush.
Thernstrom told Politico that her conservative colleagues on the commission made their political aims crystal clear “in the initial discussions” of the Panther case last year. “My fellow conservatives on the commission had this wild notion they could bring [Attorney General] Eric Holder down and really damage the president,” she said.
Thernstrom has strong conservative credentials. She is a tough critic of affirmative action and of “political correctness” — especially on matters of race. An adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Thernstrom is also member of the board of directors of the conservative Institute for Justice and is a frequent guest on “Fox News Sunday.”
ALLEGED SCANDAL STEMS FROM 2008 ELECTION DAY INCIDENT IN PHILADELPHIA
The alleged scandal stems from an incident on Election Day 2008. Poll watchers found two NBPP members standing outside of a polling station in an African-American neighborhood of Philadelphia. One of the two was a credentialed poll watcher, while the other was brandishing a police-style nightstick baton.
From there, the details get murky. The man with the nightstick was subsequently identified as a member of the NBPP, a militant, Texas-based black-nationalist organization. Founded in 1989, the NBPP, contrary to its name, has no connection with the original, California-based Black Panther Party of the late 1960s and early 1970s co-founded by Bobby Seale and the late Huey Newton.
Chris Hill, a Republican poll watcher, said that voters had been complaining about intimidation by NBPP members, but the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office said it had not received any such complaints, according to WTXF-TV, the local Fox affiliate in Philadelphia. The nightstick-wielding man was escorted away by Philadelphia police, but no charges were filed against him.
Hill then contacted Rick Leventhal, a correspondent for the national Fox News Channel, and repeated his earlier claim that the two NBPP members were intimidating voters. Fox News aired the story — which was quickly picked up by Breitbart.com and other right-wing media — and has been trumpeting it repeatedly ever since.
FEDS SUE NBPP, BUT LATER HALTS CASE — ANGERING CONSERVATIVES
In January of last year, the Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against the NBPP and three of its members alleging violations of the 1965 Voting Rights Act stemming from the incident at the Philadelphia polling station. The lawsuit named NBPP members King Samir Shabazz, who had brandished the nightstick, and Jerry Jackson as defendants. A default judgement was entered against Shabazz and Jackson after they failed to appear in court.
In May of last year, Justice Department officials, over the vehement objections of prosecutors who were working on the case, ordered the lawsuit dropped — prompting accusations by conservatives that the orders came directly from Attorney General Eric Holder and that they were racially motivated, as Holder is black.
INTIMIDATION OF WHITE VOTERS ALLEGED — IN AN ALL-BLACK VOTING PRECINCT!
As the controversy continued to build — driven by Fox News, The Washington Times, radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing media — J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department attorney, testified before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and alleged that the case was dropped because the Justice Department “did not want to protect the civil rights of white people.”
There was one major problem with Adams’ testimony: The polling station at the center of the controversy was located in an all-black election precinct — a fact that Thernstrom caught almost immediately.
In a scathing July 6 article published in the online edition of the conservative National Review, Thernstrom blasted what she said was a lack of evidence to substantiate the allegations of voter intimidation.
“After months of hearings, testimony and investigation, no one has produced actual evidence that any voters were too scared to cast their ballots,” she wrote. “Too much overheated rhetoric filled with insinuations and unsubstantiated charges has been devoted to this case.”
Thernstrom ripped her conservative colleagues for charging that “the Philadelphia Black Panther decision demonstrates that attorneys in the [Justice Department's] Civil Rights Division have racial double standards. How many attorneys in what positions? A pervasive culture that affected the handling of this case? No direct quotations or other evidence substantiate the charge.”
NBPP IS DESPISED BY ORIGINAL BLACK PANTHERS
Although the claims of voter intimidation were exposed as false, the NBPP nonetheless remains a highly controversial organization with very few fans — and is deeply despised by the surviving members of the original Black Panther Party, who adamantly insist that the NBPP is illegitimate and have even taken it to court.
The Huey P. Newton Foundation, founded by former original Panthers David Hilliard
The NBPP continues to use the Panther name and logo in spite of a permanent injunction obtained by the original Panthers in 1997 prohibiting the NBPP from using either. NBPP founder Aaron Michaels has been equally contemptuous of the original Panthers, branding them “has-been wannabes” and rejecting the injunction. “I don’t give a damn what judge issued an order,” Michaels said. “Nobody can tell us who we can call ourselves!”
Both the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center have identified the New Black Panthers as a hate group, “based on the anti-white, anti-gay and anti-Semitic views its leaders have repeatedly expressed.”
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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.
SkeeterVT1 As One Federal Court Declares Defense of Marriage Act Unconstitutional and Another Prepares to Rule on California’s Proposition 8, a Final Decision by the Nation’s Highest Court on Whether Gay and Lesbian Couples Have the Same Fourteenth Amendment Constitutional Right to Marry as Interracial Couples Is Not Only Inevitable, But Necessary
Confirming what The ‘Skeeter Bites Report has been arguing in a series of editorials since 2007, a federal judge in Boston last week declared unconstitutional the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, on the grounds that its denial of federal spousal benefits to married same-gender couples in Massachusetts violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. As another federal judge in San Francisco prepares to rule on the constitutionality — also under the Fourteenth Amendment — of California’s voter-approved Proposition 8, which bars same-gender couples from marrying outright, there can be no doubt that the issue of whether gay and lesbian couples have the same constitutional right to marry as interracial couples have will inevitably be decided by the Supreme Court — and both sides in the battle had better start preparing themselves for it. (Image courtesy GenerationQ.net)
(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 13, 2010)
By SKEETER SANDERS
For more than three years now, this column has argued repeatedly that laws that bar gay and lesbian couples from marrying were unconstitutional, based in part on a landmark 1967 Supreme Court ruling that struck down, under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, similar laws that barred interracial couples from marrying.
This column has also argued that to restrict marriage to opposite-gender couples only was — and is — an equally unconstitutional enshrinement into state and federal law of a religious doctrine that condemns homosexuality, in violation of the First Amendment separation of church and state.
No one else has made the church-state argument. But now, for the first time, a federal judge has come to the same conclusion as this column with regard to the Fourteenth Amendment.
Ruling in a lawsuit brought by several married same-gender Massachusetts couples against the federal Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, Judge Joseph Tauro of the U.S. District Court in Boston declared that DOMA, as the law is commonly known, unconstitutionally deprives married same-gender couples in Massachusetts of federal spousal benefits enjoyed by their opposite-gender counterparts, in violation of the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Judge Tauro was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in 1972 by President Richard Nixon. At 79 years of age, he is the last Nixon appointee still active on the federal bench.
CONSTITUTION ‘DOES NOT TOLERATE TREATING CLASSES OF CITIZENS DIFFERENTLY’
“The [U.S.] Constitution neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” Judge Tauro wrote. “It is with this fundamental principle in mind that equal protection jurisprudence takes on governmental classifications that affect some groups of citizens differently than others.
“And it is because of this commitment to the law’s neutrality where the rights of persons are at stake that legislative provisions which arbitrarily or irrationally create discrete classes cannot withstand constitutional scrutiny,” the judge continued.
Judge Tauro flatly rejected the contention of same-gender marriage opponents that one of the purposes of DOMA’s denial of federal recognition to same-gender
marriages was to “encourage responsible procreation and child-bearing,” citing the federal government’s own admission that “this objective bears no rational relationship” to the enforcement of the law, “as a consensus has developed among the medical, psychological, and social welfare communities that children raised by gay and lesbian parents are just as likely to be well-adjusted as those raised by heterosexual parents.”
DOMA ‘USURPS AUTHORITY OF STATES TO SET OWN MARRIAGE LAWS’
In a separate lawsuit brought by the Massachusetts state attorney general against the federal government, Judge Tauro ruled that DOMA also unconstitutionally encroaches on the longstanding authority of the states to set their own marriage laws — an authority that, the judge said, dates back to the colonial era.
Same-gender marriage has been legal in Massachusetts since 2004, after the state’s highest court ruled that gay and lesbian couples had a right to marry under the equal-rights amendment of the Bay State’s Constitution.
“This court has determined that it is clearly within the authority of the Commonwealth [of Massachusetts] to recognize same-sex marriages among its residents, and to afford those individuals in same-sex marriages any benefits, rights, and privileges to which they are entitled by virtue of their marital status,” Tauro wrote. “The federal government, by enacting and enforcing DOMA, plainly encroaches upon the firmly entrenched province of the state.”
The judge wrote that control by the states over marital status actually pre-dates the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution, which says that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
During the colonial era, “colonial legislatures, rather than [the British] Parliament [in London], established the rules and regulations regarding marriage in the colonies,” Tauro wrote. After independence, “the founding legislation of each state included regulations regarding marital status determinations.”
The issue of marriage, Tauro wrote, “was not raised” when the framers of the Constitution gathered to define the powers of the federal government. “The states had exclusive power over marriage rules as a central part of the individual states’ ‘police power’ —- meaning their responsibility (subject to the requirements and protections of the federal Constitution) for the health, safety and welfare of their populations.”
GAY-RIGHTS ADVOCATES ELATED, CONSERVATIVES OUTRAGED
Reaction to Judge Tauro’s ruling was predictable, with gay-rights advocates hailing it and conservatives condemning it.
Mary Bonauto, an attorney for the Boston-based law firm Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) — who represented seven married same-gender couples and three widowers from Massachusetts (including Dean Hara, the widower of the late former U.S. Representative Gerry Studds) — called the ruling a simple affirmation “that our country won’t tolerate second-class marriages.” The decision, said Bonauto, “will make a real difference for countless families in Massachusetts.”
It was GLAD’s second major court victory on the issue. The firm successfully argued before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that gay and lesbian couples had a right to marry under of the equal-rights amendment (Article CVI) to the Massachusetts Constitution, which bars discrimination “because of sex, race, color, creed or national origin.”
Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, who brought the second suit against DOMA on Tenth Amendment grounds, also hailed Judge Tauro’s ruling. “Today’s [Friday's] landmark decision is an important step toward achieving equality for all married couples in Massachusetts and assuring that all of our citizens enjoy the same rights and protections under our Constitution,” Coakley said in a statement. “It is unconstitutional for the federal government to discriminate, as it does because of DOMA’s restrictive definition of marriage. It is also unconstitutional for the federal government to decide who is married and to create a system of first- and second-class marriages.”
Not surprisingly, social conservatives reacted with fury. Andrea Lafferty, executive director of the California-based Traditional Values Coalition, called Tauro’s ruling “judicial activism” and said Tauro was a “rogue judge. We can’t allow the lowest common denominator states, like Massachusetts, to set standards for the country.”
The TVC is one of several conservative groups fighting to preserve California’s Proposition 8, a voter-approved amendment to the California Constitution that bars same-gender couples from marrying. A federal judge in San Francisco is preparing to rule on a Fourteenth Amendment challenge to that measure.
Tom McClusky, senior vice president of the right-wing Family Research Council, said the rulings result in part from “the deliberately weak legal defense of DOMA” that the Obama administration mounted on behalf of the government.
“While the American people have made it unmistakably clear that they want to preserve marriage as the legal union of one man and one woman, liberals and activist judges are not content to let the people decide,” McClusky said in a statement.
THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT CANNOT BE IGNORED
This column’s only concern with Judge Tauro’s ruling regarding the Tenth Amendment is that the very argument used by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts against DOMA can be used by other states to preserve their laws banning same-gender marriage. The Obama administration has said only that it was reviewing the decision, but it’s a safe bet that it will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
If the administration was smart, it would leave the judge’s ruling on the state’s lawsuit alone and appeal only the ruling on the GLAD lawsuit, as GLAD, in the opinion of this column, has a much stronger constitutional argument.
A Supreme Court decision against DOMA on Fourteenth Amendment grounds would all but doom Prop. 8 and all other state laws banning same-gender marriage to the same constitutional fate as those old anti-miscegenation laws, mostly in the South, that banned interracial marriages.
Given the court’s ideological makeup — with four hard-line conservatives (Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts), three liberals (Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer), one moderate conservative (Anthony Kennedy) and, pending her confirmation, Elena Kagan (who’s been targeted for defeat by hard-line social conservatives), any ruling on same-gender marriage by the high court is all but certain to be 5-4, either way.
Consider the fact that it was Kennedy who wrote the majority opinion in two high court rulings won by gays (Romer v. Evans in 1996 and Lawrence v. Texas in 2003), as well as a concurring opinion in a third case favorable to gays handed down just last month (Christian Legal Society v. Martinez).
Add to that mix the fact that Kagan, President Obama’s nominee to succeed retired Justice John Paul Stevens, publicly spoke out at her confirmation hearing against “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the 1993 law passed by Congress that bars gay and lesbian U.S. military service members from openly acknowledging that they are gay and remain in the military.
While Kagan’s views on same-gender marriage are unknown, this column firmly believes that there is likely to be a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court — assuming Kagan is confirmed — to strike down the ban on same-gender marriage on Fourteenth Amendment grounds, whether it’s DOMA, Prop. 8 or the other 31 similar state laws.
The justices, more than a generation ago in Loving v. Virginia, declared unanimously that the freedom of two mature, unrelated single adults who love one another and seek to form a lasting commitment to one another to marry is a freedom fully protected by the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, regardless of race, religion or nationality.
There is no reason to believe that such freedom to marry shouldn’t also be regardless of the gender of the couple.
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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.
SkeeterVT1 Several Top Conservatives Demand GOP Chairman Resign Over Remarks Made at Party Fundraiser That ‘The One Thing You Don’t Do Is Engage in a Land War in Afghanistan’ Even As He Criticizes Obama — Ignoring the Fact That the President Inherited the War From Bush and That Steele’s Own Party Pushed for More Troops to be Sent There in the First Place
WILL HE STAY OR WILL HE GO? — Ever since Michael Steele was elected chairman of the Republican National Committee 18 months ago, party conservatives have sought to undermine his leadership almost from day one. Now they are openly calling for Steele to resign after the chairman made remarks during a GOP fundraiser last week in which he called into question the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, even as he criticized President Obama’s handling of it. “If he’s [the president] such a student of history, has he not understood that . . . the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan,” Steele said, “because everyone who has tried over a thousand years of history has failed.” (Photo: Getty Images)
(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Tuesday, July 6, 2010)
By SKEETER SANDERS
Poor Michael Steele. No matter what he says or does, hard-line conservatives — both inside and outside the Republican Party — simply won’t cut the GOP National Committee chairman any slack.
Ever since Steele was elected the party’s first black national chairman 18 months ago, conservatives — who never wanted him to be chairman in the first place — have sought to undermine his authority.
Now, several prominent conservatives have called on Steele to resign after a video surfaced Thursday of remarks the RNC chairman made the day before during a GOP fundraiser in Connecticut, in which Steele called into question the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan — even as he criticized President Obama’s handling of it.
AFGHANISTAN WAR — INHERITED FROM BUSH — ‘A WAR OF OBAMA’S CHOOSING,’ STEELE SAYS
Responding to an attendee’s question about Obama relieving General Stanley McChrystal of his command of NATO forces in Afghanistan after the general made disparaging remarks about administration officials in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Steele called McChrystal’s firing “very comical.”
McChrystal was replaced by General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq.
McChrystal’s dismissal is “a reflection of the frustration that a lot of our military leaders have with this administration and their prosecution of the war in Afghanistan,” Steele said. “Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama’s choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.”
Oh, really?
It seems that Steele has forgotten the fact that the war in Afghanistan is one that Obama inherited from his predecessor, George W. Bush, who sent U.S. forces to Afghanistan to root out al-Qaida and its Taliban hosts two months after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, in which al-Qaida operatives hijacked four commercial jetliners and slammed them into New York’s World Trade Canter and the Pentagon across the Potomac from the nation’s capital, destroying the twin towers, damaging the Defense Department’s headquarters — and killing over 3,300 people in the process.
Had passengers aboard the fourth hijacked jet headed to Washington not fought to take back control of the plane — a struggle that ultimately sent it plunging into a field in Pennsylvania — the hijackers would have likely slammed that plane into either the White House or the Capitol Building.
GOP CHAIRMAN: U.S. SHOULD NOT ‘ENGAGE IN A LAND WAR IN AFGHANISTAN’
For Steele to say that the war in Afghanistan — which pre-dates Obama’s presidency by nearly eight years — is “a war of Obama’s choosing” is ludicrous. But that’s not what’s gotten Steele in trouble with conservatives in his party.
“It was the president who was trying to be cute by half by flipping a script demonizing [the war in] Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan,” Steele said. “Well, if he’s [Obama] such a student of history, has he not understood that, you know, that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan?”
Steele went on: “All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history [From Ghengis Khan to the Soviet Union], has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan.”
It is those remarks — that the U.S. should not “engage in a land war in Afghanistan” — that has Steele in hot water with conservatives. After all, Republicans had pushed Obama last fall to heed General McChrystal’s request for a “surge” of 40,000 troops in Afghanistan — double the number of American forces that Bush sent in the controversial Iraq “surge” two years earlier.
By Friday, Steele was in full damage-control mode. In a statement issued through the RNC, the embattled chairman said, “As we have learned throughout history, winning a war in Afghanistan is a difficult task. We must also remember that after the tragedy of September 11, 2001, it is also a necessary one. That is why I supported the decision to increase our troop force and, like the entire United States Senate, I support General Petraeus’ confirmation. The stakes are too high for us to accept anything but success in Afghanistan.”
GOP SENATORS RIP STEELE ON SUNDAY TV TALK SHOWS
Steele’s clarification on Friday, however, failed to stem the criticism, as top Republicans continued to blast the chairman in appearances on the TV talk-show circuit Sunday.
Senator John McCain (R-Arizona), the 2008 GOP presidential nominee — who is himself locked in a fight for his political survival against J.D. Hayworth, a right-wing radio talk-show host, in the August 24 primary — blasted Steele’s remarks as “wildly inaccurate.”
Appearing via satellite from Afghanistan on ABC’s “This Week,” McCain stopped short of calling for Steele’s resignation, but did say that he thought “Mr. Steele is going to have to assess as to whether he can still lead the Republican Party as chairman of the Republican National Committee.”
Also in Afghanistan over the Independence Day weekend, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) told CBS’ “Face The Nation” that he was “dismayed, angry, upset” at Steele. “It was an uninformed, unnecessary, unwise, untimely comment,” Graham said.
“If you’re a student of history, you would know that America cannot afford to allow Afghanistan to go back into Taliban control,” Graham continued. “We’re not here fighting a ground war to occupy this country. We’re here to help Afghans who can live in peace with us.”
RON PAUL COMES TO STEELE’S DEFENSE; RAND PAUL CONSPICUOUSLY SILENT
Not all Republicans were voicing anger at Steele, however. Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas), who ran for president as the Libertarian Party nominee in 1988 and unsuccessfully sought the 2008 GOP presidential nomination, issued a statement Sunday in which he voiced his support for the embattled GOP chairman for speaking out against the war.
“I would like to congratulate Michael Steele for his leadership on one of the most important issues of today,” Paul said. “He is absolutely right: Afghanistan is now Obama’s war. During the 2008 campaign, Obama was out in front in insisting that more troops be sent to Afghanistan. Obama called for expanding the war even as he pretended to be a peace candidate.”
Paul called on Steele to stay on as RNC chairman. “Smart policies make smart politics,” Paul said. “He [Steele] is guiding the party in the right direction and we are on the verge of victory this fall. Chairman Steele should not back off. He is giving the country, especially young people, hope as he speaks truth about this war.”
Later on Sunday, the Texas Republican, appearing on CNN, asserted that the war in Afghanistan “truly is Obama’s war,” even as he acknowledged that it began during Bush’s presidency.
“Obama said, ‘This is the good war’ and he’s expanded the war, but the American people aren’t with him,” Paul said. “The majority of the American people are tired of the war and they want to see it ended. They want to see our troops brought home.”
Significantly, there has so far been no comment from Rand Paul, the Tea Party movement-backed GOP nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky being vacated by the retiring Jim Bunning, and son of the Texas congressman. Steele had sharply criticized the younger Paul in May after the Kentuckian said that he opposed the anti-discrimination provisions of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act being imposed on private businesses.
Steele said Rand Paul’s libertarian views on the role of government and civil rights “got in the way of reality, and the reality of it is that was important legislation at the time, put in place important benchmarks for the progress of free people.” He called the GOP Senate nominee’s remarks “misplaced in these times” and that they were out of step with the rest of the country.
STEELE HAS NEVER BEEN LIKED BY CONSERVATIVES FROM DAY ONE
That conservatives have heaped scorn on Steele in the wake of his remarks on Afghanistan should surprise no one. The episode is only the latest in an ongoing soap opera in which the right wing has attacked Steele relentlessly ever since he announced his candidacy for the RNC chairmanship after the party suffered a drubbing in the 2008 election.
The race for the GOP’s top post was a bitterly-fought contest that was riven with charges of racism, prompting Bob Bennett, an RNC member and former chairman of the Ohio GOP, to brand it “the dirtiest [campaign for the party leadership] ever.” Bennett was a staunch supporter of the RNC chairman Steele defeated, Mike Duncan, who sought a second two-year term.
Steele was forced to face down vicious accusations by right-wing party hard-liners — often anonymously — that he did not possess a true conservative philosophy and that he was actually a social liberal.
Only hours before they were to begin voting for the RNC’s next chairman, the Republican National Committee’s 168 members found fliers that had been slipped under their Washington hotel-room doors depicting a partially unfurled roll of bathroom tissue with an accusatory headline: “Soft is fine for toilet paper, but not for a chairman of the Republican National Committee!”
The fliers cited Steele’s past association with the Republican Leadership Council, which he co-founded with former New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman. A moderate who served as the head of the federal Environmental Protection Agency during former President George W. Bush’s first term, Whitman’s outspoken support for abortion rights infuriated many social conservatives.
Shortly after Steele announced his candidacy for the party chairmanship, his photograph and all mention of him as a founder of the Republican Leadership Council disappeared from the RLC’s Web site.
Among the RLC’s members include the Log Cabin Republicans, an association of openly gay Republicans which strongly supports expanding civil rights protections for gays. Steele said he had “joined” the council only to reach out to liberals as a conservative and help “unite the party.”
James Bopp Jr., a conservative RNC member from Indiana, issued an e-mail to other committee members in which he openly accused Steele of lying about his relationship with the RLC.
CONSERVATIVES CLASH WITH STEELE OVER PARTY FUNDRAISING, SPENDING
In the spring of last year, party conservatives forced Steele to agree to accept restraints on his control of millions of dollars in party funds and contracts — an unprecedented curb on the powers of the RNC chairman, who, until then, had enjoyed almost unrestricted authority over how to spend the party’s funds.
In January of this year, Steele was accused by two of his predecessors of attempting to personally profit from his speaking engagements at colleges, trade associations and other groups, raking in as much as $20,000 in honorariums, or speaking fees.
“I’ve never heard of a chairman of either party ever taking money for speeches,” former RNC chairman Frank Fahrenkopf said in an interview with the right-wing daily The Washington Times at the time. “The job of a national chairman is to give speeches. That’s what the national party pays him for.”
Fahrenkopf’s criticism of Steele was echoed by former RNC chairman Jim Nicholson, who told the Times that the job “demands so much of your time that you can work 24/7 and not get everything done, so taking time out to speak for the benefit of one’s own bank account is not appropriate.”
As chairman, Steele earns an annual salary of $223,500.
STEELE NOW FACING OPEN RIGHT-WING CHALLENGE TO HIS LEADERSHIP
As the GOP’s right wing — including a chorus of neoconservatives led by William Kristol, founder and editor of the Weekly Standard who is also a board member of the of the right-wing foreign-policy think tank Keep America Safe, and Liz Cheney, the think tank’s co-founder and chairman — demand Steele’s immediate resignation, Steele is likely to face an all-out right-wing challenge if he decides to stay on and seek a second two-year term next January.
North Dakota GOP Chairman Gary Emineth, a social conservative, is stepping down to prepare to run against Steele for the RNC chairmanship after the November midterm elections, according to The Washington Times.
Emineth insisted, however, that he intended to challenge Steele for the chairmanship for the RNC’s loss of financial support from major donors during Steele’s tenure. “I was shocked at the last RNC meeting to learn how little money we got from our major donors,” the Times quoted Emineth as saying.
Regardless of Emineth’s motives, there is little doubt now that Steele’s future as the national chairman of the Republican Party is on the line. The question is whether the embattled chairman will step down now or fight to keep his job. Either way, the GOP now faces a major internal mess that — because Steele is the party’s first black chairman — potentially could get very ugly, the last thing the GOP needs just four months before the November election.
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Copyright 2010, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.
