Instinctively repainting him white is — I would say — presumptively racial. To strip away his racial identity — to stereotype him as an especially white white man — is a powerful racial move. This is not nice at all.

I hope Ann waited a few hours after eating to engage in this degree of mental gymnastics.

Let me get this straight:  She gets paid money to write this drivel?  Real money?

So the proper thing to do would have been to compare him to Apu from The Simpsons? What if he’d been compared to the Fisher Stevens character from Short Circuit. The character is Indian but he’s played by a white American in dark makeup. Had anyone done that, Ann Althouse may have said it was racist because the actor is white but not racist because the character is Indian. After that, she would have started saying “Norman, coordinate!” and smoke would have come out of her ears and we’d have been done with her once and for all.

It’s also not racist to think of certain traits as “super-white,” though it does indicate deep-seated racism to think that conservatives might not be on the level.  In fact, voting for Obama is the most racist thing a person could possibly do.  It’s a shame that McCain didn’t win, since allowing a white man to defeat a black man would have proven once and for all that we’re a post-racial society.

This isn’t exactly snark… as near as I can tell this is the actual point Althouse is aiming at.  It’s a bit hard to tell, since most of that could also be translated as “Holy crap, I’m soooo drunk right now.”

Her classes have got to be so bizarre. Have any former students written about her?

I just imagine it as a lot of loopy and mostly incomprehensible babbling, punctuated by enraged screaming at any pretty girls taking the class and/or drunken cooing over the cute boys in the class.

She’s certainly an argument for doing away with tenure entirely.

I dunno, Opo.  From the sound of that second paragraph, she’s definitely in the throes of… something.  At least I hope it’s just a cramp.

Boy, the lies these nutters must tell themselves just to get through the day…

Why do all Althouse articles sound breathy, like she’s bemoaning the un-niceness of society from the comfort of a plush, pearl-lined fainting couch?

Why do conservatives care more about HOW you say something as opposed to WHAT you say?

O good fsm we have to listen to these disingenuous assholes for at least another 4 years.

*reaches again for the single malt*

That’s an awful lot of typing for “It’s OK if you’re a Republican.” Maybe she gets paid by the word?

The fauxtrage about supposedly “racist” attacks on Jindal is approaching the sheer awesome-ness of the fauxtrage about people picking on Palin but it’s not quite there yet.

Not that there aren’t truly offensive attacks being made against both all the time but the ones the wingnuts are fixating on are not them.

Is Annie ever going to stop projecting?  DUR HUR DEM LEEBZ IS RAYCIST AN I AIN’T HUR DUR.

Also, I notice she keeps deleting my comments. I guess her higher level of class, which comes naturally from being a misogynistic, projecting conservitard asshole, naturally means she doesn’t have time to listen to such stupid little thigns as facts.

Put this comment from that article in the bag of “evidence that white racists can’t understand that one female / black politician might be different in some small, measurable way from some random other female / black politician”:

Next in line is Hillary.

We’re going to burn through the “aren’t we cool to have elected a black man president” trend soon enough.

Then it’s a woman’s turn, then we’ll have to have a Hispanic. Indians are after Asians. Then we’ll go back to whites.

In the future we’ll have some incomprehensible social engineering method of subtly picking presidents just as we now absolutely must have one African-American Supreme Court justice, at least one woman, one Jew, one Catholic, one New England recluse, and so forth.

It would be funny, if it weren’t so sad.

You could compare him to the 93 year old Greek grandmother in My Fat Greek Wedding.

like she’s bemoaning the un-niceness of society

Yeah, Essie, but don’t forget that she can—and often is—rude as hell to people that she interacts with, (see for example some blog exchanges and her nasty, sexist and demeaning attack(s) on Jessica Valenti), but only somebody being nasty back counts as rudeness in her world.

Her classes have got to be so bizarre. Have any former students written about her?

From Althouse’s RateMyProfessors.com entry:

“Her final Con Law exam did not test the material of the course and there was no semblance of fairness in the way she graded. Althouse gave no comments or feedback when questioned about the exam/grade. She is a compeltely unfair and ineffective prof, not to mention a Scalia nut. Bleh. AVOID AT ALL COSTS!!”

“She is horrible. Avoid her like the plague. Her exams do not test the material well at all. Worst prof. ever.”

“If you are looking for a clear understanding of Con Law, STAY AWAY from Althouse. A blithering, incomprehensible idiot.”

“Writes like she blogs—all over the place. Impossible to follow. Get a good outline and some study aids, tho, and you’ll do OK.”

Also, when the lord was creating the phrase “asshated simpleton” she was thinking of Althouse.

I notice she keeps deleting my comments.

Case in point.  Notice how it’s the conservatives who always bleat about being silenced, but absent physical threats or ludicrously over-the-line racism or misogyny it’s pretty difficult to get deleted from liberal blogs; not so the conservative blogs.

IOKIYARWA

Ann Althouse is a blathering idiot.

I’m sorry, was that sexist?

Though I will say I’m enjoying the little game of “who is the bigger house negro?” in the comments over there ...

The fauxtrage about supposedly “racist” attacks on Jindal is approaching the sheer awesome-ness of the fauxtrage about people picking on Palin but it’s not quite there yet.

LET BOBBY BE BOBBY!

Because Real America couldn’t possibly be recoiling from a good conservative who decries volcano monitoring from the state that was host to the first great American natural disaster of the 21st century.

With the Mt. St. Helens disaster still in living memory, no less.

Wow. When she doubles down, she really digs the proverbial hole deeper. Think I’ll start calling her Triple A: Ann Alice Althouse. That’s quite a looking glass she’s looking through.

We don’t need to monitor or regulate anything. BECAUSE KETCHUP IS A VEGETABLE!

mattbastard:

Speaking as a law grad I HAAAAATED profs who tested on stuff that wasn’t in the materials.  And it wasn’t just law school.  Hell, when I wrote my bar admission exams in the early 1980s it actually reached the governing body.  One exam (debtor-creditor, which was being phased out) had rafts of questions on stuff that wasn’t anywhere in the materials, let alone covered in the lectures. 

Da Word was twofold: first, that the lawyer in charge was pissed at having HIS course phased out and so decided to shiv the students as a contemptuous parting gesture, and, second, that so many students flunked and threatened to sue (because they wouldn’t be able to be called to the bar because of this nonsense) that the Law Society had to quietly give everybody a “gentleman’s pass” to everybody who didn’t pee on the page.  This was the student gossip at the time, and I’ve got ZERO way of proving it, or even knowing if it’s true; it might be groundless scuttlebutt.  But an awful lot of people who were sure that they failed that exam because they couldn’t or didn’t answer the GOTCHA! questions and could not have passed without them—including me!—mysteeeeeeeeeriously passed ... so I still wonder.

I wonder if that guy and Althouse used to hang out?

Her classes have got to be so bizarre. Have any former students written about her?

I just imagine it as a lot of loopy and mostly incomprehensible babbling, punctuated by enraged screaming at any pretty girls taking the class and/or drunken cooing over the cute boys in the class.

She’s certainly an argument for doing away with tenure entirely.

Talk about dodging the bullet, especially considering there are other Profs with her ideological ilk on certain departments in fields related to my own. 

It is really sad as eminent scholars like George L. Mosse was a Prof there and it has been considered by many to be a public Ivy…..despite the fact undergrad admissions for even out-of-staters like several high school classmates was quite easy considering several were C-level students with SATs (Pre-1995) barely breaking the 1000-1100.

@Essie Elephant

From the comment you cited above: “Indians are after Asians. Then we’ll go back to whites.”

Um, Indians *are* Asian. These people are bananas.

I would really like to know what makes white people so sure they are being nice about racial things. This confidence in niceness is misplaced, yet very very common….

.... in liberals. Liberals believe they are the good people with the good beliefs, the good hearts. Especially about race.

Shorter Outhouse: I think it is nice to be white.  So nice.  Only white people are nice, so THOSE people must believe, as I do, that they are being nice because they portray Swindal as white.

Oh, and is it racist to call him Bobby now too?  That isn’t his Indian name, it is his white name.

Um, Indians *are* Asian.

But it’s so KUNFYOOZING with all these foreigners from weird countries nobody can find on a map!!!!1!!!ELEVEN!1!!!! 

Seriously, I’m surprised these people can tell the difference between Indian and Mexican, and that they’re not dubbing the Indians either “Muslims” or “Arabs”.  And that they’re not getting American Indian confused into the mix somehow.

Ms Kate:

No, it’s not racist to call Jindal “Bobby”.  It IS racist to call anyone else “Bobby”, including and especially Messrs. Abreu, Bonds, Clarke, Cox, Fischer, Hull, McFerrin, Orr and Unser.

This bit of Altlogic brought to you by Prozac!

What about M. Brady?

Him too, Ann sez.

Bobby Pins and British Street Cops (aka Bobbies) are also expressions of racism against Mr. Swindal.

Yes, they are now to be referred to as Piyush Pins and Piyushes (or you can also use some non-Bobby slang term for them, like Coppers).

The term “public ivy” was originally used to refer to public schools which were similar to Ivy league schools in terms of feel and academic excellence. Wisconsin (or rather, the UW-Madison) does a good job at many things, but it was never intended to be as selective as any of the actual Ivy league schools. Wisconsin’s purpose has long been to educate the residents of Wisconsin (and to perform research to benefit them).

Back on topic: Althouse must benefit from tenure in a big way. I remember a friend of mine bitching about her back in the early nineties.

Allow me to translate from Althousese:

We have a spokesperson of color, and we don’t get to charge his liberal critics with racism. This isn’t fair, because…just because.

Please remind me again why we’re still listening to asshats like John Bolton, Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, Tom DeLay and <a >Herr Karl Rove</a>?

In case you didn’t catch it, Rove’s screed yesterday in the WSJ is a masterpiece of Orwellian doublespeak. Unfortunately for him, I have issues with it. Lots of issues.

I have to wonder if it simply makes the wingnutteria feel better about suffering the indignity of a black president when they see “those people” speaking their language/cant/argot/dogwhistle.

I think when talking about the Asians’ turn and the Indians’ turn, she meant American native, not subcontinent of India Indian. Because otherwise, she’s leaving out the people who were here first. Not that it’s weird for a conservative to ignore them, I guess.

That isn’t his Indian name, it is his white name.

I’m just quoting this to show how amazingly easy it is to tell when liberals are being actually racist, as opposed to when freaks like Althouse are pretending we’re racist.

Looks like quite a few students agree with you, Jesse,
http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=594762

Ow! My head asplode.

Does tenure prevent you from being sent off to rehab? ‘Cause this woman is a few bricks shy of a load…

Instinctively repainting him white is — I would say — presumptively racial. To strip away his racial identity — to stereotype him as an especially white white man — is a powerful racial move.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Governor Exorcist chose to cast aside his birth given name and the religion of his parents so he would no longer be Piyush the Hindu and he could become Bobby the Catholic.

He doesn’t need liberals to try to paint him white and try to strip away his racial identity - he’s done a damn fine job of that himself.

The stupid.  It burns.

I didn’t watch Jindahl’s speech. After enduring twenty years of Republican liars, I just can’t listen to them anymore. I turned off the tube.  Seeing his face coming to the set was enough for me to sum up his significance to the Republican party at this time and I think I was right.

The Republicans and their wingnut followers remind me of some sort of dumb kid on the block whose stupidity has become glaringly and tragically so obvious even he now knows he must hide his bad habits.

So when caught with a bloody brick, after the neighborhood has found a trail of bludgeoned people in town, he cries with amazement and points a bloody finger at his accusers and attempts to accuse them of his deeds.  And so it is with the Republicans.

After years of attempting to skirt, avoid and ignore their racist behavior, now that the cat is officially out of the bag and the people have spoken, they scramble to find the first face they can that has a hint of brown.  “Look, look! See! Whadya say now? Who’s the racist now?”  They did the same with Palin, “Look, look! See?  Whadya say now bitchez!? Who’s the sexist pig now?”

It ain’t working.  I’d imagine between these new social developments to cope with along with the phase-out of the Bush tax cuts for the privileged, there might be a run on inhalers and fainting couches as these fools are going to be getting the vapors for quite awhile it seems.

Instinctively repainting him white is — I would say — presumptively racial.

She obviously means that in the legal sense, but in the common sense she’s right. Her saying it is taking the racial nature of the depiction for granted simply because it is made by liberals. It is not, however, grounds for inference of a fact.

It’s also somewhat brazen and impertinent. Another meaning of presumptive I doubt she was aiming for.

but only somebody being nasty back counts as rudeness in her world.
seeker6079 on 02/26 at 03:16 PM

Rude and partisan, seeker, and the same one-way rule applies to both judgments.

I miss Altmouse.

My impression is that Althouse shut Altmouse down with some nasty legal threats.

At what point does one become so spectacularly stupid—and partisan, for real, dammit!—that one becomes a public figure no matter how much one clings to the “I am a mere humble tenured law professor; how dare anyone parody me!” line?

but Althouse is correct that there is a reflexive response among Democrats to accuse conservatives of color of being somehow hypocritical.

Hm, I wonder why that is?  Could it be that Rethugs have this tendency to, y’know, be racist jacktards?  If someone decries your race as immoral and inferior, makes unfunny jokes to their friends about your race conforming to stereotypes, and tries to have your life officially made more difficult, then you turn around and support that same person, then yes, that is hypocritical on a basic human level.

I’m somewhat reminded of the criticism of Jar-Jar Binks.  Somewhere along the way, as the charges of racism minstrelry were thrown this way and that, it became forgotten that the character was just plain annoying.  There really isn’t a direct analogy to Bobby Jindal there, but I guess that in each of these cases, race is not the first thing I think of when I see and hear them.

Still, I guess the Token Former Hindu guy needs to be defended somehow.  It certainly put his fabricated/exaggerated story about boats and Katrina (as if the overall reality really proved the GOP point) under the radar, but talking about race in politics really is something today’s GOP really wants.  We should welcome this development, even if they don’t really mean it.  It’s a wonderful strategy for them to create a Permanent Minority, which sounds like a good motto for their party for a host of reasons.

I don’t think comparing him to Kenneth is racist, but I don’t think it’s racist, either, when somebody takes a mean-spirited shot at a Democratic leader.

What Mitchforth is doing here is affecting, as so many defenders of racism do (especially just lately, like in two or three threads in just the past week) on Pandagon threads, not to understand what racism in America is and how it works.

One reason we progressive types hate racism, Mitchforth, is that it is mean. (Another is that it is based in a false view of reality). It doesn’t follow automatically that every kind of mean is therefore racist. “Mean” and “racist” have a lot of overlap but they are not the same thing—not everyone who indulges in certain racist tropes has a cruel intention. (The fact that by indulging in them, they are both demonstrating their unreal take on reality, and upholding a system that is objectively mean, makes them objectively meanies, or at least incredibly stupid and clumsy in their good intentions). Vice versa, not every mean attack on a Democrat has a racist component to it. Considering that still yet the vast majority of even Democratic office-holders and media mucky-mucks are clearly white would make that very doubtful.

So when an attack is largely racist, as many specific attacks against Obama, for instance, and a bunch of others I could name achieving various levels of success or at least notoriety in the past few decades, have been, we correctly identify them as racist. We don’t automatically assume every attack on Obama is presumptively racist, but usually we don’t have to go far to find the racist subtext.

But I haven’t observed a lot of anti-Semitic attacks on, for instance, Senator Barbara Boxer. Actually until fairly recently (2006, when her support for Joe Lieberman was an issue, and it was pointed out that he had personally made her feel more welcome in the Senate back in 1992 when she first joined it) I didn’t even realize she was Jewish. No, rightists attack her as a woman, and as a progressive, but not as ethnically questionable. As far as I know anyway—I wouldn’t be too surprised if Orcinus or someone like that has a whole dossier of subterranian racist hatespeech against her.

Whereas, the attacks on Obama that Pam and others have assembled their rouge’s galleries of are often blatantly, in-your-face racist, and your blanket denial here puts you somewhere on the spectrum between stupid and lying on this matter.

But wait, there’s more!

More Mitchforth:

The racism Althouse finds in criticism of Jindal is at least as valid as the Obama campaign’s allegation that Bill Clinton’s comparison of Obama’s victory in the South Carolina primary to Jesse Jackson’s was racist.

Wrong, just plain wrong. Just think for half a second what Clinton was saying there. He was saying Jackson won SC solely because the vast majority of African-American voters there voted for him, and that in SC unlike most other states, AA voters dominated the Democratic party numerically; therefore Obama’s victory in the same state was likely due to the same demographics and he would therefore lose by the same predominantly white demographics in most other states. Put that way it all sounds very objective, but the subtext was “Jackson had nothing going for him but being the only black guy in the race and (implication here) Obama is the same.” That was racist. As Obama went on to demonstrate, he had other dimensions of appeal, and did win over a majority of primary votes from a whole range of states.

Now, are you saying that the reason Bobby Jindal has the status of Governor of Louisiana because the people of that state are peculiarly inclined to vote for people of Indian extraction? I hope not, because that would be a profoundly stupid thing to suggest. We certainly don’t think so. The analogy doesn’t just break down; it slingshots right back at you. If anything, we (I speak for myself here anyway, but I bet it’s true of a lot of us) progressives do sit up and take notice when a person of color makes progress among reactionaries. It is a remarkable thing; it gets our attention. But the inevitable judgment we make against these kinds of Republicans is because we do see them as hypocrites, for reasons BlueFielder and 3letterjon have already gone over.

Racism in America is fundamentally about maintaining class stratification; it would be dangerous for a party as deeply committed as the Republicans are to classism to work toward scrapping racism as a strategy.

But Louisiana state candidates don’t have high-priced coaches and consultants like Clinton and Bush and Obama had.

Once again—that is just plain silly. If you want to remind us, more than we’ve had our faces painfully and humiliatingly smeared in the disgusting proof for the past 8 years, that Bush Jr was totally an ill-behaved meat puppet, a product foisted on the nation and world by deceptive advertising and shady dealings, go right ahead. But if you want to claim that in general all politicians are nothing but public performance artists and the other two gentlemen you mention were also totally stage-managed, as by implication must be any nationally prominent politician—

Well, if the Republican Party has decided in its wisdom that Gov. Jindal is to be its spokesperson, shouldn’t they have dispatched him some “coaches and consultants,” pronto? If the freshman US Senator from Illinois already had, as you imply, such spinmeisters serving him (or serving him up, as the case may be) in 2004, why is Jindal prevented from the same sort of entourage, especially if his national party is clearly putting so much weight on him? As for Clinton, he came from Arkansas, just two states away from Louisiana. Why is poor Bobby Jindal at some kind of structural disadvantage, as you suggest?

What I actually think is that while spin doctors have become alarmingly important (and in some sense always were) there is an interaction between them and the candidate themself. Some are brilliant in policy but not so much in presentation; they need image coaches/consultants (and run the risk of their policy agenda getting hijacked by slick politicking). Ronald Reagan, as it happens, was I think very largely his own coach/consultant in the matter of presentation; as an actor, he knew the value of his image and how to project it—where he needed consultants was in the matter of actually governing; anything fact-based in fact.

The fact is, the rise of neither Clinton nor Obama can be explained as a marketing phenomenon. Obama in particular repeatedly demonstrates that he is his own first consultant in both politics and policy.

I think Jindal has had just as much access to polishing as any other nationally prominent figure; it’s just that there isn’t much to polish there.

I mean, come on, the guy believes in exorcism! Or pretends to.

As always, the question, stupid or evil, is both pressing and irrelevant; clearly the two go hand in hand somehow or other.

Listen, just because someone who acts the fool is not white, doesn’t mean that calling him out for acting a fool is racist.  If you say he’s obviously a fool because all people of his race are fools or imply the same, that’s racist.  But if you are talking about a specific instance of a specific politician acting a fool, telling lies, and being condescending to the public he purports to serve, it’s not racist.

I think if there were Apu jokes floating around the liberal blogosphere, they’d be shot down.  We really don’t like racism and really don’t think it’s funny, even if the target is a Republican.

B/c it’s not party first and foremost over here on the left.  It’s people first, and we like them in all colors and genders.

His genius was pressing flesh at barbecues.  He got out in the swamps and the backwoods, and he got backwoods southern white people behind his candidacy.

Ahahahahahahahahaha!  Wrong person is wrong.

Jindal is governor of Louisiana because he ran basically unopposed.  His political background is as a paper pusher, and then as a congressman from the New Orleans metro area.  He’s probably never been in a swamp in his life, not counting a photo op or two.

“Backwoods southern white people” voted for him because he’s a conservative Republican who is good at playing up his devout Catholicism and playing down his ethnicity.  The fact that Louisianians tend to see non-Vietnamese Asians as either tokens or model minorities helps, as well.  He didn’t actually have to work very hard in a grassroots sense to win their votes.

I don’t think it’s racist ... when somebody takes a mean-spirited shot at a Democratic leader.

Some people think that charges of racism are caused by people being mean to others of a different race. They think this because they can’t understand it any other way. They just don’t see it. Whether that’s caused by congenital blindness to the plight of others, by plain old ignorance and its attendant (and self-perpetuating) intellectual laziness, or by an inability or unwillingness to examine their own beliefs, the upshot is “If it doesn’t look like racism to ME, then it’s not racism!” Which is, of course, completely wrong on every level.

There’s an element of tokenism to the Republican party’s efforts ... but Althouse is correct that there is a reflexive response among Democrats to accuse conservatives of color of being somehow hypocritical.

No, she is not correct. It’s nice to know that you agree with her on this, but you’re both wrong. This belief is an outgrowth of the misunderstanding of what racism is, as outlined above.

Althouse is, of course, being racist by leaving out 250 years of white imperialism on the Indian subcontinent.

As every proverbial village has its idiot, every academic department has its Althouse.

Tenure per se is at fault so much as academic culture and administrative policy—both of which are timid, fearful of litigation, and generally inept.

tenure NOT so much at fault… &c;&c;

I’m just quoting this to show how amazingly easy it is to tell when liberals are being actually racist, as opposed to when freaks like Althouse are pretending we’re racist.

Sophonisba, Are you joining in with the anti-Althouse snark? Or are you going all raging moonbat out of context?

Just for those who might be making a simplistic reading of select comments out of context, read here:

Althouse says that having a white guy portray Jindal essentially bleaches him of his ethnicity.  Does the name bobby not do that also (note italics here) by her logic?

Althouse is one Brady short of a bunch.

Mitchforth has entered the Althouse Zone.

Jindal seems like the Republican’s Michael Dukakis.

A rather dorky and uncharismatic policy wonk that has no chance of being President.

Ford would have never, ever become President on his own. History’s Greatest Accident, indeed.

Also, I notice she keeps deleting my comments.

Oh, thank heaven! I was sure I’d written a comment and couldn’t find it, and wondered if I chickened out (because being snarky, and correct, is pointless when enough folks are just going to mock what you say because it’s not politically correct (to them)).

My comment was that maybe she was being racist in thinking the other folks were being racist. No, wait… maybe *I* was being racist in thinking she was being racist. Or… what if my racism was making me question my judgment? I might be racistly assuming my racist assumption of her racist assumption of racism was wrong!

And I then pointed out that, on a personal level, asking such questions can be productive. You should be willing to ask yourself if you’d feel differently if so-and-so wasn’t (whatever).

But it’s not productive to try to judge others without something more explicit.

If someone finds the comparison of Jindal to Kenneth racist, how can you say it’s not, just because it doesn’t look like racism to you?

The comparison is based on their mannerisms and speech, neither of which conform to any racial stereotype.  Racism is not some mystical, subjective thing that nobody can truly know or understand, like the face of God.

Well, I suppose you wingnuts can’t understand it, but only because you try so hard not to.

You, like Althouse, will never comprehend the ease with which we are able to criticize someone of a different race from ourselves without being racist because ...

Thanks, Dan! I was just about to say something similar in a much more long-winded sort of way! You are much more concise and understandable than I am.

He won a 4 way election.

Yes, this is how elections always work in Louisiana.  There are no primaries, instead everyone who wants to throw their hat in runs (regardless of party, I believe), and if nobody wins a clear majority, there is a runoff between the top two candidates.  Jindal won without a runoff, which is a pretty rare feat. 

I don’t even remember which Democrat he ran against, so the person must not have been particularly prominent.  I mainly remember talking to family about it and hearing the Democratic side of the family groan about how the Dems didn’t have their shit together, their candidate wasn’t even trying, etc. 

it takes a pretty remarkable set of circumstances for a guy named Jindal to wind up governing Louisiana.

A remarkable set of circumstances, sure.  A remarkably charismatic individual?  No.  He has political strengths, sure.  But the idea that those strengths include kibbitzing with shrimpers or building some sort of grassroots movement among roughnecks?  Not so much.  He’s much better at press conferences, taking credit for things he had nothing to do with, and at seeming grievously religious.

A remarkably charismatic individual?  No.

This is why he will never be President. Jindal is, at the end of the day, a dork. Americans will elect many kinds of people to be President, but Americans don’t vote for dorks, even competent ones. Ask Michael Dukakis and Al Gore.

BTW before anyone says anything—yes, I know Dubya essentially stole that election, but Al Gore’s dorkiness is what made it so close in the first place. Close enough to steal it.

Jindal obviously didn’t have much support from the party

Well then how exactly did they come to hand pick him to do the response to Obama’s speech? 

Are you saying that all the Republican talking points going around in the lead up to Jindal’s speech, touting him as the Republican Obama, the Great Brown Hope of the GOP, was the exact opposite of what the Republican party’s actual intentions towards Jindal are? 

Rightwing koolaid drinkers must have to work really, really hard to be this stupid.

But Michy baby they’ve chosen to be Republicans.

Hey Mitch, got any complaints about the horrible racism heaped onto Jindal that don’t come from dishonest right-wing hacks?  Althouse thinks that having tits amounts to lecherous behavior, so pardon me if don’t take her remarks on racism seriously.

Again, racism is a tangible thing.  It’s not some nebulous mystery that we can only talk around, and hope to find a consensus.  Yet that’s the argument from you and Althouse: “Well, some might construe this as racist, so we can hardly say that it really isn’t.”  We can.  My evidence that comparing Jindal to Kenneth is not racist is that their similar traits are not racial stereotypes.  Your evidence for is that Jindal and Kenneth are different races, so there must be something there!

This is the trick that racists use to avoid actually thinking about their racism.  They pretend that it’s all just so confusing and who can really know and other bullshit excuses that seem almost reasonable.

Give me a break.  Monkeys are classic racist imagery when referring to black people, and the cartoon explicitly said that the dead monkey wrote the stimulus bill.  The cartoonist in question has a history of racist cartoons.  There is concrete evidence of the racist intent in the cartoon.  For the Jindal/Kenneth comparison there is not.

The only question remaining is whether you’re actually this stupid or you’re being disingenuous, but either way you fail.

Comparing Jindal to Kenneth from 30 Rock is no more or less racist than comparing Obama to Jackson.

Um, no.

There is no standard of “racism” that would allow this, other than Althouse’s entirely rudderless and intellectually bankrupt definition, which is “Hey, could be!”

Clinton dismissed Obama’s victory by immediately declaring it to be the exact same thing as what another black politician had done, despite there being no actual connection between the two events other than the race of the people involved.

The Kenneth/Jindal comparison came about because they said and did things that were incredibly similar.
 
Other examples:

A black man writes a book.  A critic declares it identical to a book by another black man despite the fact that the first book is a cookbook and the second book is an espionage thriller.  There is strong suspicion that the only reason to connect those two things is race.

A Hispanic man performs a stand up act.  It is compared to an act done by a white man because the delivery and topic matter is virtually identical, almost uncannily so.  There is no reason to suspect that the connection between the two is race, because they both had a five minute bit about high fructose corn syrup and Corn Nuts.

From the comments on Annie’s little pearl-clutch:

Can’t we simply accept that both Jindal and Obama are highly intelligent individuals, who should serve as an inspiration to young people of ALL races and ethnicities??

No.

Obama is an inspirational story.
Jindal is a cautionary tale.

Amazingly enough, my latest volley of comments there wasn’t deleted.  Maybe she’s coming around and realizing that wholesale deletion of dissent isn’t going to help anything.

...because they both had a five minute bit about high fructose corn syrup and Corn Nuts.

DUDE.

I have got to write a bit about that and put it into my stand-up act.

Again, racism is a tangible thing.  It’s not some nebulous mystery that we can only talk around, and hope to find a consensus.  ....

jrod, I think what we need to do is spell out how racism is tangible.

It’s tangible because it is a social system that serves purposes in our society. Therefore, the cultural manifestations are not, as mitchforth, Althouse, that Post cartoonist and whoever that dude was defending him here, all imply, just a matter of arbitrary phobias and sensitivities various people might happen to have at random. Nor do we just throw the charge of racism out there as some kind of squid-ink to stain people we don’t like for unrelated reasons.

The resentment, anger, even fear arise because the targets of racist discourse, in whatever form, know that there is a system in place and there may well be material consequences—ranging from not getting a job through not being allowed to buy a home in a particular neighborhood to being lynched in the dead of night. Furthermore, when they observe someone using these tropes, they have good evidence that this person identifies with the system—they are facing a self-declared enemy.

The protests, “Hey, I never intended it that way!” are disingeuous because American racism* is pervasive. If you haven’t ever had a friend, a co-worker or other acquaintance, a teacher, or some authority figure point out “that’s wrong because it is racist,” you’ve probably had people in all those categories who tried to include you on the racist team with winks, nudges, and laughs. Most of us have known both; I find it hard to believe any American has heard neither side. If someone just arrived on Earth from another planet, I might credit them with some innocence in these matters, but I don’t think anyone on Earth who manages to arrive on these shores gets here without the culture of racism being exposed to them, from one angle or another. It’s just a great big part of the machinery of living in this country; not noticing would be like never seeing a gas station.

But—as you say:

This is the trick that racists use to avoid actually thinking about their racism.  They pretend that it’s all just so confusing and who can really know and other bullshit excuses that seem almost reasonable.
Jrod on 02/27 at 01:25 PM

We didn’t used to have that layer of the machinery in our society; time was, roughly before WWII, that it was perfectly respectable—in fact, the norm—to openly subscribe to doctrines of racial hierarchy.

I’ve talked before about how and why we have this obligatory plausible deniability now; partially it is a sign of progress—the overt racists don’t reckon they have the force to put down the inevitable resistance to restoring that old status quo, and that’s good.

But not being sure you can win a war and therefore keeping a sort of tense peace is not the same thing as forgetting enmity. And the underlying social imperatives that created a demand for racist ideology in the first place are still in place, and so, the ideology not only stays around if subterranian, it also gets spontaneously replicated.

So—we recognize racism when we see it because we recognize the structural purposes of racist messages. The ones that fit are racist.

Whatever mitchforth’s imaginary South Asians may or may not feel, American society has no stake in mocking them for successful assimilation. If there really were such a hypothetical common sensitivity, there would be a reason for it, probably because there really were (in Bizzaro World, I mean) American racists somehow using that as a line of attack, and we would know about it; then choosing to stomp on that sensitivity or respect it would be a choice of allegiance with racism or its negation. If it is a misunderstanding, the sensitivity would evaporate as it becomes clear there is no systematic attack that has to be avoided or fended off.

I call this being reality-based, but American reactionaries have long ago realized that for them, reality is a slippery and weak brace for their stances, unless they are willing to admit they are all about using force for their own narrow advantage. That’s why our modern “conservatives” are so damn Postmodernist.

Thank you, Mark, for making my point far better than I did.

This is yet another issue where the right-wing frame has taken over in the American zeitgeist.  Racism no longer refers to anything systemic in the minds of far too many; it’s simply what you have when a minority feels aggrieved.  We need to push the window back.