Has There Ever Been a Nastier Party Than This?
GOP idea of a “birthday present.”
Evidently, not only do the Republicans refuse to accept the facts of the President’s birth, they refuse to acknowledge his right to a birthday. Ha ha.
RNC sends DNC ‘you didn’t bake this’ Obama birthday cake
By Alicia M. Cohn - 08/03/12 03:43 PM ET
The HillThe Republican National Committee (RNC) sent the Democratic National Committee (DNC) a birthday cake on Friday, but the DNC sent it back.
The cake read “you didn’t bake this” over a picture of President Obama. Text written in icing reads, “Happy birthday, Mr. President.” The cake marks the occasion of the president’s birthday, which is Saturday, with a play on the “you didn’t build that” controversy….
Yahoo News reported the cake as vanilla with vanilla frosting.
“Happy 50.99726th Mr. President,” RNC spokesman Tim Miller wrote in an email. The decimal number tweaks the Democrats on an official blog post from White House Economic adviser Alan Krueger, who pointed out the July jobs report, released Friday, indicated the “unemployment rate ticked up to 8.3 percent in July (or, more precisely, the rate rose from 8.217 percent in June to 8.254 percent in July).
“23 million people struggling for work isn’t a rounding error,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus ?snapped back….
Frankly, there’s not a lot that any civilized person can say in any sort of civil manner about this juvenile (some might say ‘infantile’) viciousness.
Love the subtle racism, as well. Get it? ”vanilla with vanilla frosting.”
Not that that’s “code” in any cultural sense. Oh wait “Vanilla Ice.”
Ha ha.
But let’s lay aside the increasingly naked racism of the Republicans’ rhetoric. Let’s look at what’s actually supposedly being said:
“You didn’t bake this” is self-evidently TRUE.
And, taking the nonsense out of the idiotic allegation, let’s look at how many people would have been involved, HAD the President (oddly) actually baked his own birthday cake.
OK: Frosting.
You didn’t print this, Mr. Trump
Let’s assume (incorrectly) that the icing was made with actual sugar (and not fructose from corn):
It either came from sugar beets (most likely) or cane sugar (less likely).
In either case, how many people did it take to plant that field?
“One,” if you only look superficially, but SOMEBODY made that cultivator. Someone machined the parts, someone dug the ore for the metal. Someone manufactured the plastics (probably oil-derived, see below) and then somebody fabricated or extruded them. And someone made all the machinery that performed those tasks.
Someone drilled the oil that fueled the cultivator, someone manufactured the machinery to DRILL that oil, then to cap the well, pump the oil, through pipelines also manufactured, etc. Someone had to transport that oil (probably by supertanker) then refine that oil (and then all those who built the refinery) then TRUCK the oil to a place where it could be pumped into the cultivator.
Ditto the harvester. Add the trucking that brought the oil, that transported the beets or cane to a processing plant (and let’s just leave the trains out of it for simplicity); someone had to build the roads. Someone had to refine the sugar from the cane or beets, more trucking, and someone had to either buy the sugar for the White House Kitchen or else process it into ready-made frosting for the cake.
Then there are all those who had to manufacture the utensils, the icing tube, etc.
Are you keeping up on your calculator? We’re easily up to four figures now, and most probably five.
That’s 10,000 people who had a hand in making the frosting.
Collectivist political parties!
Let’s skip over the cake itself, because we don’t have the TIME to delineate all those who delivered the materials and machinery to create it without creating a War & Peace-length tome. You can do the math yourself, but you won’t get any extra credit.
In fact, if the usual is the case, you won’t get ANY credit.
But the Democrats sent the cake back. [ibid]
The great problem in our greed-driven society is that those who benefit the most are the least likely to ever acknowledge the machinery of civilization that allowed them to “create” their wealth, to have their success, and to enjoy the fruits of their “labors.”
Thus the insane Ayn Rand philosophy that “I created my success without any help.” (Except for welfare and food stamps, as Craig T. Nelson famously madlibbed.)
You didn’t print this stamp, RNC
And that anyone who I see who I don’t IMMEDIATELY see as a contributor to my Superman society is a “looter.”
Adam Smith thought this notion was crazy. Most thinkers throughout human history thought so, too.
Extra credit assignment: Name five economists/philosophers who pointed out the necessarily social nature of humankind. But you can’t start with Hobbes’ Leviathan, because I already said so.
You have to NOT think very deeply to come up with the notion that “you didn’t bake this” is an insult.
The person who has to bake their own birthday cake alone is either a pathetic, friendless schmuck, a baker without baking friends, or else a Republican (one would assume).
So, ridiculous, racist and not able to stand a moment’s rational scrutiny.
Sent as a political INSULT for the President’s birthday.
It used to be that certain things were out of bounds in American political discourse. Birthdays. Christmas, religious holidays and, unless egregious in their behavior, First Ladies’ noncontroversial appearances and “pet projects.” Nobody except extremists ever decided that Lady Bird Johnson’s “Keep America Beautiful” campaign was a collectivist plot to plunge America into a Lovecraftian nightmare of fascism and the ritual eating of human flesh.
Etcetera.
We hear a lot about “civility” in political discourse, and certainly the second that any non-Republican is uncivil in any wise, we hear about it a LOT.
But crapping on someone’s birthday with a racist cake?
Why not just burn a cross on the White House lawn, Republicans?
Oh wait. They’d have to have help to get the wood and the gasoline and the matches. (See “frosting” above).
Idaho KKK cross-burning 2012
You didn’t burn this cross, Mr. Priebus.
The RNC also marked the occasion of Obama’s birthday with faux e-birthday cards mocking gaffes by the administration. [ibid]
Courage.
====================
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, an honorary Texan, Clown (ditto) and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog
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Hart, Thanks for pointing out what passes for subtlety in the Republican Party.
The RNC think they’re being subtle when 20% of their staffers don’t ‘get it.’
“Juvenile vicousness” is only a symptom of the greater GOP problem, which seems to be either A.) a voluntary relinquishing of anything related to integrity and common decency, or B.) an institutionalized ignorance of the realities we face (without which there can be no solutions). More likely it’s both A.) and B.) Also what Steve said. Love the Ayn Kampf stamp btw.
Thanks, Steve. Thanks zephyr.
When truth and civility are sacrificed to “win at any cost,” it’s not a representative democracy. It’s a coup d’etat.
Our politics has devolved into pure reptile brain conditioning a la Madison Avenue advertising. Keep telling the big lie and people will believe it. Suppress the vote for those likely NOT to believe it, and voila! you’re in “charge.” See Bush/Cheney.
Another enjoyable read full of truths.
Thank you.
I agree with the post. I feel it important to point out that Ayn Rand did NOT believe that the interconnectedness of society was unimportant. Her signature novel, Atlas Shrugged, was ALL ABOUT such interconnectedness. That she believed that CEO’s could easily get along without their workers, but not the reverse, was suggested in their moving to Colorado and taking up such activities as pig farming.
Maybe the GOP is trying to throw the election.
Wouldn’t be a bad move!?
GOP has no solid candidates.
GOP are in the drivers seat while blaming Obama.
What does the GOP have to gain by winning an election? Let the “good times” roll!
Maybe the GOP doesn’t care as much about the presidency as Mitt does. Maybe they’re more concerned about gaining the Senate. Just a thought.
If the cake had been chocolate with chocolate icing, would that have also been an instance of subtle racism or would it be overt racism? How about a yellow cake, or a chocolate and vanilla marble cake? Just askin’
If harmless jokes based on current political advertisements are able to rouse our indignation to the exploding point, perhaps we all need to chill out just a little? Sorry, but this all seems a little too contrived.
If anyone wants to understand the subtle and not so subtle racism in the Republican party, there are no end of examples to choose from. I fail to see this as one of them.
@ The_Ohioan — ditto. I made a very similar comment to yours on this thread earlier this morning, but it has disappeared.
I can’t visualize any cake / icing combination that would have been “safe”.
“But crapping on someone’s birthday with a racist cake?”
I think it is debatable as to whether the cake itself is racist, but this is yet another in a long line of unprecedented things that I can’t help but think might have something to do with the blackness of the President.
When was the last time a President’s birthday was used as an opportunity to attack? Can anyone remember the last time a President’s birthday was more than a minor news tidbit, if mentioned at all?
The entire narrative constructed by the right wing regarding Obama is aimed at minimizing him as a person, and it has been done to a ridiculous degree.
Leaving aside the birther elephant in the room, they’ve worked hard to imply that Obama just isn’t successful or qualified enough to be President. The idea that he hasn’t run anything – even a lemonade stand – makes him inferior to any opponent with business credentials.
Yet by any objective standard Obama has been successful. If he’d done nothing more than get admitted to Harvard on merit, that would be considered exceptional. If he’d done nothing more than graduate with honors from that institution with a law degree, he’d be considered successful. To go on and teach law at the University of Chicago would be the penultimate career goal for many, and should be enough to be considered a success.
Most people don’t get to write a best selling book, and if that was all Obama did with his life, he’d be considered successful. He wrote two.
And serving in the US Senate? That’s a distinction that only 100 out of 300 million Americans can claim at any one time…clearly a success.
Plus, he’s a millionaire.
If he’d done any one of these things, it would be hard to argue he’d not been successful, but the narrative from the right has been that Obama is nothing more than a “community organizer” who stumbled into the Presidency at best, and at worst is a foreigner who isn’t even qualified to be an American, let alone President.
A white millionaire/Harvard graduate/Senator/best selling author would be an unqualified success story. A black one gets a nasty cake for his birthday.
Well said, ccjack.
The oddity here is that impassioned defense is given to the notion that vanilla cake/vanilla frosting ISN’T meant to be a sly racial insult.
Everything else about the cake is insulting. No defense is offered. But, magically, it is divined that this doubling up on “vanilla” can’t POSSIBLY be racial code.
Think about that for a minute.
Why such an impassioned defense that ONE element can’t be insulting when it is tacitly admitted that all other parts are an intentional insult? And, the Defenders of Vanilla/Vanilla seem to have no problem with that.
Why?
This isn’t a criminal court, in which the burden of proof would be “beyond a reasonable doubt.” It’s not even a civil court, in which the burden would merely be “preponderance of evidence.” (I think I could win in that forum.)
No: this is the court of public opinion and I’ll say this again: When your actions are indistinguishable from that of a Grand Kleagle of the KKK, the burden of proof isn’t on me to prove racism. The burden is on the Kleagle Clone to prove that it ISN’T.
Again, WHY such a passionate defense: “I can’t visualize any cake / icing combination that would have been “safe”.”
The defense itself depends on the notion that if the writer can’t visualize it, it can’t be visualized. This is, prima facie, specious.
Marble cake. Cheesecake. Carrot cake. Spice cake. Angel food cake with cherry icing: all of these are not telling. Even chocolate cake with chocolate icing can be argued as non-controversial, since it is the most common birthday cake configuration. But vanilla/vanilla is far more so.
Indeed, vanilla/vanilla is a somewhat unusual cake choice, as anyone who’s shopped for birthday cakes will attest. It is an outlier.
Given the endless attempts to deny President Obama his very personhood, any reasonable observer would conclude that the subtle insult was part and parcel to the overt insult. Or don’t you think they put this together carefully?
The evidence suggests otherwise.
Somehow, making explicit what seems self-evidently implicit has called up a firestorm of defense … that it’s NOT racist?
The insult to the person and the office seem to cause not a bit of trepidation, which rather undercuts this defense. People who don’t want to see what it in front of their eyes can always find a series of seemingly-rational equivocations to cast doubt on the conclusion, but to assume that the “racist” conclusion is THE only portion of my analysis that requires refutation is, itself, telling.
We do not live in a world of deductive logic. We live in a world of inductive reasoning, and I included the charge because it seems entirely reasonable, given the extraordinarily well-known background of this “cake attack.”
Squall all you want, but my inference from the evidence seems less refuted than buttressed by this quite narrowly delineated faux-outrage.
Pure skepticism is a rhetorical dead end, since pure skepticism allows me to conclude that no one actually exists, and, therefore I don’t have to listen to anything anyone has to say.
Bonus points if you know the term that characterizes the stance delineated in the previous paragraph.
Come on Hart. Seriously? You are surprised that people would respond to the charge of racism when you put up a burning cross?
Be honest — You would have written exactly the same thing had the cake been chocolate, with chocolate frosting. (Worse with light or dark chocolate?) And one can only imagine the reaction to… say… a vanilla cake with chocolate icing.
And lemon? It would have been a backhanded slap against the car industry or something. And labor.
I mean… at some point, the sheer ridiculousness of all this has got to become obvious.
Sometimes, a rose is just a rose. Or icing is just icing.
If you are trying to make the case that there were outrageous, egregious messages carried by the vehicle itself (ie the cake), your message got buried in the icing someplace.
Well done twice Hart.
It’s funny, not ha ha funny but funny nonetheless, how off put some become when shown a hypocrisy.
It’s as if they miss the point that a vanilla / vanilla cake and a burning cross might have just a little something in common.
Guess ‘some folk’ think subtle racism should be excused, or at the very least ignored.
Restating the same argument in longer form is NOT responding to an argument.
Neither is it a particularly logical response. All of your points are dealt with explicitly in my previous comment.
“Come on,” and “Seriously” are not rational arguments. In fact, they’re not actually arguments at all.
The boy who cried “Wolf” too often, was unable to save his flock when a real wolf appeared. All the sturm und drang about whether the cake’s icing and/or message is a racial slur (even ccjack is doubtful) could be better spent delineating the more obvious racial machinations of the party in question – voter suppression springs to mind.
Questioning the validity of a premise is not a defense of the opposite of that premise. Everything ccjack expresses so well is actually the raison de’etere of the Tea Party fanatics and is being used by the right-wing of the Republican Party; it is also their Achilles’ heel.
The answer to the original question is maybe; but this is the party we must confront now.
True enough. We seem to be building to some kind of “perfect storm” of bad (voter suppression, endless abortion laws, etc.) governance, vicious tactics and secret moneymen.
How it will turn out, no one can say.
As for the fundamental premise, it seems apparent that this “you didn’t build this” distortion is going to be the hill they make their “stand” on, and that was the main point this essay dealt with.
That and the shameless (in the literal sense) attack on the President’s birthday. I guess that makes sense only if you weren’t actually born.