How to be a faux-liberal whore

Roger Ailes recently pointed out an embarrassingly stupid op-ed piece by Wan Julliams, in which he complained about how the vacuous lip service with no changes in policy whatsoever offered by George Bush hasn’t won him more votes.

Anyway, he moved things up another notch today. Here’s Wan on poor Bush snubbing those meanies at the NAACP on Faux News Sunday:

WALLACE: The NAACP, the nation’s oldest and biggest civil rights group, held its annual convention this week. John Kerry attended. George W. Bush did not and becomes, I believe, the first president since Herbert Hoover not to attend an NAACP convention during a full term in office.

Juan, I know that you, in fact, think that Mr. Bush has a strong case to make to black voters. Explain.

WILLIAMS: Well, I don’t think there’s any question when you look at the the appointments. At any point in history, if you said to me the secretary of state is a black person and the national security adviser, people in charge of our foreign policy apparatus are African- American, you’d be stunned. And it’s the truth of this moment.

WALLACE: And to more Cabinet…

WILLIAMS: And you also have Alphonso Jackson at housing and Rod Paige at education and you had Larry Compton as deputy in terms of justice. I mean, these are amazing people and they have been elevated in this administration to prominent, powerful positions. These are not tokens. If you ask people who the most popular are in the administration, I believe Powell’s number one and Rice is number two.

WALLACE: But what about his policies?

WILLIAMS: But his policies are interesting, too, because if you look in terms of his vouchers, his emphasis on vouchers, on improving the quality of education in public schools, in large part they’re servicing minority communities. So this is all part of the appeal that George W. Bush would have for the minority community.

I might say that when he goes out and give speeches, when we stood against Trent Lott, when Trent Lott made his comments about support for the Strom Thurmond and 48 and all that, here was George W. Bush speaking to ministers, the black ministers, who understand, in fact, are more supportive than white Evangelicals of the idea of sending government money into churches to support community-based programs to help addicts, to help people in prison, to help the homeless and the hungry. This is all what Bush has to say to black America.

But unfortunately so much of it has been defused by the fact that the NAACP has become so highly politicized under Kwase Mfume, and especially Julian Bond. I mean, they pretty much had made Bush, who got 30 percent of the black vote when he ran for governor in Texas and then spoke to the NAACP he was running for president, but they’ve subsequently made him into a real dragon in terms of a man who they portray as having supported the people who killed James Byrd in Jasper, Texas.

It’s just a terrible thing that the NAACP has politicized, especially to the extent that the president can say legitimately that I’m in a political fight with the leadership of the NAACP. It has nothing to do with the history of the NAACP. And that’s why he will speak to the Urban League this week and try to repair the damage done to the people who may not pay attention to how political the NAACP has become, and simply say, I’m not avoiding black audiences, I’m avoiding the leadership of the NAACP.

I dunno, Wan, maybe most African-Americans aren’t dumb enough to think that the race of the incompetents and company men in Bush’s cabinet has anything to do with anything? Maybe they realize that vouchers, as currently constituted, don’t actually help poor people? Maybe they understand that his fiscal and labor and civil rights enforcement and foreign policies are disastrous for people of color no matter how many black churches Bush speaks at? That they might understand what it means when an ex-segregationist judge who unethically intervened on behalf of a cross-burner is appointed on the weekend of MLK’s birthday? That he hasn’t made the case because there’s no case?

And, Juan, the NAACP has always been a political organization. It favors policies that advance civil rights and the interests of African-Americans. This doesn’t always lead to the same partisan support; there have been times in the NAACP’s history when the Republicans were still more progressive on civil rights in some respects. But this is no longer true. The NAACP isn’t betraying anything by opposing a President whose policies have been disastrous for African-Americans who aren’t millionaires or likely to receive patronage appointments. Christ, this is just pathetic even for a Fox “liberal.”

The best response may be to quote Thurgood Marshall, as he announced his retirement (knowing who Bush was likely to replace him with): “My dad told me way back that you can’t use race. For example, there’s no difference between a white snake and a black snake. They’ll both bite.” Anyone who looks at the totality of Bush’s policy and then holds up Rod Paige and wonders why Bush isn’t gaining traction is a fucking idiot.