Facts from the Front – February 2016
by Moe White –
I’m a political progressive, so I sometimes force myself to listen to self-described conservatives.
It’s not just a question of “know your enemy”; it’s “What are they thinking?”
And here’s the thing: When I listen to some of these Republican primary voters in my role as a political junkie, I find their words fascinating; as a patriot, frightening; and as a thinking man, roll-your-eyes appalling.
Fear and …
What characterizes the vast majority of such voters is a combination of profound ignorance and baseless fear. They are truly low-information voters who, apparently, watch nothing but the Fox channel. They say that they’re thinking; but in fact, they’re fearing, and they don’t know the difference.
Thus an Iowa Trump supporter is quoted in a New York Magazine story: “Bringing in these refugees, why are there so many men? If you want to convince me, where are the women and children?”
Well, according to data from the U.S. State Department, they’re coming to America. Of all the Syrian refugees, 67% have been women and their children under the age of 12. Even counting teenagers, fewer than a third are men, and of those, the majority are over fifty – grandfathers traveling with their families.
Thinking? No. That requires logically analyzing facts. Feeling? In her case, fearing based on ignorance of facts.
How is it that people are so ignorant? Well, it would seem they both watch and believe the Fox “news” channel – the “fair and balanced” network with the fairness and balance of a Soviet election. For example:
… Ignorance
About 2% of those attending the GOP convention in 2012 were African Americans. Most TV coverage and newspaper photos showed a sea of white faces with a tiny number of black ones sprinkled among them. But on Fox, virtually every camera showed one or two or even three African Americans, in close-up, with at most a dozen whites in the frame, thus giving the impression that blacks made up 10% or 20% of the convention. People who watch legitimate news channels could assert, with reason, the GOP is a virtually all-white party. People who watch Fox claim, “See, we have lots of minorities!”
A few years back Fox showed video of several thousand people massed in front of a speaker’s stand on the Washington Mall, identifying it as a pro-gun, pro-GOP, anti-Obama rally taking place that day. The rest of the media showed actual footage of the event: a few dozen gun-toting men and women wandering aimlessly around on the grass. Fox later admitted it had “substituted” stock file footage of an actual demonstration from years before, but its dedicated viewers had already absorbed the deliberate misinformation.
The network’s coverage of refugees is similar: in an image with 30 women, 35 children, 20 old men, and a dozen teens and young men, the Fox cameras zoom in on the 12 frustrated, angry-looking young men … and that’s all their viewers ever see. That’s why they’re steeped in ignorance, and fearful of all sorts of phenomena that don’t actually exist.
Judge not
As of January 2016, the U.S. Senate had a list of 62 judicial vacancies to fill, compared with 40 at the beginning of 2015 – an increase of more than 50%. Now in his last year in office, President Obama has submitted qualified candidates for many of those judgeships, including for courts that are considered judicial emergencies – where the caseload is so high that justice cannot be served. But the Senate, under Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA), is unlikely to allow votes on more than a few, if any, additional Obama nominees through the rest of 2016.
In President George W. Bush’s seventh year in office, there were 56 vacancies in January 2007 and, by the end of that year, even with new vacancies, fewer than 50. The Senate under Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) confirmed 40 Bush nominees in 2007; the McConnell Senate in 2015? Only 11 of Obama’s.
Why the difference? When Republican Bush faced a Democratic Senate, Harry Reid put the needs of the country above politics, and filled judicial vacancies. But with Democrat Obama facing a Republican Senate, Mitch McConnell puts the ideology of the GOP ahead of the needs of the country, in the hope that a new Republican president in January 2017 will pack the courts with partisan, ideologically biased judges along the lines of Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito.
A stacked judiciary is the last line of defense for a party whose policies and politics resemble the Jim Crow era and the Gilded Age, while the American electorate has moved into the 21st century. Controlling the courts for another generation is their only hope of fighting the tides of history.
What to do? People can try to bring public pressure on the Senate to ratify the scores of judicial nominees already in the pipeline before the end of the year. But it’s even more essential to vote for Democrats at every level – president, senator, representative and statewide – to restore enlightenment, reason, constitutional validity, and, yes, JUSTICE, to our judicial system.
Facts From The Front is a monthly column by copy editor Moe White in which America’s Constitutional democracy is defended against ongoing assaults by those who prefer less palatable alternatives: oligarchy, autocracy, theocracy, feudalism, fascism, and other nondemocratic methods of government. Among the qualifications for White’s commentary and ridicule are hypocrisy, dishonesty, corruption, unbridled greed, flat-out lies, and sheer idiocy on the part of public figures.
NOTE: The views and opinions expressed in “Facts from the Front” are those of the author. They do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of The Urban News.
