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for what it's worth, i am not personally interested in juan williams at all. i thought what he said was stupid and banal---he's not the baroque lunatic racist that o-reilly is---instead at worst he seems a tepid bigot. i think he got fired mostly for saying something that was really stupid. and i never cared for his npr work. i thought him consistently lame and one-dimensional.
what interested me, in a kinda train wreck way, was the attempts to reframe this from an uninteresting incident involving a b-list celebrity into a confrontation in the conservative identity-reinforcement spill-over zone they call the "culture wars"---which forced palin and gingrich and the other main populist spokesmodels to (a) defend the statement is if it were racist and not merely stupid, (b) invoke the right's paranoid huntington thesis worldview to justify the racism, make it "necessary" by making it a "Recognition of Reality" then (c) to duplicate that us/them business (war on "terror" anyone?) with another version in which the Heroic Conservatives Stand Up to Political Correctness and Say What It Is.
by the end of that, juan williams being an idiot is framed as an act of heroism of some bizarre kind.
and this topped with a nice steaming bonbon in the shape of a canard about that bastion of "leftism" npr---which had it's insitutional spine removed during the reagan period because of the exact same canard-usage, but hey, whipping boys are whipping boys and why let go of a good one?
the frame that these conservatives place around this is really curious.
you have to wonder what they're thinking.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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