In my post from last Friday, I discussed how Walter Williams compares America’s relative peacefulness to all the civil war and bloodshed in other nations and somehow concludes it’s because Americans oppose big government (and therefore, government interfering in health insurance is bad).

In a post from a few years back, reporter David Neiwert points out the flaw in Williams’ argument, about five years before Williams wrote it:
“Have you ever noticed how, when libertarians and right-wingers talk about “threats to our freedoms,” the only source of those threats is the government?

It’s perhaps useful to remember that, over the course of American history, the greatest threats to the liberty of American citizens have come not from the government, but from our fellow citizens. Particularly, those directed by white citizens against nonwhites.

Recall, for instance, that the most egregious example of the removal of citizens’ civil rights in America occurred primarily through extralegal means — namely, during the lynching period, when thousands of blacks were summarily murdered in the most horrible fashion imaginable, often merely for the sin of being successful by white standards (this made them “uppity” and thus marked for extermination).

Lynching was a form of socially sanctioned terrorism against the black community whose entire purpose was to “keep the niggers down.” It largely succeeded, until the wellsprings of the civil rights movement began working to tear it down as a broadly accepted American institution.

The legacy of lynching remains with us today, though, in the form of hate crimes — whose purpose, once again, is to oppress and eliminate targeted minorities.”

Pat Buchanan, in a recent column on white anger, argues that it’s nothing to do with Obama being black: “the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived … In their lifetimes, they have seen their Christian faith purged from schools their taxes paid for, and mocked in movies and on TV. They have seen their factories shuttered in the thousands and their jobs outsourced in the millions to Mexico and China. They have seen trillions of tax dollars go for Great Society programs, but have seen no Great Society, only rising crime, illegitimacy, drug use and dropout rates … America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.”

In the first place, America was “their” country only in the sense that everyone else — white women, blacks, hispanics — was kept from sharing in power. I know it’s painful for some people to see the whole equality of races/genders/faiths thing taken seriously—to know that no matter how poor they were, they were automatically held superior to people who weren’t straight white males—but I don’t have much sympathy for them.
In the second place, it’s creepy—though having been reading Buchanan for years, not surprising—that he conceives this entirely in terms of white people. No suggestion that the black working class is hit as hard or worse by the economic downturn, by downsizing and outsourcing or that they feel alienated and frustrated, or that it matters if they do. Apparently America doesn’t quite qualify as “their” country.
And in that light a quote in response from Adam Serwer: “Black Americans have shed blood in every American war since the Revolution. This country, even the very Capitol building in which today’s legislators now demand to see the birth certificate of the first black president, was built on the sweat and sinew of slaves. Before we were people in the eyes of the law, before we had the right to vote, before we had a black president, we were here, helping make this country as it is today. We are as American as it gets. And frankly, the time of people who think otherwise is passing”

But just in case: A Louisiana judge refuses to marry interracial couples, regardless of his legal responsibility to do so.

An Alabama CBS station reported recently on a bar that has an anti-healthcare plan sign using the N-word, which the guy insists doesn’t mean he’s a racist, “those are just the words I choose.”
The response from a couple of right-wing bloggers: This is just an attempt to smear Obama critics as racists! It was biased.
Of course, the fact the same bar ran a white-supremacist party that included a mockup of a Klansman in a hammock (made of two lynched blacks tied together) might suggest the gentleman does indeed have racial issues.
And the article doesn’t smear anyone: It notes that blacks and whites in the area want it to come down.
Nevertheless, blogger “the other McCain” discusses how this is all unfairly smearing the South as racist.
Roy Edroso has the details and the links (Saturday’s post–scroll down).