A new Pew survey shows a rather steep “Partisan Knowledge Gap,” with Republicans and Independents generally better informed than Democrats.

Mary Katharine Ham finds this quite amusing and also notes that, “if the polling had gone the other way, the NYT would shout it from the rooftops.”  She provides examples of the mainstream press doing just that on previous occasions.

We’d need a more wide-ranging set of questions and more replication over time to make any definitive conclusions about the relative knowledge of various partisans.   This does, however, seem to belie the recent White House-approved meme that Fox News and its ilk aren’t really news outlets.   The fact of the matter is — and this has been borne out over time — that people who listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity are among the best informed people out there.   It’s not that those hosts are unbiased — Lord knows, they are — but because they draw an audience that’s much more interested in the news than most Americans.

CNN’s current business model is straight news, with the opinion shows pushed to their sister HLN.  But people actually watch Fox.

“[E]ven if we stipulate that torture had produced vital information in some particular instance when no other method would have worked—and it’s not remotely clear at this point that we should stipulate to any such thing—this is a wildly confused way to frame the question. Sooner or later, someone wins the lottery. For that person, it was certainly worth it to buy that lottery ticket. That’s not a helpful way to decide whether buying lottery tickets is a wise investment.” – Julian Sanchez

The observation is based on an appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor” by Cato’s David Rittgers that’s really aggravating to watch.  O’Reilly uses guests as props to make his points rather than as experts with whom to engage in meaningul conversation.

Quite a few reports came out yesterday buttressing rumors that there were tensions between John McCain and Sarah Palin which caused a feud within the campaign team.   It’s only fitting, I suppose, since the selection of Palin has highlighted and exacerbated a growing fissure within the Republican Party itself.

Fox New’s Carl Cameron dished last night about rumors that Palin was even more unprepared than we thought, like not knowing that Africa was a continent rather than a country or being clueless about which countries were in NAFTA:

Cameron continued the assault on Bill O’Reilly’s show, continuing to use the word “knowledgability” to describe what she lacked:

In “Internal Battles Divided McCain and Palin Camps,” NYT corespondent Elisabeth Bumiller details some of the petty squabbles and disputes over such things as the prank Sarkozy call and the wardrobe brouhaha but this section puts it all into perspective:

Finger-pointing at the end of a losing campaign is traditional and to a large degree predictable, as Mr. McCain himself acknowledged in a prescient interview in July.

“Every book I’ve read about a campaign is that the one that won, it was a perfect and beautifully run campaign with geniuses running it and incredible messaging, etcetera,” Mr. McCain said then. “And always the one that lost, ‘Oh, completely screwed up, too much infighting, bad people, etcetera.’ So if I win, I believe that historians will say, ‘Way to go, he fine-tuned that campaign, and he got the right people in the right place and as the campaign grew, he gave them more responsibility.’ If I lose,” people will say, “ ‘That campaign, always in disarray.’ ”

Quite right.  Had McCain somehow managed to win, we’d be hearing about all the Obama staffers who couldn’t believe Joe Biden was so boneheaded as to promise a grave national security crisis if his guy won and Biden staffers complaining about Obama’s ill-considered remarks to Joe the Plumber or Obama’s diva qualities being demonstrated by his penchant for giant outdoor rallies with Greek columns.  Since they won, however, the mistakes are minimized.

Regardless, these revelations about Palin are embarrassing, if true, and seem petty at this juncture.   Michelle Malkin and Ace are absolutely right that it’s cowardly for these rumormongers to be dishing anonymously.

Palin, for her part, is being extraordinarily gracious, at least in public, saying all the right things about McCain and about letting president-elect Obama have his moment.

RedState honcho Erick Erickson says his team is “tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others.” Fair enough. He then goes on:

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

It is our expressed intention to make these few people political lepers.

[...]

Don’t make us add you to our list. Do you really want to be next to Kathleen Parker in the leper colony?

I was about halfway through a draft of this post which decried a New McCarthyism and a witch hunt against those Republicans who dared speak out against Palin when it occurred to me that I’ve had more than one adult beverage with Erick and that he couldn’t possibly mean that.  Either this was a late night rant that he’d walk back in the morning or I was reading too much into the whole thing.

So I emailed him asking, “Is it your intention to sabotage candidates you’d otherwise support for hiring staffers who say mean things about Sarah Palin?  And perhaps anyone else who says anything mean about Palin?   Not sure how else to take Don’t make us add you to our list.”  He assured me that, “We’re just trying to rattle cages.  It’s pretty clear there are four staffers and one former staffer in the McCain camp who are out to save their own reputations by throwing Palin under the bus.  Just trying to get them to back off.  I’m positive, because i have my own campaign sources, that the vast majority of what they are saying is B.S.”

Fair enough.

The whole Palin thing, though, worries me.  I take people like George Will and Christopher Buckley and Colin Powell at their word when they say the selection of Palin was very troubling to them.   And, to the extent Palin did lack “knowledgability,” it’s not her fault that she was jumped directly from Rookie League ball to the World Series.   Michelle Malkin is absolutely right here:

Let’s assume the rumor-mongers are telling the truth for a moment. Who does it damn more: Sarah Palin or McCain and his vetters who green-lighted her for the vice presidential nomination? Don’t need an Ivy League degree to figure that one out.

Indeed not.

But here’s the thing: As Stacy McCain has argued eloquently for some time, the grassroots of the party love Sarah Palin.  His sentiment that, “We need more grass-roots activists and fewer intellectual elites” is surely widespread.   It’s also a path to permanent minority party status.

My political awakening occured in late 1979, with the Iran Hostage Crisis, and grew steadily over the next year as Ronald Reagan battled Jimmy Carter for the presidency.  At that point in time, the Republican Party was said to have an “Electoral College lock” on the White House — California was a solid GOP state at the time — and it took extraordinary things like the combination of Watergate, an energy crisis, and runaway stagflation to get a Democrat elected.  At the same time, though, the Democrats were overwhelmingly the dominant party.  They had majorities in most state legislatures, held most of the governorships, had been in control of the House of Representatives for decades, and were ensconsed as the majority party in the Senate.

Reagan changed all that.  He managed to build a coalition of anti-communists, fiscal conservatives, and social conservativesthat swept Carter off to build houses for the poor, brought in a wave of Republicans on his coattails, and started a national realignment that culminated in the 1994 Republican revolution.

The social conservatives, mostly Southern evangelicals, took over the party, starting with the school boards and county commissions and eventually the state legislatures, the breeding ground for future Congressmen and governors.   The result, for a time, was a majority party or, at least, one on par with the Democrats in party ID and more easily mobilized on election day.

The coalition has long been an uneasy one, with the social conservatives disdained by the Rockefeller Republicans and vice versa.  The demise of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War made it harder to keep the coalition together but it has more-or-less held together.   All the while, though, moderate and liberal Republicans have gradually been driven from power.  Olympia Snowe is all that’s left of them in the New England states, now a one-party region.

The frontrunners for the 2012 nomination are Palin and Mike Huckabee.  I don’t see how either gets beyond 40 percent of the national popular vote, let alone takes back any state that Obama won this go-round.   Not only will they not appeal to independent voters, they’d both alienate the Crunchy Cons, South Park Republicans, Goldwater Republicans, Rockefeller Republicans, and essentially everyone else outside the hard core evangelical base.

There’s got to be a better way.

UPDATE: Along these same lines, Steve Benen reminds us of Jim Nuzzo’s recent remarks that,

There’s going to be a bloodbath. A lot of people are going to be excommunicated. David Brooks and David Frum and Peggy Noonan are dead people in the Republican Party. The litmus test will be: where did you stand on Palin?

Matt Yglesias‘ response at the time is apt:

I’m actually one who thinks that the occasional ideological purge can strengthen a movement, but this would be a seriously odd basis for conducting such a cleansing exercise. Nuzzo is talking about a blind test of loyalty, not any kind of substantive demarcation of conservatism.

A GOP where the likes of Brooks and Noonan aren’t welcome would be a fringe party, indeed.

UPDATE II:   George Will makes similar arguments in his column today, although his view of what’s happening is a bit more, well, conservative.

As this is being written, Republicans seem to have lost a total of 55 House and 11 Senate seats in the past two elections. These are the worst Republican results in consecutive elections since the Depression-era elections of 1930 and 1932 (153 and 22), which presaged exile from the presidency until 1953. If, as seems likely at this writing, in January congressional Republicans have 177 representatives and 44 senators, they will be weaker than at any time since after the 1976 elections, when they were outnumbered in the House 292 to 143 and the Senate 61 to 38.

After the 1936 election, when the Republican nominee against FDR, Kansas Gov. Alf Landon, carried only two states, both in New England (hence the jest, “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont”), there were 29 congressional seats in New England and Republicans still held 15. With Tuesday’s defeat of Connecticut Republican Chris Shays, Democrats hold all 22 New England seats. As recently as 1996, when New York had 31 House seats, Republicans held 14; after Tuesday, they have just three of 29. With the loss of the seat on Staten Island, Republicans will hold at most one urban seat.

Since John Kennedy was elected from Massachusetts in 1960, all of the elected presidents (leaving aside Gerald Ford), before Tuesday, came from Georgia, Arkansas, Texas and Southern California. In 1960, there were no Republican senators from the South. (In 1961, John Tower of Texas became the first since Reconstruction.) But when the next Congress convenes, 19 of the probable 44 Republican senators — 43 percent of them — will be from the South, understood as including Oklahoma and Kentucky. The South is beginning to look less like the firm foundation of a national party than the embattled redoubt of a regional one.

Still, the Republican Party retains a remarkably strong pulse, considering that McCain’s often chaotic campaign earned 46 percent of the popular vote while tacking into terrible winds. Conservatives can take some solace from the fact that four years after Goldwater won just 38.5 percent of the popular vote, a Republican president was elected.

True that.  But it took some extraordinarily bad governing and an unpopular war to do it.  And it would be another three decades before the GOP won a majority in the House of Representatives.

On Thursday night, it appears that Barack Obama will be appearing on The O’Reilly Factor:

Before Senator John McCain delivers his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday, Senator Barack Obama will make a marquee appearance of his own.

Call it counter-intuitive. He will appear on “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News Channel.

For Mr. Obama, it will be the first time in his presidential candidacy that he’s on Bill O’Reilly’s prime-time program.

That’s some interesting counter-programming right there.

(link via Mark Kleiman)

Jesse Jackson’s statement that Barack Obama’s “talking down to black people” makes him so angry that he “wants to cut his nuts out” has caused quite the stir.

Charles Hurt of the NY Post has the most concise report:

In a vulgar tirade caught on tape by Fox News, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said he wanted to “cut his [Barack Obama's] nuts out” and he accused the fellow Chicagoan of “talking down to black folks” by giving moral lectures to African-Americans, source said Jackson’s shocking quotes were picked up by a hot mic before an interview on health care in Fox’s Chicago studio last Sunday. Fox planned to air the recording on Bill O’Reilly’s “The Factor” show.

Jackson has apologized for the remarks and the resulting hubbub, CNN reports.

Speaking to CNN Wednesday, Jackson said he feels “very distressed” over the comments.
“This is a sound bite in a broader conversation about urban policy and racial disparities. I feel very distressed because I’m supportive of this campaign and with the senator, what he has done and is doing,” he said. “I said he comes down as speaking down to black people. The moral message must be a much broader message. What we need really is racial justice and urban policy and jobs and health care. That’s a range of issues on the menu.

“Then I said something I regret was crude. It was very private. And very much a sound bite,” he also said.

In a statement issued earlier Wednesday to CNN, Jackson said, “For any harm or hurt that this hot mic private conversation may have caused, I apologize. My support for Senator Obama’s campaign is wide, deep and unequivocal. I cherish this redemptive and historical moment.”

My reaction was along the lines of Andrew Sullivan’s: This is “the kind of electoral gift any politician dreams of. Obama gets his Sistah Souljah moment handed to him on a plate … by Bill O’Reilly.” Indeed, getting castigated by Jesse Jackson furthers the whole mainstream, articulate, bright and clean vibe.

I do wonder, however, what so peeved Jackson. In what way was Obama “talking down to blacks”? Simply because he channeled Bill Cosby in a speech and forgot to add the usual caveats about how everything is ultimately society’s fault?

I’m also a bit curious about Fox News’ editorial judgment. The event happened Sunday but they held off the tape until Wednesday? I could understand saving it for their Monday prime time lineup. But three days?

Meanwhile, Kate McMillan and her commenters amuse themselves with various plays on the “nuts” theme.

Hillary Clinton won the Ohio and Texas primaries, revitalizing her campaign and ensuring that the race will continue, probably to the Democratic convention. It’s not clear as of this writing (6:01 Eastern) how many delegates she’s won and her path to a majority of delegates remains unclear.

What It Means: The Spin Game

The candidates’ spin:

“For everyone here in Ohio and across America who’s been ever been counted out but refused to be knocked out, for everyone who has stumbled but stood right back up, and for everyone who works hard and never gives up — this one is for you,” Clinton said before supporters in Columbus. “You know what they say,” she said. “As Ohio goes, so goes the nation. Well, this nation’s coming back and so is this campaign.”

Obama congratulated Clinton on her victories but downplayed his losses. “We know this: No matter what happens tonight, we have nearly the same delegate lead as we had this morning, and we are on our way to winning this nomination,” Obama told supporters in Texas.

That’s the framing we’ll get in the weeks leading up to the next major primary in Pennsylvania. Yes, Clinton won. But she didn’t make up much ground in the delegate race. Then again, it’s not as if Obama had a commanding lead.

While winning 50 percent plus one of the delegates is the endgame, the bottom line at this stage of the race is perception. While he’s right on the delegate math, Obama has gone from the all-but-inevitable nominee into merely the frontrunner. And, if Clinton plays her cards right, she’ll convince people that the race is simply tied. Which, for all practical purposes, it is.

What It Means: Delegate Math

The Washington Post runs Peter Baker and Anne Kornblut’s report on page 1 under the headline “CLINTON: Energizing Victories, But Difficult Delegate Math.” The crux of the piece:

Clinton wiped away the debate last night with a robust victory in Ohio and a narrow win in Texas. But as she vowed to keep campaigning, the tight vote in Texas signaled she may yet face a tough decision in coming weeks. The slim margin in the Texas popular vote and an additional caucus process in which she trailed made clear that she would not win enough delegates to put a major dent in Sen. Barack Obama’s lead. And regardless of the results, she emerged from the crucible of Ohio and Texas with a campaign mired in debt and riven by dissension

Clinton plans to use her triumphs in Ohio and Texas, as well as in Rhode Island, to argue that she still has a credible claim to the Democratic nomination, despite the delegate math. Many in her circle believe she finally recaptured momentum on the campaign trail in recent days and managed to put Obama on the defensive by questioning his readiness to serve as commander in chief. If nothing else, they hope she has earned a new lease to make her case to the nation.

[...]

Critical to Clinton’s prospect of victory are the superdelegates, the nearly 800 elected officials and party leaders who can vote any way they choose. Her campaign envisions what aides call a “buyer’s remorse” strategy of raising enough doubts about the first-term senator from Illinois through increasingly vigorous attacks and tougher media scrutiny to convince the superdelegates that it would be too risky to nominate him.

That reflects the recognition that it would be enormously difficult for Clinton to overtake Obama in the pledged delegates chosen by voters in primaries and caucuses. By some calculations, Clinton would need to win more than 60 percent of the vote in the dozen contests remaining between now and June 7 to catch Obama in pledged delegates — a steep challenge given that, so far, she has won that much in only one state, her onetime adopted home of Arkansas. Even in New York, where she is a sitting senator, she won 57 percent of the vote. She won 55 percent in Michigan, where Obama was not even on the ballot.

Jonathan Alter does the math state-by-state and demonstrates very clearly how hard it will be for Clinton to overtake Obama even if she gets some improbable wins. As his subhead puts it, “She could win 16 straight and still lose.”

Indeed, as Marc Ambinder points out, Obama will likely come away with more Texas delegates than Clinton even though it will be portrayed as a Clinton “win.”

But she doesn’t have to overtake Obama in pledged delegates; merely keep him from getting enough delegates to win. Clinton has won all the big states: New York, California, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, and Florida. Unfortunately for her, she gets no delegates for the last two (nor should she, under the circumstances). But she’s got a pretty powerful argument to make to the superdelegates.

What It Means: Show Me The Money

To the extent that mathematics is a problem for her, it’s in the accounting department, not the delegate count:

Her organization, though, is drained of money and energy. Outgunned by Obama in the fundraising department, the Clinton campaign is carrying millions of dollars in debt, although officials would not say how much, and it threw everything it had into Texas and Ohio. Campaign aides expressed optimism that she will draw a new infusion of money after these primaries and have enough to go forward, although that remains unclear.

One suspects money will come in now. But reports have Obama raising $50 million this month alone. He’s clearly the frontrunner in that department.

Postmortem: Race, Republican Cross-Overs, and Rush Limbaugh:

Matt Yglesias is reading those same and thinks “the racist vote” may have been the deciding factor, in that Clinton won 57-43 among the 20 percent who said race was “an important factor” in their vote. Jonathan Chait agrees, and notes that gender also went Clinton’s way. He concludes, “Clinton’s winning margin . . . came from the pro-female, anti-black (or, I guess, anti-male, pro-white) vote.”

But, even if the poll is representative, it’s worth noting that Clinton won the white vote 64-34 while Obama won blacks 87-13 in the same survey. Was this an anti-white vote? And is there really such a thing as an anti-male vote?

As noted yesterday, Rush Limbaugh urged listeners to vote for Hillary Clinton to prolong the race. Did they listen? It’s probably too early to say but not too early to speculate.

CNN’s Joe Van Kanel reports,

Early exit polling shows 10 percent of the voters in Ohio’s Democratic Primary identified themselves as Republican, along with 22 percent who said they were independents. It was the same story in Texas: 10 percent of the voters in the Democratic primary identified themselves as Republican, along with 25 percent who said they were independents.

Tom Ott, Michael Scott, Joe Wagner & Maggi Martin of the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Poll watchers throughout Ohio are noting large numbers of Republican voters crossing over to vote in the Democratic Primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

In the Republican roost of Chagrin Falls, veteran poll worker Liz McFadden was amazed at the number of people jumping the party’s ship. Democrats accounted for 70 percent of the voters in her precinct, one of seven at the village’s high school. “That’s a complete reversal of what it normally is, even more so,” she said. “I’ve never seen a switch like this.”

The defectors had motives both pure and sinister.

One woman voted for Clinton in hopes of delivering John McCain a weaker debate opponent. Another picked Obama because her vote could help deny Clinton and her husband a return trip to the White House.

A 69-year-old Catholic nun, Sister Ann Marie, was converted to the Clinton camp because of the former first lady’s experience. John Baggett, another ex-Republican for Clinton, said he simply wanted to switch, and Clinton represented a known commodity. “I’m happy with Republicans, in general,” Baggett, 50, said. “I don’t believe they’ve done a good job the last eight years.”

This is purely anecdotal and doesn’t tell us much of anything. My hunch, though, is that a handful of people voted to sabotage the opposition primary while most simply voted for their preferred candidate in the only contest that mattered.

Hugh Hewitt (and apparently Bill O’Reilly) thinks the Limbaugh factor was huge. But there’s not much evidence for that at this point. Indeed, the early Ohio exit polls show a 49-49 split of Republicans between Clinton and Obama.

Prediction Games: I predicted yesterday that Clinton would narrowly win Ohio, that Obama would likely take the delegate win in Texas even if Clinton won the popular vote, and the McCain would win the Republican contests. Dave Schuler predicted narrow popular vote wins for Clinton in Texas and Ohio. Alex Knapp predicted a narrow win for Obama in the Texas primary and a bigger one in the caucus and a Clinton win in Ohio.

Back in December, I predicted a McCain-Clinton general election matchup while Alex picked McCain-Obama. (Dave hoped for McCain but figured it would be Romney.) My chances of being right went up considerably last night but the odds are still with Alex. It’ll likely come down to the superdelegates and who they think would be more likely to beat McCain in the fall. Most everyone thinks Obama’s that guy; whether the superdelegates agree won’t be known until the summer. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: I think Taegan Goddard’s right here:

Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will win the Democratic primary because they made the math work for them. Pretending the nomination battle is like a precise mathematical formula ignores the messy political realities.

I’m less sure of this:

In fact, the ultimate Democratic nominee may be determined through negotiation. As Craig Crawford notes, “They might have to run together, whatever the order and whether they like it or not.”

I think Clinton needs Obama but am not sure why he’d want to run with her — whichever order the ticket. Clinton is incredibly polarizing and negates much of Obama’s “Hope! Change! Yes We Can!” appeal. If he’s at the bottom of the ticket, he’d be expected to be the attack dog, which hurts him. And it’s not as if recent losing VP nominees have been treated kindly by the Democratic nominating electorate when they come back and try for the top slot; Joe Lieberman and John Edwards had incredibly anemic bids.

UPDATE (Dave Schuler):

Flushed with the victory of my own correct predictions of the Ohio and Texas races I’ll make some more of which I’m pretty confident. Expect the Clinton campaign to float a couple of ideas, first, that the only big state that Barack Obama has won has been his current home state of Illinois and that Democrats need to win the big states in order to win the general and, second, that Barack Obama is only winning because Republicans and independents who can’t be depended on to vote for him in the general election are voting for him in the Democratic primaries.

As of this moment Barack Obama may win the pledged delegate count and the popular vote but not by a large enough margin that the superdelegates, however reluctant they might be, won’t end up deciding who the party’s nominee will be. And the Clintons know where the bodies are buried.

BTW I agree with James above. I think that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have a sort of reverse synergy thing going for them. The whole would be less than the sum of the parts. I also think that Hillary Clinton would have to be crazy to ask Barack Obama to be second on the ticket to her top and Barack Obama would have to be crazy to accept.

Bill O’Reilly made some, um, interesting comments on his radio show Wednesday that have sparked some controversy in the blogosphere after being highlighted by Media Matters. Here, in context, is what he said. All emphases from the Media Matters transcript:

O”REILLY: Now, how do we get to this point? Black people in this country understand that they’ve had a very, very tough go of it, and some of them can get past that, and some of them cannot. I don’t think there’s a black American who hasn’t had a personal insult that they’ve had to deal with because of the color of their skin. I don’t think there’s one in the country. So you’ve got to accept that as being the truth. People deal with that stuff in a variety of ways. Some get bitter. Some say, [unintelligible] “You call me that, I’m gonna be more successful.” OK, it depends on the personality.

So it’s there. It’s there, and I think it’s getting better. I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves. They’re getting away from the Sharptons and the Jacksons and the people trying to lead them into a race-based culture. They’re just trying to figure it out: “Look, I can make it. If I work hard and get educated, I can make it.”

You know, I was up in Harlem a few weeks ago, and I actually had dinner with Al Sharpton, who is a very, very interesting guy. And he comes on The Factor a lot, and then I treated him to dinner, because he’s made himself available to us, and I felt that I wanted to take him up there. And we went to Sylvia’s, a very famous restaurant in Harlem. I had a great time, and all the people up there are tremendously respectful. They all watch The Factor. You know, when Sharpton and I walked in, it was like a big commotion and everything, but everybody was very nice.

And I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship. It was the same, and that’s really what this society’s all about now here in the U.S.A. There’s no difference. There’s no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment — people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you’re gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody’s skin.

[...]

O’REILLY: No, no, I mean, I like that soul food. I had the meatloaf special. I had coconut shrimp. I had the iced tea. It was great.

WILLIAMS: Well, let me just tell you, the one thing I would say is this. And we’re talking about the kids who still like this gangsta rap, this vile poison that I think is absolutely, you know, literally a corruption of culture. I think that what you’ve got to take into account that it’s still a majority white audience — young, white people who think they’re into rebelling against their parents who buy this stuff and think it’s just a kick. You know, it’s just a way of expressing their anti-authoritarianism.

O’REILLY: But it’s a different — it’s a different dynamic, though.

WILLIAMS: Exactly right –

O’REILLY: Because the young, white kids don’t have to struggle out of the ghetto.

WILLIAMS: Right, and also, I think they can have that as one phase of their lives.

O’REILLY: Yeah.

WILLIAMS: I think too many of the black kids take it as, “Oh, that’s what it means to be authentically black. That’s how you make money. That’s how you become rich and famous and get on TV and get music videos.” And you either get the boys or the girls. The girls think they have to, you know, be half-naked and spinning around like they’re on meth in order to get any attention. It really corrupts people, and I think it adds, Bill, to some serious sociological problems, like the high out-of-wedlock birth rate because of this hypersexual imagery that then the kids adapt to some kind of reality. I mean, it’s inauthentic. It’s not in keeping with great black traditions of struggle and excellence, from Willie Mays to Aretha Franklin, but even in terms of academics, you know, going back to people like Charles Drew or Ben Carson here, the neurosurgeon at [Johns] Hopkins [University]. That stuff, all of a sudden, is pushed aside. That’s treated as, “You’re a nerd, you’re acting white,” if you try to be excellent and black.

O’REILLY: You know, and I went to the concert by Anita Baker at Radio City Music Hall, and the crowd was 50/50, black/white, and the blacks were well-dressed. And she came out — Anita Baker came out on the stage and said, “Look, this is a show for the family. We’re not gonna have any profanity here. We’re not gonna do any rapping here.” The band was excellent, but they were dressed in tuxedoes, and this is what white America doesn’t know, particularly people who don’t have a lot of interaction with black Americans. They think that the culture is dominated by Twista, Ludacris, and Snoop Dogg.

WILLIAMS: Oh, and it’s just so awful. It’s just so awful because, I mean, it’s literally the sewer come to the surface, and now people take it that the sewer is the whole story –

O’REILLY: That’s right. That’s right. There wasn’t one person in Sylvia’s who was screaming, “M-Fer, I want more iced tea.”

WILLIAMS: Please –

O’REILLY: You know, I mean, everybody was — it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.

Hilzoy wonders, “If it was wrong for Don Imus to refer to the Rutgers basketball team as ‘nappy-headed hos’, and it was, and if MSNBC rightly decided that they had to drop him, then why on earth does Bill O’Reilly still have a job?”

Barbara O’Brien terms O’Reilly’s comments “racist” and “unreal” and remarks, “This would have been bad enough if O’Reilly were some teenage yahoo fresh from all-white Snipe Hunt, Kentucky. But O’Reilly is even older than I am, and grew up on Long Island, for pity’s sake. Did his parents keep him in a box?”

It’s apparently fine for educated middle aged people to buy in to negative stereotypes about the rural South but confessing to being pleasantly surprised that the stereotypes of black urban culture are overblown makes you a racist? And FOX ought to fire its highest rated host for saying things no worse than Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden have said?*

I’m no fan of O’Reilly, who I find to be pompous, phony, and just generally annoying. But what he’s expressing here isn’t racism but 1970s style white liberal guilt.

It’s noteworthy that the WILLIAMS in the dialog above is Juan Williams, a black man and chronicler of the civil rights movement who authored Eyes on The Prize, Thurgood Marshall—American Revolutionary, and The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do about It.

Like Williams, O’Reilly is frustrated with the worst elements of hip hop culture. He’s a very wealthy and successful man, which means the blacks in his community and workplace are people like Williams or Barack Obama or Colin Powell. His sense of black inner city culture, then, is shaped by the entertainment industry, which in fact depicts urban black men as loud, vulgar thugs. It’s been a staple of mainstream black standup comedians for decades that black men holler at the screen in the movie theater and are otherwise rather obnoxious when among their own kind. So, he’s pleasantly surprised to go into a restaurant in Harlem — the epitome of what we used to call ghetto culture — and find it indistinguishable from a little Italian joint in his own neighborhood. And he can’t wait to share that news with his mostly white audience.

O’Reilly’s real thesis — interestingly, not in bold text above — is this:

It was the same, and that’s really what this society’s all about now here in the U.S.A. There’s no difference. There’s no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment — people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you’re gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody’s skin.

It wasn’t all that long ago that a white man saying that would have been looked at as an ultra-liberal. Now, he’s a bigot?

Note that Williams didn’t seem the least bit offended or put off by O’Reilly’s remarks. My guess is that he’s had variations of this conversation before with O’Reilly and other white friends. It’s a very worthwhile one to have, in my view, and the more public the better.

UPDATE: Juan Williams has responded angrily to these smears against O’Reilly, calling them “rank dishonesty.” Here’s the video:

Stephen Spruiell and Johnny Dollar have more.

__________

*I’ve defended both the Clinton and Biden remarks; I merely use them here to illustrate that it’s not just conservatives who say awkward things about racial matters and yet aren’t “racist” in any meaningful sense.

Bill O’Reilly has been railing against Democrats and corporate sponsors who are associating themselves with the YearlyKos convention, on the grounds that there is a lot of filth and hate spewing from the DailyKos website. While the former is his right and the latter is likely true, virtually all the examples cited come from commenters and the hundreds of site “diarists” rather than front page posters.

John Aravosis has done a bit of digging and found that “O’Reilly’s own Web site contains some of the most hideous hate you’ve ever seen.” Among those he found were some oblique death threats against Hillary Clinton, which some yahoo has now reported to the Secret Service.

Now, I seldom take anonymous comments left on message boards particularly seriously and see no reason to do so in this case. Nor do I think holding O’Reilly responsible for his failure to moderate the hundreds of messages his site gets makes any more sense than expecting Markos Moulitsas Zuniga to do that for the tens of thousands of words written at DailyKos every day.

If I’m reading Aravosis correctly, he agrees. Rather, the point is that O’Reilly is fanning the flames against DailyKos for something of which he himself is “guilty.” As Aravosis notes, the site even has a rather explicit disclaimer: “BillOReilly.com will not be held liable for any user activity on the message boards. We do not actively monitor user-submitted content.”

Of course, hypocrisy by O’Reilly and others who rely on hyping the sins of their political targets is so common as to be a given. It’s worth noting from time to time, however.

Former Sports Illustrated associate editor Don Yaeger’s book about the Duke lacrosse case, written with former head coach Mike Pressler, is a very good overview of the circumstances surrounding the fateful events of March 13-14, 2006, when members of Duke’s lacrosse team created a “perfect storm”: hiring two adult entertainers for a party that went dreadfully wrong.

It’s Not About The Truth: The Untold Story of the Duke Lacrosse Case and the Lives It Shattered supplies some details about the events of that evening that I wasn’t familiar with from my contemporaneous coverage of the case, supplied in interviews with players for the book, and as such gives us a more complete picture of what actually happened at the house at 610 North Buchanan in Durham that evening. The bulk of the book, however, is about heroes and villains, and more of the latter than the former; those looking for a balanced, objective account of events may want to take some of the book’s aspersions with a grain of salt.

The obvious villain is Mike Nifong, but Duke administrators Joe Alleva and John Burness, as well as the school’s president, Dick Brodhead, take their fair share of the blame, as do the infamous “Group of 88″ Duke professors (including several former colleagues of mine in the Duke political science department); the Durham police also take their lumps. About the only mainstream media figures to be praised are News and Observer columnist Ruth Sheehan, who did much to aid and abet Nifong’s poisoning of the well in the early days of the case but quickly changed sides once the wind started blowing in the opposite direction; Bill O’Reilly, whose involvement in the case was peripheral at best (MSNBC’s Dan Abrahms was a far more effective advocate for the accused players at the peak of the media frenzy); and Duke Chronicle columnist Stephen Miller, whose position as the chief campus cheerleader for David Horowitz goes unmentioned. A few bloggers, like K.C. Johnson and LieStoppers, get credit; others, such as JohnInCarolina and the infamous DukeObsrvr, do not, suggesting a research strategy that was based on who was still writing on the case in early 2007.

A bit more disturbing is the degree of whitewashing of the lacrosse team throughout the book. One notable example: the allegations of assault and battery in Washington D.C. involving Collin Finnerty, one of the three players ultimately accused of rape, go completely unmentioned. Nor is there much effort to place the lacrosse case in context: Duke’s responses to the 610 party allegations are compared to a similar 2007 incident allegedly involving a party organized by members of an African-American fraternity at an off-campus house—a case in which the alleged assailant wasn’t even a Duke student. Duke’s past crackdowns on on-campus fraternities for minor infractions–less serious than the allegations in question in the lacrosse case–aren’t mentioned at all, although Yaeger might have gotten a hint of the Duke administration’s level of discomfort about the Duke party scene when recounting Nan Keohane’s notorious keg control scheme or more recent efforts to rein in Tailgate.

In closing, while I think Yaeger’s work is a pretty powerful polemic–aided by the access to Mike Pressler, his family, and a number of lacrosse team members–this is not the definitive story of the “rush to justice” in the case that many will be looking for; perhaps the forthcoming book by Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson will be more satisfactory on that score.

Cross-posted from PoliBlog:

Via Human Events we have Pat Buchanan to go along with my Bill O’Reilly post from yesterday: Path to National Suicide

According to the Census Bureau, from mid-2005 to mid-2006, the U.S. minority population rose 2.4 million, to exceed 100 million. Hispanics, 1 percent of the population in 1950, are now 14.4 percent. Their total number has soared 25 percent since 2000 alone. The Asian population has also grown by 25 percent since 2000.

The number of white kids of school age fell 4 percent, however. Half the children 5 and younger in the United States are now minorities.

What is happening to us? An immigrant invasion of the United States from the Third World, as America’s white majority is no longer even reproducing itself. Since Roe v. Wade, America has aborted 45 million of her children. And Asia, Africa and Latin America have sent 45 million of their children to inherit the estate the aborted American children never saw. God is not mocked.

And white America is in flight.

This is breathtaking, and not in a good way.

I have noted Buchanan’s equation of “White”/”European” with “American” before, but I continue to be stunned by it (although I should know better by now). That he can continue to spout this bilge and still be treated like a legitimate commentator is disheartening. It certainly speaks very poorly of Human Events for publishing this piece .

Understand the basic thesis: less Whites in the United States equals “national suicide.” In other words the American “nation” is white people whose culture is somehow endemic to them and only them. For example, Buchanan clearly refers to “our” culture when referring to the assimilation of Blacks in the 1960s (I won’t get into the issue of discussing the assimilation of people who had lived here for generations–or the fact that maybe slavery, Jim Crow and segregation may have had something to do problems of integration….):

In 1960, 18 million black Americans, 10 percent of the nation, were not fully integrated into society, but they had been assimilated into our culture.

Emphasis mine.

Certainly when he asks “What is happening to us?” he is referring to Whites, rather than using an inclusive “us.” So I guess he just assumes that he readers are all White.

Surely being American has to do with certain ideas and ideals, not to mention being born here (or naturalized), living and working and contributing to the lives of one’s fellow citizens. Americans, I should like to tell Pat, come in all hues. Perhaps Pat needs to get out of the house more often, but it really doesn’t take a lot of looking to discover this fact.

The notion that the waves of darker hued persons swarming into America to overtake the Whites is somehow God’s punishment should be offensive to Christians–as if Mexicans coming across the border to work in our fields and clean our fast food restaurants is to be likened to some Biblical plague of locusts.

He also demonstrates a great deal of historical obtuseness, given that none of the following is analogous to the United States:

All over the Western world, multiethnic, multicultural countries are coming apart over language, ethnicity, history. The Soviet Union broke into 15 nations, Yugoslavia into half a dozen. Czechs and Slovaks divorced. Scots want separation from England. Catalans and Basques seek independence. Corsicans and Bretons want out of France. Northern Italians want to secede. Only immigrants who prefer Ottawa prevent Quebecois from breaking free of Canada.

Indeed, in most cases we are talking about circumstances of artificially constructed states (the USSR, Yugoslavia) and the one case that he cites as staying together he attributes to immigrants–does he even read what he is writing?

And if this column is what Bill O’Reilly was referring to when he said that Pat Buchanan “is right” then the argument that O’Reilly isn’t really concerned about the “white Christian male power structure” is rather weak.

A reminder as to what O’Reilly said on May 30, 2007:

O’REILLY: .what “The New York Times” wants and the far-left want? They want to breakdown the white Christian male power structure of which you are a part and so am I. And they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically breakdown the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say that you’ve got to cap it with a number.

Again: that Pat Buchanan is considered a serious commentator by any significant segment of the population is a disgrace.

h/t for the Buchanan article:
Buck Naked Politics

Cross-posted from PoliBlog:

It is not uncommon for critics from the Left to accuse persons on the Right as being about nothing more than defenders of a white, male, protestant status quo. What is unusual (thankfully) is to hear a prominent commentator or politicians from the Rightward side of things to blatantly state that that is what they favor.

Along those lines I give you Bill O’Reilly on May 30, 2007 on his program The O’Reilly Factor interviewing Senator John McCain (transcription via Lexis/Nexis):

O’REILLY: .what “The New York Times” wants and the far-left want? They want to breakdown the white Christian male power structure of which you are a part and so am I. And they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically breakdown the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say that you’ve got to cap it with a number.

MCCAIN: In America today, we have a very strong economy, low unemployment. So we need additional farm workers, including by the way, agriculture. But there may come a time where we have an economic downturn and we don’t need so many.

O’REILLY: OK, but in this.

MCCAIN: So I think it has to vary.

O’REILLY: In this bill, you guys got to cap it.

MCCAIN: Yes.

O’REILLY: Because you’re estimated there’s 12 million. There may be 20.

MCCAIN: Yes.

O’REILLY: You don’t know. I don’t know. You got to cap it.

MCCAIN: We do. We do. I agree with you. But I also would remind you, again, that they have to get behind everybody else who tried to apply legally. They have to pay the fines. They have to go back to the country of origin.

If you prefer video, you can watch the exchange at Think Progress.

This is stunning. First off, I reject the notion that, properly understood, American conservatism is about maintaining the “white, Christian, male power structure”–and I say that as a white, male Christian. One cannot be in favor of freedom, liberty, merit and the marketplace if one thinks that there is a specific power structure linked to gender, race and religious confession that needs to maintained. Plus, I hate to break it to Bill, but there are a lot of non-male, non-white, non-Christian types in this country who are quite significant and have accrued a great deal of power by their talent and hard work.

And he is very much aligning himself with Buchanan here, and that is not a compliment coming from me.

Shame on McCain for not calling O’Reilly on this reactionary tripe.

I am repulsed by the notion that we should be focusing on race, gender and religion in the context of who should, and should not, be in power.

A lest ye think that this was a slip of the tongue on the part of O’Reilly, I noted the following from the Lexis/Nexis transcript of the May 29, 2007 edition of the O’Reilly Factor:

O’REILLY: Thanks for staying with us. I’m Bill O’Reilly.

In “The Factor Follow-up” segment tonight, racism and the immigration Bill. FOX News contributor Linda Chavez writes in a Town Hall column, quote, “Some people just don’t like Mexicans, or anyone else from south of the border. They think Latinos are freeloaders and welfare cheats who are too lazy to learn English,” unquote.

Now on the other side, the open border people want a huge influx of foreign nationals to become American citizens, because they don’t like the white Christian male power structure that’s in place now.

And later in the same show:

O’REILLY: That’s bull. At the turn of the 20th century when the wave of immigration from Europe came over the country was in a totally different thing. If you bring in 40 — look, you bring in 40 million foreign nationals to this country, you change everything about this country. And admit it, everything changes. And then there’s where you have the reverse racism.

SCHWARTZ: Our rights change, our freedoms change?

O’REILLY: No. We have a one party system. The Republican Party disappears, because three to one the 40 million will break Democrat. So you destroy that. And then you go from there.

But that’s where the reverse racism is. The New York Times of the world hate the white Christian male power structure and want to change it by a massive amount of foreign nationals being able to vote, Laura. That’s racism, too.

The irony of making those assertions in the context of charges of racism takes cognitive dissonance to a new level.

Also, I reject the notion that immigrants from Latin America and their progeny will automatically be, over time, Democrats. Further, O’Reilly and his ilk act as if as soon as immigration reform passes the Congress that all the illegal aliens in the country become voters overnight–which is hardly the case.

BTW: we all do know who it is that usually rants about protecting white, Christian America?

h/t: TAM.

Sean Hackbarth finds the Republican acceptance of a debate on MSNBC interesting.

Despite MSNBC being the network of Leftist loon Keith Olberman, despite it being the network of Chris Matthews, no friend to conservatives, neither the candidates nor the GOP base is crying foul. That’s in stark contrast to the Left going bonkers that Fox News host Democratic debates.

Indeed. Especially since Matthews is one of the debate moderators. At least Fox didn’t propose to have Bill O’Reilly moderate the Democratic debates.

Andrew Sullivan points out that Ann Coulter’s hypocrisy in writing, “Liberals are already comfortably ensconced in their beachfront estates, which they expect to be unaffected by their negative growth prescriptions for the rest of us” when, in fact, she owns a pricey beachfront estate.

A fair point. The faux populism of the Coulters and Bill O’Reillys and Rush Limbaughs is annoying.

At the same time, wouldn’t it be preferable to make this point without making it quite so easy for would-be stalkers to find her?

Update: Rob Bluey emails noting that Sullivan has now taken down the link to Coulter’s property records. Good for him.

The videos of Stephen Colbert’s appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor” and Bill O’Reilly’s appearance on “The Colbert Report” on January 18.

Bill O’Reilly and Stephen Colbert will be guests on each other’s programs on January 18.

“I’m really looking forward to speaking to a man who owes his entire career to me,” O’Reilly said.

On “The Colbert Report,” Colbert portrays a self-involved talk-show host who has tried to bring “truthiness” to the world. His character owes an obvious debt to O’Reilly, who holds court in the “no-spin zone” each evening.

On “The O’Reilly Factor,” O’Reilly portrays a … um, he hosts the top-rated program in cable news.

“I look forward to the evening,” Colbert said. “It is an honor to speak face-to-face with a broadcasting legend, and I feel the same way about Mr. O’Reilly.”

It should be interesting.

via Julian Sanchez