Were Tim Pawlenty's Remarks Antisemitic?

This will be very brief. Yesterday, republican governmental hopeful Tim Pawlenty made a speech at the Right Online Conference in Minnesota. I heard excerpts on NPR. I couldn't believe what I heard. Then I found this confirmation in the Washington Post. Here's what he said. You determine whether this is dog whistle anti-semitism.

...former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty again took a sharp jab at primary rival Mitt Romney....

Pawlenty seemed in overdrive, walking the stage to give a fast-paced speech without notes. His plane was late, so he arrived on stage 10 minutes behind schedule straight from the airport. His speech was short -- about fifteen minutes -- without many pauses for applause.

He offered an energy plan (”more energy”), a defense of his call for 5 percent annual growth (”Kennedy didn’t say let’s have a space program and go to the clouds”) and an attack on Wall Street that used religious imagery (“We’ve got to go to Wall Street and tell the bankers and the money-changers it’s time to take their snout out of the government trough.”) By the end, the crowd was enthused.

"Money-changers"? Wall Street money-changers? Religious imagery? Wait a second. Am I the only person who hears this charged reference as a dog whistle (if not an an overt reference) to New York Jews in finance and the tired assertion that that they are pigs whose "snouts" are improperly in the government trough? Or, put another way, is this an anti-semitic reference? I hear it as one. Maybe I'm over sensitive. Maybe I'm getting rankled because Biblical references in secular politics seem to me to be dog whistles to the religious right, signals that their interests, even if not explicitly articulated, are accepted as Gospel.

Look. Here's Matthew 12:21-23, the source of the reference:

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all of them who sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves,
And said unto them,

It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

This incident is supposed to have happened on Passover in the Temple in Jerusalem, and the money-changers who were expelled were, of course, Jews, as were those who did the expelling.

Am I oversensitive?

On An Ethnic Slur

When it comes to cluelessness, a characteristic demonstrated repeatedly in rightwing politics, the world record always seems to be harder to reach, always seems to be harder to match. The goal posts just seem to move further and further away. And now we have two South Carolina GOP County Chairman entering the South Carolina division of the clueless sweeps to defend Jim DeMint (R-SC) by invoking an antisemitic stereotype in print, in an guest editorial.

How's that for stepping up to the competition? A breathtaking feat.

Writing a guest editorial for the South Carolina Times and Democrat, Edwin O. Merwin Jr., Chairman, Bamberg County Republican Party, and James S. Ulmer Jr., Chairman, Orangeburg County Republican Party, give us these pithy bon mots:

There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.

Nice. Real nice. No, they are not saying Jim DeMint is a Jew. That's not their point.

And I don't know who might be taking credit for being the source of this "saying," or who might have said it when he wasn't wearing white sheets and a pointed hood and standing before a flaming cross.

But you do have to admit that this writing shows a remarkable degree of cluelessness. These guys actually wrote this down, and then they had it printed in a newspaper with their names on it.

Predictably, this flourish of profound cluelessness was lambasted in the editorial of the conservative Palmetto Scoop:

Umm… who in mainstream America thinks it’s a good idea to write something like that in a guest editorial? Especially in light of the racially-motivated attention garnered by South Carolina Republican activists over the past few months.

It’s people like Ulmer and Merwin that make many folks fear for the future of the once Grand Ole Party.

Lest you forgot, the "racially-motivated attention," referred to, had to do with the remarks of one Rusty Depass that an escaped gorilla was an ancestor of Michele Obama.

That, I thought, had set the previous South Carolina mark for cluelessness. And I expected that remark to keep the title for decades. What an error on my part. Evidently Ulmer and Merwin want to contest the record.

Can we expect the powers that be in the GOP to condemn this remark? More when I stop laughing.

This Isn't Your Grandfather's Argentina

It's about time.

Argentina has thrown out Holocaust-denying British bishop Richard Williamson, saying he must leave the country in 10 days.

The Interior Ministry said last night Williamson had failed to declare his true job as director of a seminary on immigration forms and because his comments on the Holocaust "profoundly insult Argentine society, the Jewish community and all of humanity by denying an historic truth".

Williamson's views created an uproar last month when Pope Benedict XVI lifted his excommunication ... as part of a process meant to heal a rift with ultra-conservatives.

The flap led the Vatican to demand that the clergyman recant before he could be admitted as a bishop in the Roman Catholic Church. ....

The Vatican had no comment on the Argentine action.

Although Williamson has been in Argentina since 2003, the government's secretary for religious affairs, Guillermo Oliveri, said immigration officials only realised he had made an undeclared change of jobs when the controversy hit the press.

But Mr Oliveri made clear the Holocaust uproar played a key part.

"I absolutely agree with the expulsion of a man residing in our country following his statements (denying) one of the greatest human tragedies," he said.

And the Vatican had "no comment"? That's disgraceful.

h/t to AMERICAblog

Echoes: "Country First" and "America First"

Cartoon By Dr. Seuss

It's been more than 65 years. But the slogan of the RNC and of the McCain Candidacy, "Country First" consciously evokes a slogan from America's recent, right wing, isolationist, antisemitic past, "America First." It's troubling, and it's not an accident. The Republicans might appear at first to be tone deaf. Or maybe they don't recall history. But I doubt it. The phrase "Country First", echoing "America First", is a blatant signal to the far right, the very same people to whom the Republicans offered the Palin nomination, that a McCain candidacy shares their extremist ideological goals.

The history is ugly. The America First Committee (AFC) was formed in 1940 and focused primarily on keeping the US out of the Second World War. A primary spokesperson for AFC was Charles Lindbergh.

You will recall Lindbergh's famous, solo flight across the Atlantic. You might not recall that in 1938 Luftwaffe chief Herman Goering presented Lindbergh with a medal in behalf of Adolf Hitler. Following Kristallnacht, Lindbergh sparked enormous controversy by refusing to return that medal.

Lindbergh declined to return the medal, later writing (according to A. Scott Berg) "It seems to me that the returning of decorations, which were given in times of peace and as a gesture of friendship, can have no constructive effect. If I were to return the German medal, it seems to me that it would be an unnecessary insult. Even if war develops between us, I can see no gain in indulging in a spitting contest before that war begins."

Two years later, Lindbergh, who still had the medal, remained a spokesman for AFC:

On June 20, 1940 Lindbergh spoke to a rally in Los Angeles billed as "Peace and Preparedness Mass Meeting". In his speech of that day, Lindbergh criticized those movements he perceived as leading America into the war. He proclaimed that the United States was in a position that made it virtually impregnable and he pointed out that when interventionists said "the defense of England" they really meant "defeat of Germany." Lindbergh's presence at the Hollywood Bowl rally was overshadowed, however, by the presence of fringe elements in the crowd.

However, nothing did more to escalate the tensions than the speech he delivered to a rally in Des Moines, Iowa on September 11, 1941. In that speech he identified the forces pulling America into the war as the British, the Roosevelt administration, and the Jews. While he expressed sympathy for the plight of the Jews in Germany, he argued that America's entry into the war would serve them little better. He said in part:

It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make bitter enemies of any race. No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution the Jewish race suffered in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them.

Instead of agitating for war the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. Tolerance is a virtue that depends upon peace and strength. History shows that it cannot survive war and devastation. A few farsighted Jewish people realize this and stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.

For a full text of the Des Moines speech, go here. To hear it, go here.

And who were the fringe elements in the crowd in Hollywood? Newspaper headlines before the speech announced, "L.A. NAZI'S PREPARE FOR LINDBERGH RALLY." And it has been widely written that in addition to the Nazis, Lindbergh shared many followers with Father Coughlin.

Later, Lindbergh was on the defensive, claiming that he wasn't really an anti-semite. And the bombing of Pearl Harbor forced the end of the AFC and its arguments for "neutrality."

That's the relevant history.

The RNC's use of the phrase "Country First" clearly echoes the phrase "America First." Both are extreme. Both seek to imply that those who disagree are, if not outright traitors, unacceptably less patriotic, and that those who disagree find primacy instead in foreign, alien, liberal values, values that are unpatriotic, instead of American.

This isn't a dog whistle only the right can hear. As buhdy pointed out in a comment recently, this is a bull horn. And it's typical, old time, right wing Republican politics. This isn't about change, it's about atavism.

And then there's this: