On so many levels...
... this is an interesting item:
http://rawstory.com/2009/10/gops-facebook-photos/
To summarize: somebody posted on the Republican National Committee's facebook page an incredibly racist picture of Obama eating fried chicken with the caption that interracial marriage was a crime and that the court case that overthrew laws banning it should be overturned.
It also appears that this picture was up on the RNC page for 5 days before the outrage raised about it generated a lot of bad press, after which it was taken down.
Now, the process of this fascinates me in how it played out, but some of my own thoughts about this.
1. Personally, I don't care if people post such racist things up. I believe in free speech and think that people can put up as much offensive stuff as they want.
2. I have heard, although not confirmed, that such racism is against facebook rules, and therefore they may be able to force people to take it down. That's also fine with me--it's their website, they make the rules.
3. I do find the picture vile, but more importantly, I find it stupid. If the person posting it was serious, they really are displaying a level of ignorance that does nothing to impinge on the stature of Obama, but much more says how small they are.
4. It is not a sure thing in my mind that this was done by someone who was really a racist. It could, theoretically, have been done by someone who was a liberal trying to make the Republicans look bad. I acknowledge this fact and keep it in mind, but this caveat is really strongly overwhelmed by the next point....
5. The 5 day period that it remained on the RNC website is really amazing. The conclusions that I come up with are:
a) The people running the site didn't know it was up there and really aren't paying much attention to what's going on in the site. This is an amazing level of incompetence and looks really bad for the Republicans.
b) The people running the site did know it was up there and really didn't think it mattered that much. This is a sign of some serious levels of ignorance and is a demonstration of how out-of-touch many such high-level Republican operatives are to the average American. This also looks really bad for the Republicans.
c) The people running the site did know it was up there and thought it was cool. This reveals a truly audacious level of racism on their part that is not going to help them at all in the long run, but will only doom them all the more quickly.
Needless to say, this incident really makes it look like looks like the Republicans are either totally incompetent or totally racist. The fact that it took a storm of interweb criticism and major press release to lead to the removal of the pic (a point I don't really care about--they could have left it up forever so far as I cared--it only confirms many of my opinions of where the majority of Republican leadership is at right now...) really looks bad..
Please feel encouraged to discuss...
http://rawstory.com/2009/10/gops-facebook-photos/
To summarize: somebody posted on the Republican National Committee's facebook page an incredibly racist picture of Obama eating fried chicken with the caption that interracial marriage was a crime and that the court case that overthrew laws banning it should be overturned.
It also appears that this picture was up on the RNC page for 5 days before the outrage raised about it generated a lot of bad press, after which it was taken down.
Now, the process of this fascinates me in how it played out, but some of my own thoughts about this.
1. Personally, I don't care if people post such racist things up. I believe in free speech and think that people can put up as much offensive stuff as they want.
2. I have heard, although not confirmed, that such racism is against facebook rules, and therefore they may be able to force people to take it down. That's also fine with me--it's their website, they make the rules.
3. I do find the picture vile, but more importantly, I find it stupid. If the person posting it was serious, they really are displaying a level of ignorance that does nothing to impinge on the stature of Obama, but much more says how small they are.
4. It is not a sure thing in my mind that this was done by someone who was really a racist. It could, theoretically, have been done by someone who was a liberal trying to make the Republicans look bad. I acknowledge this fact and keep it in mind, but this caveat is really strongly overwhelmed by the next point....
5. The 5 day period that it remained on the RNC website is really amazing. The conclusions that I come up with are:
a) The people running the site didn't know it was up there and really aren't paying much attention to what's going on in the site. This is an amazing level of incompetence and looks really bad for the Republicans.
b) The people running the site did know it was up there and really didn't think it mattered that much. This is a sign of some serious levels of ignorance and is a demonstration of how out-of-touch many such high-level Republican operatives are to the average American. This also looks really bad for the Republicans.
c) The people running the site did know it was up there and thought it was cool. This reveals a truly audacious level of racism on their part that is not going to help them at all in the long run, but will only doom them all the more quickly.
Needless to say, this incident really makes it look like looks like the Republicans are either totally incompetent or totally racist. The fact that it took a storm of interweb criticism and major press release to lead to the removal of the pic (a point I don't really care about--they could have left it up forever so far as I cared--it only confirms many of my opinions of where the majority of Republican leadership is at right now...) really looks bad..
Please feel encouraged to discuss...