It’s been a rough August for [tag]conservatives[\/tag] and racial problems.<\/p>\n
We had the “macaca<\/a>” scandal; the “nice little Guatemalan man<\/a>” flap; the leading congressional candidate in Florida who said he knows from personal experience that black people can’t swim<\/a>; several high-profile Republicans backing racial profiling for people who “appear<\/a>” to be Arab or Muslim; and Pat Buchanan’s belief that we should have a “moratorium on all immigration<\/a>” in order preserve the dominance of the white race in America.<\/p>\n Given all of this, just from the last few weeks, you’d think conservatives would extra careful when it comes to discussing [tag]racial[\/tag] issues. Unfortunately, the problems keep popping up. Take [tag]Conrad Burns[\/tag]<\/a>, for example.<\/p>\n During a fundraiser Wednesday with first lady Laura Bush, the three-term Montana senator talked about terrorism, tax cuts and the money he has brought to his state. Burns is one of the more vulnerable Senate incumbents, facing a tough challenge from Democrat Jon Tester.<\/p>\n At the campaign event with Bush, Burns talked about the war on terrorism, saying a “faceless enemy” of terrorists “drive taxi cabs in the daytime and kill at night.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Burns is a classy guy, isn’t he? A few months ago, he told reporters, “I can self-destruct in one sentence<\/a>.” He wasn’t kidding.<\/p>\n Of course, it’s not just Burns. Beauprez stated that “in some of our ethnic communities we’re seeing very, very high percentages of babies, children, pregnancies end in abortion.” When Warner asked him to name “which ethnic communities in particular” he was referring to, Beauprez answered, “I’ve seen numbers as high as 70 percent, maybe even more, in the African-American community that I think is just appalling.”<\/p>\n In fact, according to the latest figures from the November 2005 issue of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a publication of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among states in which abortion rates by race were adequately reported, the 2002 “abortion ratio for black women” was “495 per 1,000 live births.” In other words, roughly 33 percent of pregnancies among African-American women that do not end in miscarriages or stillbirths — less than half of what Beauprez claimed — end in “legal induced abortions.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Not surprisingly, the African American community in Colorado wasn’t pleased<\/a> with Beauprez’s comments. State Rep. Rosemary Marshall said, “Coloradans deserve better than Beauprez’s disgusting demonstration of ignorance. Beauprez should stop trying to push his anti-abortion agenda at the expense of African-Americans.” Beauprez later apologized, saying he “should have verified the statistic before repeating it.”<\/p>\n I have a hard time believing [tag]Republicans[\/tag] would actually coordinate these disconcerting comments, but I’m reminded of something Joe Klein said<\/a> about Karl Rove in May (via FDL<\/a>):<\/p>\n He will deploy an ugly, stone-throwing distortion of Christian “values,” especially against those Democrats who choose not to discriminate against homosexuals. And if things get really desperate, he will play the [tag]race[\/tag] card, as Republicans have ever since they sided against the civil rights movement in the 1960s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Something to think about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s been a rough August for [tag]conservatives[\/tag] and racial problems. We had the “macaca” scandal; the “nice little Guatemalan man” flap; the leading congressional candidate in Florida who said he knows from personal experience that black people can’t swim; several high-profile Republicans backing racial profiling for people who “appear” to be Arab or Muslim; and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\nIn Colorado, Republican gubernatorial candidate [tag]Bob Beauprez[\/tag] criticized African-American women<\/a> for an abortion rate that he made up.<\/p>\n