Another Racist Tweet?

[Teallaura]

What did Sanders have to say about MD-7?

Said it was 'like a Third World country' - and not in the good way.

[KingsGambit]

Said it was 'like a Third World country' - and not in the good way.

He said that about Baltimore, which is not part of MD-7.

The point is, why single out this relatively affluent district?

[Cow Poke]

Trump has a pattern of behavior where he uses certain negative phrases about black people but never about white people, and certain negative phrases about places where black people live but never about where white people live. That's pretty standard behavior for racists.

Trump calling a district he knows has a high black population "disgusting, rat and rodent infested" is a pretty standard for him, in line with his racism. If this were a one-off comment that we were considering in isolation it would be hard to know whether or not it was a racially motivated, as perhaps the speaker simply didn't like that particular district. But in Trump's case we have ten billion other tweets and comments on all sorts of subjects, so his general behavioral pattern is clear. Trying to analyse the extent to which a specific statement is racist is beside the point.

He was slamming a DEMOCRAT. DEMOCRATS seem to think they have the moral high ground on 'taking care of people', but look at the cities run by DEMOCRATS, some of whom happen to be black.

[demi-conservative]

I personally suspect that he tweets something provocative whenever he wants to distract the news cycle from something and it works every time.

Progs so easy to play by Trump.

"Orange man bad! Orange man racist!!!" for 474th time.

[Starlight]

He was slamming a DEMOCRAT.

Nobody's upset that he was attacking Elijah Cummings, don't be silly. Critiquing political opponents is expected. The issue is that Trump referred to the district Cummings represents as "disgusting, rat and rodent infested". That's a criticism toward the district and/or people in it, not the representative of it. Trump wasn't claiming Elijah Cummings himself is rodent infested.

DEMOCRATS seem to think they have the moral high ground on 'taking care of people'

Obviously, and that is only reasonable given taking care of people is inherently a moral issue, so they generally tend toward having the moral high ground. But at this particular point in history, I would personally judge the US Republican party currently to be one of the most immoral major parties in current Western democracies - "evil", "insane", and "unamerican" would seem apt descriptors.

but look at the cities run by DEMOCRATS

Pretty much all the cities in the US lean democratic, even in otherwise Red states, because the Blue / Red split in the US usually falls along Urban vs Rural lines.

Commonly I see conservative propagandists try to use this to mislead their gullible audiences by suggesting that because a few specific cities aren't doing great, and because those particular cities happen to be run by people from the Democratic party as most US cities are, that those specific cities must be doing badly because the Democratic party has bad policies. This conveniently ignores the fact that pretty much all cities are run by people from the democratic party including cities that are doing well. So if the bad cities are doing badly because they're run by the democratic party then are the good cities doing well because they're run by the democratic party???

[Tassman]

Yes, anybody who dared to criticize Saint Barack was blasted as a racist.

Oh please. From birtherism to racist tweets and full-page adds re the Central Park Five and the “squad” etc. etc. Trump has a history of inflaming racial tensions. He’s a racist, he has a long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2019.

[rogue06]

I personally suspect that he tweets something provocative whenever he wants to distract the news cycle from something and it works every time.

That's definitely part of it but he's also done it to draw attention to things that the MSM spikes. A good example of this was during the Kavanaugh trial when he "attacked" Ford by listing some of the many holes in her story which until his tweet and the outraged reaction to it (which quoted him) a vast number of Americans were unaware of just how shaky her allegations were.

[rogue06]

Yes, anybody who dared to criticize Saint Barack was blasted as a racist.

There were long lists of words that were deemed "racist" if associated with Obama including things like "skinny" and "professor." Heck even "Obamacare" was called a racist term until it was pointed out that it was used on the White House website and Obama himself used it in speeches.

[rogue06]

Um, so why wasn't it racist when Bernie Sanders called out the same thing?

He's a leftist. It's okay.

Back in the 90s Dan Quayle got pilloried for saying that the TV show Murphy Brown glorified single motherhood which typically is associated with economic distress and a whole litany of social ills, but then several months later Bill Clinton said almost exactly the same thing and suddenly the same folks who jumped on Quayle were praising Clinton for his wisdom. And then a year later when Bob Dole repeated it we were right back to attacking the messenger.

Something is only bad if a non-liberal says it.

[KingsGambit]

He's a leftist. It's okay.

Back in the 90s Dan Quayle got pilloried for saying that the TV show Murphy Brown glorified single motherhood which typically is associated with economic distress and a whole litany of social ills, but then several months later Bill Clinton said almost exactly the same thing and suddenly the same folks who jumped on Quayle were praising Clinton for his wisdom. And then a year later when Bob Dole repeated it we were right back to attacking the messenger.

Something is only bad if a non-liberal says it.

But as I pointed out above, there is hardly a one to one correspondence here. Sanders spoke of one of the most violent cities in the US, whereas Trump spoke of one of its more well to do suburbs. The tu quoque will not do here.

[rogue06]

He was slamming a DEMOCRAT. DEMOCRATS seem to think they have the moral high ground on 'taking care of people', but look at the cities run by DEMOCRATS, some of whom happen to be black.

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[rogue06]

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[Mountain Man]

Oh please. From birtherism to racist tweets and full-page adds re the Central Park Five and the “squad” etc. etc. Trump has a history of inflaming racial tensions. He’s a racist, he has a long history of racism, from the 1970s to 2019.

Funny thing is, Donald Trump has been in the public eye for decades, but nobody ever accused him of being racist until he dared to run for president.

[Mountain Man]

Criticism of Baltimore is nothing new. A 2016 op-ed in the Baltimore Sun called the city a "disaster"...

https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion...109-story.html

And PBS aired a documentary in 2018 about Baltimore's rat infestation...

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2...oblem-in-2018/

I guess the truth is only racist when Trump says it.

[JimL]

For one thing, it's factually not all that accurate, which is no surprise for Trump. He was simply parrotting a Fox News segment he'd just seen. Cummings' district includes some very affluent African American neighborhoods. I think it's Trump's knee-jerk default assumption that a majority black urban district is going to be a rat-infested hell hole. And his proclivity for using the words infest and infestation only in connection with people of color.

And inhuman! "where no human beings would want to live."

It's the knee-jerk default assumption on the part of the conservatives here on tweb as well, which is why they don't get it. But Trump has made similar comments about many american cities. I would suggest that if he hates this country so much, he should go back to his ancestral home, which I think would have been, according to him, some small town in Nazi Germany.