Know Your Bigots
Mary Matalin is Mary Joe Matalin, aged 52, an American political strategist and consultant of Croatian origin. She is known for her work with the Republican Party as an assistant to George W. Bush and counselor to vice president Dick Cheney.
Shorter Mary Matalin, via Kos and Media Matters:
“Why can’t those uppity nigras just be grateful and shut the fuck up?”
Referring to some of the speakers at Coretta Scott King’s February 7 funeral on, where else, Fox News:
MATALIN: — the achievement gap between the white and black students at a high, closing, narrowing. I mean, you know, I think these civil rights leaders are nothing more than racists. And they’re keeping constituency, they’re keeping their neighborhoods and their African-American brothers enslaved, if you will, by continuing to let them think that they’re — or forced to think that they’re victims, that the whole system is against them. Articulate it better, Sean; it’s so sad to me.
Matalin worked with Karl Rove and also for Dick Cheney in the White House. She attended meetings of the White House Iraq Group, a secretive internal White House task force convened in August 2002 (nine months before the 2003 Invasion of Iraq).
WHIG was charged with the task of marketing the Iraq war to the US public . Matalin resigned her responsibilities as of 31 December 2002 – although she left the White House more than six months before the leak that triggered the Valerie Plame scandal, she is reported to have testified before the grand jury of Independent Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.
Matalin is the consummate rightwing political media operative and the proxy voice of the White House. This is just the first salvo in the Republican open season on African-Americans and it’s policy, IMO.
After all, with even the fundies peeling off, who does the the White House have left to appeal to but its racist, Turner-diaries-reading, fanatic base? We already know the Republican party is the party of racists :
Another study presented at the conference, which was in Palm Springs, Calif., explored relationships between racial bias and political affiliation by analyzing self-reported beliefs, voting patterns and the results of psychological tests that measure implicit attitudes — subtle stereotypes people hold about various groups.
That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did.
The analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals and conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with positive concepts than white faces — evidence of implicit bias. But districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically produced more votes for Bush.
“Obviously, such research does not speak at all to the question of the prejudice level of the president,” said Banaji, “but it does show that George W. Bush is appealing as a leader to those Americans who harbor greater anti-black prejudice.”
[…]
Brian Jones, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said he disagreed with the study’s conclusions but that it was difficult to offer a detailed critique, as the research had not yet been published and he could not review the methodology. He also questioned whether the researchers themselves had implicit biases — against Republicans — noting that Nosek and Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji had given campaign contributions to Democrats.
