Sixteen years after Clinton’s government shutdown, the Republicans were about to try the same thing with Obama. “Don’t call my bluff,” Obama told Eric Cantor. Cantor did—and Obama folded immediately. The Republicans got everything they asked for and made no significant concessions. If that was Bill Clinton, the Republicans would have feared telling him no. They might have still done it, but they’d be waiting for the other shoe to drop at any minute. Obama needs to learn from Bubba. What the president doesn’t seem to get is that you can be loved and feared. He is loved and well regarded, but Bill Clinton was loved and feared.
The ultimate test of blackness is not taking no bullshit. Who would be the fastest to slap the hell out of someone in an argument: Bill Clinton or Barack Obama? That’s the answer to Toni Morrison’s question, and it’s an answer you don’t need an Ivy League degree to know.
It’s not too late for President Obama to change, and maybe he just doesn’t have it in him. But the principle here is bigger than one man, even if that man is the president of the United States. Bubba Rankin taught me a lesson as a kid, and then I taught him one when we got older. After Bubba dislocated my shoulder and generally made a fool out of me, he moved out of our neighborhood. When I was eighteen or nineteen, he came back to visit. But things had changed in the intervening years. I had dudes around me who I got high with. They were my people.
So five of us young dudes were hanging out, and Bubba came walking down the block. He was now a grown man, reminiscing about the old days and glad to be in the neighborhood. Of course his memories were positive. He wasn’t getting his ass whupped. No one remembered Bubba’s and my history.
But I sure as fuck did.
When Bubba came up to us, I started saying something smart in response to whatever he said. Then he’d say something else and I’d say something else smart. I was like some sort of sarcastic parrot, and no one likes a back-talking bird.
“Hey man, how you doing?” he said.
“Motherfucker, how you doing?” I repeated.
Even though he came up to us all friendly, eventually I started to get on Bubba’s nerves. “Hey, motherfucker,” he yelled at me. “Who you talking to like that?”
Soon after that, we all jumped him. Now it was my street and my neighborhood. I still couldn’t whup him—but six of us could. Man, oh, man, that was the best shit ever. My mother even saw what was happening, and she let it go for a while. Eventually she came out of the house and had to put a stop to it because it was getting so bad. I stood up, looked Bubba square in the face, and I said, “You can’t never come on my street no more. It’s my street.” He never bothered me or my friends again. Now he feared me.
So Mr. President, I understand how you want to remain above the fray and not fight these people. But Mr. President, we’re standing with you. Fuck whether you win or not. You’ve got to let these motherfuckers know it ain’t going to be easy. If you’re going to be treated like an angry black man, then maybe you should start acting like one. My entire street is behind you, and many, many other streets like mine. All we need is for you to give us the word.
What we need more than anything, Mr. President, is for you to lead. Because we sure as fuck aren’t getting that from the other side of the aisle.
PART of the reason our nation is so divided is because we have become a multicultural nation. We have two dueling cultures in America, the red states and the blue states, and they perceive things completely differently. You can watch a story on a network news show and get the facts—and then you can turn to cable news and see the same story interpreted and reinvented in a completely different way. We don’t have a national dialogue anymore. Instead we have two national monologues.
We used to have national discussions and disagreements. There was a standard of truth and objectivity. Now, thanks to our mass media, people can believe whatever they want and never have their views questioned—and these views are simply based on who people surround themselves with. You live in the South, you’re a conservative Christian. You live in San Francisco, you’re a progressive Democrat. Our philosophies are not randomly distributed across the nation but instead lie in enclaves. People put themselves, or try to put themselves, in positions where they are constantly around others who edify their beliefs. Who would question their own views if everyone around them felt the same way?
But I don’t like that mentality, and that hasn’t been my approach. I have been around more conservatives than people on the other side of the aisle have been around liberals. I’ve traveled this country and know many people from various political perspectives. I’ve personally met prominent Republican politicians and interviewed them one-on-one. I’ve sat with them backstage in green rooms and had meaningful discussions—not elevator talk, but real conversations about the issues.
When I condemn specific politicians, it’s only after I’ve listened to them. I think there are a lot of evil conservatives—but there is evil on both sides of the aisle. Robert Byrd, for example, was a fairly evil Democrat. There are things you can’t square with me, like being in the Klan.
People on the left think that everyone on the right is stupid. But a politician can only get elected if he gets votes, so the Republican leaders have no choice but to kowtow to their crazy base. Mitt Romney is not a good actor. It’s obvious he doesn’t believe half of the shit he’s being driven to say. But any deviation from the party line is like heresy. It’s really like a religion for these people, and they’re constantly searching for heretics. They even have a term for it: RINO, as in Republican in Name Only. This term has been applied to Rudy Giuliani, and it’s been applied to Mitt Romney. But how far to the right do you have to be to consider Mr. Law and Order and a multimillionaire investment banker to be Democrats? From their perspective, there’s no room for a minority opinion in the party. Isn’t that telling? And isn’t it a piss-poor strategy in a democracy?
The Republican Party has gotten so crazy that people are trying to forget just how nuts the process was for choosing their presidential nominee. A bunch of nobodies thought, “If this black dude could get elected president, surely I have a chance.” Politicians like to sweep unpleasant things under the rug if it doesn’t suit their interest. Well, I think I need to lift that rug up and remind everyone of just how demented things were this past election cycle.
The Minnesota Twins
People who are serious candidates and could do the job of president are finding it impossible to get through the gauntlet of crazies. There is no better example of this than Tim Pawlenty, the first man to drop out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. When Tim Pawlenty started out, I thought he seemed like a bright and reasonable guy. Just like everyone else, I found him bland. He bored me to tears. He was kind of young to be that bland. It’s hard to be that young and white and boring as fuck. You’ve got to be around for a long time to be that fucking boring. Mitt Romney is that boring, but he’s had years to have all of his personality drained out of him. But boring is hardly a disqualification from the presidency. If that’s the worst thing you can say about a man, then he’d probably be one of the greatest presidents ever.
The two-term Minnesota governor was knocked out by a bat-shit harpy from his own state, a congresswoman with no legislative achievements to speak of whatsoever. Michele Bachmann went there. She appealed to the crazies who hate gay marriage, and the crazies who only care about abortion. I’m not speaking about people who happen to be socially conservative or pro-life. I mean the crazies. Michele Bachmann went for the lowest common denominator—and those are precisely the people who vote in straw polls, whether they’re left or right.
Let me quote Bachmann, because she once said something so telling that it really speaks to the heart of many in the GOP: “Those who are coming into France, which had a beautiful culture, the French culture is actually diminished. It’s going away. And just with the population in France, they are losing Western Europeans, and it’s being taken over by a Muslim ethic.” She
often brings up the specter of Sharia, or Islamic law, being imposed in Europe by the burgeoning Muslim population.
Bachmann and people like her know perfectly well that the possibility of Sharia being voted in in the United States is zero. Muslims constitute less than 1 percent of the American population. What she’s playing on are fears of dark-skinned people “infiltrating” our society and imposing their perspective. So what is it that the Mexicans are bringing into the United States that’s so bad? When the Irish came, they brought Saint Patrick’s Day. Every politician walks in those parades. Italians brought pasta. Are Cinco de Mayo and tacos that much worse? She doesn’t have a problem with foreign people and their cultures. She has a problem with foreign brown people and their cultures. In her vision of America, Reagan’s “city on a hill” has become a gated community designed to keep out “undesirable” elements.
Newt Gingrich
Conservatives bitch that progressives think they’re all fucking stupid. That’s not true in the slightest. No Democrat would deny that a George Will or even a Dick Cheney is bright. Newt Gingrich certainly fits that bill. Gingrich is technically a very bright guy. He should probably be a professor somewhere teaching political science.
In 1994, Gingrich had a lot to do with the Republicans taking control of the House of Representatives for the first time in forty years. But he also had a lot to do with Bill Clinton looking so successful and earning a second term. Bill Clinton took that cat to the woodshed, and it cost Gingrich his speakership. If you can’t win when you’re ahead, then you can’t win. That’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!
For a while, people forgot what a nasty dude Newt Gingrich really is. He may not have originated the principle of making political fights personal, but he sure as fuck mastered it. He did everything he could to take down Speaker Jim Wright, and he eventually succeeded. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, so he tried to pull the same political dirty tricks with Bill Clinton. He even said that there wouldn’t be an interview where he wouldn’t bring up the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Meanwhile, dude’s fucking his mistress in his office. I don’t get how you can be that intellectually bright and still have a little bit of Lil Wayne in you. It doesn’t make sense to me.
But politics is based on building coalitions in the population and alliances in the seats of power, and Newt Gingrich alienated even his closest allies. During his speakership, he was giving the Republican Party a very bad name. The House majority leader and the majority whip and several other major Republican congressmen all got together. Their plan was to oust Gingrich from power in the name of helping the party. Then Dick Armey got cold feet and turned snitch, and it all fell apart. If your entire team is plotting against you, that doesn’t speak well of you as a person. Even Nixon had Republicans backing him until the very end.
Gingrich likes to talk about how President Obama is a dictator and how the presidency is becoming imperious. At the same time, he himself scored points with the Republican Party by lecturing reporters when they asked him questions. He even wagged his finger at them during debates, when he knew perfectly well that he signed up to be asked questions he might not like. What the fuck is he expecting them to do, throw him flowers and sing “Hosanna”?
In a technical debate, he probably is as bright a politician as we have on the scene. But no one likes him. He’s the smart dude who thinks people hate him because they’re intimidated by his intellect. But sometimes people hate you simply because you’re a nasty asshole who doesn’t know how to talk to others.
I don’t blame the Republicans for hating Newt Gingrich. Forgetting their political positions, who’s a worse person: Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney? Mitt Romney is tapioca, but Newt Gingrich is evil. He bragged about his role in imposing supply-side economics on this country, the very philosophy that is the reason we’re in trouble now. But even that is not the worst of his evil. I don’t call him evil for marrying his side piece, taking on her religion, and publicly parading her around in Tiffany’s jewelry. I’ve always thought the First Lady should be a lady, but maybe I’m old-fashioned that way. I don’t know what the fuck that whole thing is about. Because Gingrich thinks of himself as a man of science, he saw the dangers of climate change, an issue that is much bigger than any party or even any country. Trying to do the right thing, he cut an ad with Nancy Pelosi, and in a bipartisan, apolitical way tried to do something about the crisis. As a presidential candidate, and in an act of blatant political hypocrisy, he said that ad was the dumbest thing he’d done in recent years. But even that isn’t why I call him evil.
I call him evil because of how the man ran his life.
I don’t consider it anyone’s business how a politician acts in the bedroom. If Bill Clinton wants to shove a cigar into a fat intern like it’s some kind of bizarre Cuban tampon, that’s his business. I like cigars myself, but I prefer to smoke them. But unless President Clinton’s actions affected how he treated the tobacco industry, his kinky ways were his affair (literally and figuratively).
One of the most overlooked stories about Newt on the long list of horrors on his résumé is this one. A neighbor on Newt’s block was babysitting Gingrich’s young daughters. As the neighbor was walking down the street with the two of them, he spotted Gingrich sitting in a parked car on the street. As the neighbor walked by, kids in tow, he saw a woman’s head going up and down in Gingrich’s lap. Mr. Speaker was getting a hummer in front of his own house in broad daylight. The neighbor was just glad that the girls weren’t tall enough to see what was going on. When you are getting a blowjob in front of your house as your children walk by, you are a depraved dude. But even that is not the worst of it.
Newt Gingrich told his wife that he was leaving her for his mistress while she was in the hospital facing a life-threatening illness. If he can’t have compassion for his woman, how can he have compassion for his country? How the fuck can he care about somebody he’s never seen, who’s brown or black? If he can leave a woman that is suffering and in crisis, he can fuck this country up. That speaks to a person’s humanity. A president has to be thirty-five years of age, and he has to have been born in the United States, and he has to be a human being. This is the problem I have with Newt Gingrich and political leaders like him (John Edwards is certainly on that list). They seem to have temporary morals—and that’s why they must never become president.
Our system was actually working really well to keep men like Newt Gingrich from the presidency. If not for the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court, Gingrich would have had to shut down his campaign much earlier simply due to a lack of funds. That ruling allowed unlimited political contributions and led to the creation of SuperPACs, which can spend anything they want on behalf of their candidate. The only reason Newt Gingrich remained in the race is because he knew a billionaire, Sheldon Adelson, who was willing to write $5 million checks. That’s not democracy. That’s rich people’s chess, and anyone can see how dangerous that is. This country is nakedly only for rich people, and the SuperPACs are doing everything they can to make sure it stays that way.
If this country weren’t for rich people, how else can you explain a major presidential candidate saying that poor minority children should be made into janitors? You would have to go back a hundred years to find such brazen anti-poor sentiment. Gingrich specifically said this was for minority children so that they could learn the value of hard work, which they weren’t learning at home.
Gingrich wants to take these jobs away from janitors and give the money to, by his math, thirty or so kids. I know a little bit about this, because my father was a maintenance man—in other words, a janitor. My childhood street was full of janitors. Mr. Tarver, Mr. Price, Mr. Ivy, Mr. Hamilton: Maybe fifteen out of the twenty houses on my street had their bills paid by janitors. Every lesson that the Republicans now talk about, my father the janitor taught me.
I’ll work on a comedy special; I’ll have an interview; I’ll go do the radio thing; that is my janitorial service. It�
�s my mop and broom, and my suits are my uniform. My father didn’t wear a suit, but his uniform was always fucking neat. My father wasn’t on the radio, but he busted his ass every day and didn’t complain or make excuses.
My father didn’t like sweeping the floors at the steel mill. He did it because it needed to be done. He worked the same job every day and came home at the same time every day. He got a watch from them for never being late. He never wore it and never took it out of its case. But the one time I borrowed it, he got so mad. “You can’t be taking my shit!” he yelled. “That’s my watch!” I shared underwear with this man. My mom would wash all the men’s underwear together and it just went into a pile that you picked out from. But that watch was a point of pride for him, even if he never said so. Taking pride in your work is something my father taught me.
This motherfucker Newt is so good at ruining families on a personal level that he wants to implement it as federal law. Who would want to teach his son to be a janitor? Every father wants his children to surpass him. My father, and all the fathers on my street, would be mortified if their sons had their job. “This broom was handed down from generation to generation”? If the notion is to take janitor jobs away so kids can learn work habits, what happens to the janitors? What of those men who are supporting their families and buying homes? They’re obsolete now. The family doesn’t need them, and Gingrich isn’t proposing retraining them. It would mean more families without father figures, not less. The quickest way to get a black man to leave his home is to devalue him.
I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up Page 5