*groan* I feel ill whenever great political satire shows like TDS and The Colbert Report have their WHITEPROGRESSIVE moments. Seriously. Gonzales as slimeball? You have TONS of material without bringing the fact he's Mexican-American into this issue -- this is lowest common denominator slime. T0NS of material elsewhere. But it's always easiest to malign the brown.

some of TDS writers are also stand-up comics, and most of their stand-up humor is raw, hateful crap - not the dressed up WHITEPROGRESSIVE crap they put on tv.

it's that feeling when you think you are in the crowd laughing with the crowd...and you realize suddenly that the joke is actually on you and your kind....and you are actually surrounded by those who enjoy drawing the distinction.

Alberto Gonzales (R-Texas). Now that says 'criminal'.

I dislike the Attorney General because I see him as a Mexican Clarence Thomas - plain and simple. As a Black woman, it's taken some time, but I finally realize, that even though it's natural to rally around ' one of your own', there is a time when you realize the old Zora Neale Hurston saying - ' All that are my skin folk, ain't my kin folk'. Clarence and Condi are but two of that group.

For some, the Secretary of State is THE office outside of the Presidency that they revere. Not me. For me, it has always been the Attorney General. Because, I have always believed in the power of the law, and believed, that, as its core, this country is at its best, when it is a country of just laws. Yes, the law has been used against my people, but there is a way to fight to change the law.

The shredding of The Constitution of the United States is one of the most wretched legacies of this Administration. And, I want everyone involved in it to BURN...and, I don't care what they look like. But, yes, it burned me just a bit more to watch Shrub, The Evil One, and The Master Puppeteer put a Brown Face on shreddng The Constitution.

Mr. Gonzales is about to learn a lesson about 'being expendible', because Shrub isn't going to let 'his brain' be thrown under the bus. There is an entire White House full of folks going under that bus before The Master Puppeteer.

And the Attorney General is one of them.

But, you are right, it is always 'interesting' to see how racially-tinged the ' humor' can become when the veneer is stripped away.

agreed on many points, rikyrah. mostly on the Mexican Clarence Thomas, on the quote bout skin-kin, and BURNING. :) thanks.

Guilty as charged! Why? Cause I laughed...then again I saw a man like many of the men in my side of the woods, corrupt, lying bastards that tug of at the heartstrings of nationhood, of patria y sangre, only to slap you in the face.

I laughed...and that was not a good thing....

i hear you rafa. but we always laugh at these guys. so we're almost coded to anyway, we're ready to, we're willing to. and they are funny guys. but with what i was thinking as they did it and bein of tha mex, it just numbed my funnybone on this one is all.

i feel what you are saying...the cloak of patria y sangre....

I blogged on the subject of Gonzales being the token Latino in this administration this past Monday and the effects it has on the rest of us. There were comments that were well intentioned however, sometimes people who do not suffer racism don't really get it or they might try to downplay it.

Here's what I said:
"Some will say the New York Times is a tool of the left wing agenda others will say it's about time people stand up and notice he is not doing a good job as Attorney General. This is an incredible source of frustration for me. I realize I need not take his personal failings personally however when we as an ethnic group wait so long for one of us Latinos to achieve a position of importance and influence we don't want a pendejo to fuck it up for the rest of us."

There was more to say but I still feel the same way, when one of us makes it to the top, his or her failure is a reflection on the rest of us. Like it or not.

Another source of frustration is the fact that the incompetent and questionable get into these high powered positions, look at Clarence Thomas, I can bet he is a source of frustration to many African Americans as well.

Some, of the mainstream culture, understand what's going on, but not everyone is enlightened.

i feel you completely on this, leesee. it's the last thing we needed in the news now, just when our people are being so mercilessly attacked from all sides. why couldn't he have been honorable and historic. why did the first mexican politician that high up have to be a creep and a villain. i hate it.

I've always had this nagging feeling that Bushco put incompetent tokens like Rice and Gonzales in key positions for the very reason that they'd then be able to turn around later and say, in short, "See, we're right not to trust minorities, they're all criminals and/or shit at their jobs." Of course doing that also serves the useful purpose for Bushco of covering their own criminal asses with ready-made scapegoats.

The Daily Show may have picked up on that subtext but if so, rather than examine it they took the line of least resistance and easy laughter and indulged in the cheap and nasty racist joke.

I do think though that what Gonzales said was by way of the WH testing the waters to see how playing the race card would be received. Although it appears Gonzales said it of his own volition (and my saying this does not imply any global denial of any brown persons' power of individual thought, before anyone jumps down my throat), my guess is that it was said at the behest of the WH (ie Rove)to try and draw the fire away from the president.

A nice, big, public kerfuffle about Gonzales being picked on because of his ethnicity would occupy the babble-o-sphere and divert attention from the real crime quite nicely.

That one little phrase about fighting obstacles was a dogwhistle signal to both liberals and wingers; a] to get the former to stand up for Gonzales, which would remind the racist base that all liberals want the US to be taken over by the Spanish-speaking brown hordes, and b] to get the racist base riled up against Mexican immgrants and Latinos generally as it's a pot which has gone off the boil a bit lately and could do with a stir, especially now nemesis is getting so close to Bush and his Brain.

If the liberals, as planned, come out to defend slurs on Gonzales' ethnicity, he can then be safely painted as a tricksy Mexican not-real-conservative-maybe-even-a-liberal who deliberately set out to fool Dear Leader.

It doesn't reflect well in the Daily Show crew and their inbuilt and unexamined prejudices that they fell for this, and even less well that they thought the way to deal with it was to tell racist jokes.

As for Gonzales agreeing to this tactic, well he's shown time and time before he's a man with no principles and no shame who will do anything at all for personal advantage.

It's no real surprise.

I don't think you can compare Gonzales to Clarence Thomas. Thomas' qualification for the job was, as everyone knows, the fact that he was a black conservative. It was Thurgood Marshall's seat, they needed a black man for it. Gonzales' qualification, on the other hand, is simply loyalty to Bush. They may feel that his race gives them "bonus points" but there was no particular need to give the job to a Latino at that moment in history. I don't think he's a "token" in the sense we normally intend that word.

How do "we normally intend" that word, Steve? For purposes of clear discussion, of course.

I think the ordinary understanding of a "token" is someone who gets a job because the boss feels someone of a particular skin color is needed in that department. When it came time to fill that particular job, my opinion is that loyalty to Bush was considered about 100x more important than race. A white guy with Gonzales' long history of loyalty still would have been picked for Attorney General (most likely); a white guy with Clarence Thomas' resume would never have been nominated for Thurgood Marshall's seat on the Supreme Court in a million years. That was my only point.

okay, well i'm glad we dug at the root of our ideas before we got tangled in misunderstanding. because i disagree on what "we" are using token to mean here. you place the crux at the cause of hiring. whereas i, and some others here, believe a person can be used as a "token" despite how they got where they are. i agree that gonzo was picked for his buddiness. that does not mean that was all he was used for, or all that he is used for, or all that he will be used for, nor does it mean that more was not concurrently considered in choosing him, aside from his loyalty factor.

Hola Amigos!

I saw that piece the other day, and I think they were just predicting (as they often do) How Gonzales will be thrown to the wolves by the Right wingers. They have to separate him from Bush now, in the empty little heads of the 27%ers. Simple for them- just play on the 27%ers racism and we're done.

I thought that the daily show did a good job of showing the right wing's mindset. But I guess this is jumping the gun? They should have waited til the Repubs started up?

Bush doesn't see color when looks at ol' Alberto Lewinsky. He sees a man who will do anything, break any law, distort the constitution, just to serve his pleasure. And he hates throwing a loyal man to the dogs, hates it! But Alberto's done.