Yo! Bad Republican Optics, Sen. Tim Scott & Michael the Black Man

African-American reach-out, Republican style?
Sen. Tim Scott tries to bamboozle black folks

The word of the day for me is optics.

Not the kind of optics associated with a complex scientific instrument like NASA's Hubble Telescope, which has been orbiting above our beloved planet since 1990 and to date has sent back hundreds of thousands of images and resulted in the publication of over 10,000 scientific research articles and papers.

No, I'm talking about the kinds of optics associated with political perception.

It defies belief that out of all the hyper-wealthy conservative members of the U.S. Senate, the braintrust of the Republican Party would trot out South Carolina Senator Tim Scott (the only African-American Republican in the Senate) to appear on-camera deceptively touting the GOP's "tax reform" plan as benefitting working and middle class Americans - then have him end it with the cringe-worthy catchphrase "#KeepYoMoney".

Not your, yo.

By the way my mom grew up in West Philly when African-Americans, Italian-Americans and Jews still lived in the same neighborhoods, Italian guys from Philly have been calling out Yo! to each other for decades.

Want to get hammered?

Watch the 1976 film Rocky and take a drink every time the title character, South Philly boxer Rocky Balboa, played by Sylvester Stallone, says "Yo!"

Now it's bad enough that the Republican-majority House and Senate have yet to pass a single piece of substantive legislation despite having the political "trifecta" benefit of having a Republican president in office - but they offer up their only black Senator to deliver an insulting catchphrase to bolster the illusion that their "tax reform" is not just a big tax cut for the rich?

As Gail Collins noted in her New York Times column yesterday, when White House economic adviser Gary Cohn, a former Goldman-Sachs executive who is one of the architects of the Republican "tax reform" effort, was asked if he could assure members of the working and middle class that their taxes wouldn't increase under the Republican plan he said he couldn't "guarantee that." 

So says the guy who received a whopping $285 million severance package when he exited Goldman-Sachs to join the Trump White House - no need to speculate on how much Gary's personal tax bill will shrink under the plan he's helping to craft. Cha-Ching!

Sen. Tim Scott delivering the "Keep yo money"
punchline on Wednesday in D.C.

What's really pathetic about all this Senator Scott tomfoolery is that I'm honestly not sure if the Republicans who thought up this latest PR disaster realize that it only reinforces their image as a bunch of culturally-oblivious stiffs who are perpetually and painfully out of touch with mainstream Americans.

As if having the black guy throw out a casual colloquialism commonly associated with African-American slang would suddenly convince people of color that Republicans have the interests of average Americans in their cold, compassionless hearts. 

Especially given that that the current tax overhaul being touted by Republican politicians in Washington, which seeks to radically lower the corporate tax rate, eliminate the estate tax and do away with the alternative minimum tax, is basically a mechanism for redistributing over $1.2 trillion in wealth to corporations and America's top earners.

Putting Tim Scott out there to promote the lie that Republican "tax reform" will benefit working and middle class Americans strikes me as culturally klutzy - it's not like he's a "man of the people".

As Jamelle Bouie observed in an article about Scott for Slate back in 2014, Scott's brand of "colorblind conservatism" is far more suited to the conservative white South Carolina constituents who elected him to office than it is to the mostly black South Carolina Democrats who overwhelmingly voted against him and his Tea Party policy positions. 

After all, Scott is the guy who introduced legislation that would cut off food stamps to any American worker whose wages were affected because of participation in a strike, as a then-member of the House, he voted against the 2011 deal to raise the debt ceiling to keep the government functioning.

He's basically a Tea Party guy who avoids speaking out on divisive racial issues like the controversial police killings of unarmed African-Americans like Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown - so it's disingenuous for the Republicans to trot him out as the public mouthpiece of a hokey phrase like "Keep yo money" when black voters in his own state don't even vote for him.

One doesn't have to point out the racist, misogynist xenophobe the Republican Party nominated as it's 2016 presidential candidate to recognize that the GOP has long since abandoned any pretense of concerning itself with the major policy issues concerns impacting people of color. 

Maurice Symonette (AKA "Michael the Black Man") 
at Trump's rally in Phoenix back in August  

Amongst the unsavory leftovers still remaining from Trump's toxic 2016 presidential campaign, few are more disingenuous or laughable than his pathetic attempts to reach out to the African-American community.

This was true long before Trump stood at a podium at a campaign appearance in the mostly white Lansing, Michigan suburb of Dimondale, shrugged his shoulders with that smirk and pitched black American voters with the question: "What have you got to lose?"

Not surprisingly a mere 8% of African-Americans voted for Trump - I've yet to meet one of them.

His actions and statements since his inauguration have demonstrated that not only does he not give a rat's ass about people of color, Hispanics and Muslims, he's openly played footsie with fringe white supremacists by, among other things, hiring at least four as top White House advisers and describing the alt-right "Tiki Torch Nazis" parading around Charlottesville with swastika imagery chanting "Jews will not replace us" as "decent people."

So I found it really odd that out of the approximately 4,100 people at that bizarre Trump rally in Phoenix back in August, a strange black guy named Maurice Symonette (who also posts online videos as Michael the Black Man) wearing a "Trump & Republicans Are Not Racist" t-shirt holding a "Blacks For Trump" sign just happened to be standing just behind the Rambler-in-Chief - where the cameras caught him fawning, oohing and cheering at virtually everything that was said.

As Nina Golgowski reported for the Huffington Post back in August, Symonette used to go by the name Maurice Woodside when he was a member of a cult called the Temple of Love led by a man named Yahweh ben Yahweh who enticed Symonette into joining the cult by walking up to him and saying "All white people are the Devil." - ben Yahweh was subsequently sentenced to 20 years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder.

Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke

Symonette, who promotes a range of loony right-wing conspiracy theories, has frequently been seen photographed with his "Blacks For Trump" sign positioned in sight of the camera in ways that strongly suggest he's intentionally placed there by campaign staff and is quite likely paid to do so.

The only other black people I can think of that offer such enthusiastic support of Trump is the Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke who vilifies Black Lives Matter as a terrorist group.

You may recall his unhinged speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention, and recently his department came under fire after inmate Terill Thomas died in his cell after intentionally being denied water for 7 days.

The cowboy hat-wearing conservative firebrand has also drawn criticism from military veterans for festooning his police uniform with an assortment of pins and badges that have nothing to do with his actual service; including a Harley Davidson pin on his lapel according to a detailed analysis of his uniform decorations by the Washington Post.

Trump's African-American supporters also include former candidate on The Apprentice, Omarosa Manigault, who served as the Trump campaign's "director of African-American outreach" (when 88% of black Americans voted for Hillary...) and now serves in the White House in a position that really isn't all that clear - she's the one who proudly boasted that Trump has a list of "enemies."

It's weird enough that Trump is holding political rallies for the 2020 presidential race eight months into one of the most disastrous, unproductive and unpopular presidencies in U.S. history, but the fact that his most prominent black supporters are basically fringe right-wingers with views considered far outside the mainstream is a pretty sad indication of how widely despised he is by people of color in America - and how divisive he is as a president.

When you couple that with the Republican Party trotting out their only black Senator to try and bamboozle working and middle class Americans into believing that the GOP's tax cuts are going to put more money into their pockets, it's clear the Republicans have a huge optics problem.

What's not so clear is whether they're aware of it.

Uncle Ben's Old-Fashioned Revisionist History

Dr. Carson addresses HUD employees 

Remember back in November when Dr. Ben Carson declined a cabinet position in the Trump administration saying: "Having me as a federal bureaucrat would be like a fish out of water quite frankly."?

Don't say he didn't warn anyone.

Carson's outrageous comments on Monday in front of hundreds of gathered employees of the Department of Housing and Urban Development truly reflect the Republican Party's embrace of "alternative facts."

From the perspective of a student of history who knows a little something about the African Slave Trade and the institution of slavery in America, I believe it was ludicrous of Carson to compare European immigrants who voluntarily left their homelands and arrived at Ellis Island in the 19th and early 20th century, with African slaves who were first brought to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia in 1619.

Now it's one thing for this pontificating former neurosurgeon to wax philosophic and merge distorted fact with his own peculiar interpretation of Christian theology in the sing-song sermon-like way he did during the 2016 presidential campaign.

But his medical gifts and status as a darling of the Christian right don't necessarily make him qualified to head up a massive federal agency like Housing and Urban Development - a complex organization with over 8,000 employees and an annual budget of $49.3 billion tasked with (according to its mission statement) creating "strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all."

Does brain surgery qualify him as an affordable housing policy expert?

No, but like the equally-unqualified secretary of education Betsy DeVos, he's now the head of a major federal agency anyway.

How Africans "immigrated" to America

Carson's suggestion, widely panned by both citizens and academics on social media, was absurd.

African slaves, who were forcibly kidnapped from their homeland, shipped thousands of miles across the Atlantic while chained in the hulls of ships in traumatic deplorable conditions, before being sold into a state of slavery to live out their lives in a state of perpetual human bondage for financial profit, were not "immigrants".



Suggesting otherwise reflects a simplistic understanding of the complex history of the institution of slavery.

Such asinine statements also reflect the Republican Party's abject willingness to place extremist conservative ideology over relevant professional experience, knowledge, training and competency.

Carson's personal beliefs are his own business.

But his decision to share those kinds of personal views in front of an audience of hundreds of HUD professionals and policy experts in a public forum where he was essentially introducing himself as the agency head was unprofessional - and remarkably inappropriate.

Yesterday's statement was not the first time that Uncle Ben, as some in the African-American community have taken to calling him, has demonstrated a questionable grasp of history and a bizarre willingness to try and factually retrofit the institution of slavery to fit conservative principles that exist far outside the mainstream of the American center.

How can a guy who separated conjoined twins
at the brain be so ignorant about history?

Why would a gifted neurosurgeon with a background in biology, medicine, chemistry and neuroscience willingly allow himself to be used as a flagrant conservative tool?

Carson criticizing the Affordable Care Act as "the worst thing since slavery", as he famously did back in October of 2015, epitomized baseless partisan pandering - and can you imagine the reaction if Jeff Sessions or Ted Cruz had said such a thing?


It's as if Carson's being African-American functions less as an example of the diversity within the Republican Party than it does as a kind of political-racial "Get Out Of Jail Free Card" that enables the GOP to use him as a conduit to deliver messages that are intentionally demeaning to the black American community as a whole.

Or, as in the case of his misinformed comments on slavery, meant to undermine the significance of the role that institutionalized slavery has played in the economic and political marginalization of large segments of the black population.

In an essay published in the January 27th issue of the Hollywood Reporter about the duty and importance of African-American celebrities to use their influence to insure that the concerns and needs of the millions of voiceless poor and working-class black Americans who have, are and will be comprehensively ignored by the Trump administration, former NBA great-turned writer Kareem Abdul Jabbar noted of Caron's delusional right-wing agenda:

"More insidious is Carson's war on Planned Parenthood based on his inaccurate belief that clinics were placed in black neighborhoods to control the black population."

The 7'2" former LA Laker and master of the Sky Hook was far less sparing in his view of the role Trump envisions for Carson in the new administration given his own admission that "has no government experience." 

Trump's "Black shills"? Manigault and Carson  

Jabbar suggested that Trump uses both Carson and Omarosa Manigault as "black shills to distract us from the paternalistic policies dismantling civil liberties for people of color, women, the LGBT community, Muslims and immigrants."        

Outspoken actor Samuel L. Jackson didn't hold back on his reaction to Carson's statement on African slaves being "immigrants" either.

In a widely-circulated Twitter message Jackson said: "OK!! Ben Carson...I cant! Immigrants? In the bottom of SLAVE SHIPS?!! MUTHAFUKKA PLEASE!!! #dickheadedtom"

And that's just a slice of the contempt people expressed for Carson's HUD speech on social media.

Given Trump's desperate attempts to distract attention from almost every single person in his sphere of influence having proven ties to Russia, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the White House intentionally gave that "slaves are immigrants" line to Carson and asked him to use it in his HUD speech - there's just something distinctively Bannon-ish about it.

If there's been a more shaky rollout of a presidential cabinet in the 241-year history of the United States than that of the current Republican administration I really don't know what it is.

With Trump now Tweeting outright quackery so outrageous that even his own staff refuse to comment on or defend it, perhaps Uncle Ben's helping of good old-fashioned revisionist history was meant to deflect the unwelcome attention to his boss' blatant lies.

If only for a moment.

GOP Ethics & The Enigma of the Manigault Syndrome

Swamp Thing? Republican Congressman and
House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte 

It's overcast, rainy and chilly on this first Tuesday of 2017 here in New Jersey.

In some ways, the weather reflects the gloomy mood of many Americans who are coping with an uneasy sense of impending dread as the inauguration of the most unpopular presidential candidate in U.S. history edges closer.

If nothing else, the importance of voting has been made painfully clear to Democrats and progressives who decided to stay home on Nov. 8th.



Well we certainly got a taste of what the new Republican super-majority has in mind for the American people yesterday when Republicans, secretly meeting Monday evening on a federal holiday, backed a proposal drafted by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) that would have placed oversight of the non-partisan independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) under the oversight of the Republican-majority House Ethics Committee.

As TheHill.com reported, the jaw-dropping Republican proposal actually called for blocking the OCE from considering anonymous tips about corrupt congressmen, or from hiring a communications director, in a remarkably sleazy effort to make it harder for the media to learn about ethics violations and charges.

Swift backlash from members of both parties (including the president-elect), the media and outraged citizens prompted Republicans to pull the proposal from the rules package for the 115th Congress today, but don't be surprised to see them take another crack at it within weeks.

But the fact that Republicans tried to do that on the very first day of the new Congressional session should raise serious concerns; so much for "draining the swamp".

One can only hope the thousands of Democrats, progressives and independents who decided not to vote on November 8th, or cast their presidential ballot for Green Party candidate Jill Stein or a write-in candidate as a symbolic but essentially meaningless "protest vote" are happy - and I like Stein but let's be frank, a vote for her was in essence a vote for the con man being sworn in two weeks from now.

But I don't think it's fair to "blame" any one demographic segment for the results of this election.

Donald Trump and Omaraosa Manigault

Meddling on the part of foreign nations, Republican efforts to suppress non-white voter turnout across the nation, conservative media's incessant misogynist slandering of Hillary Clinton's record and apathetic (dare I say pathetic) Democratic voter turnout all played a factor in the 2016 presidential election results.

Don't get me wrong, each of us has the right to choose whom we want in an election, but the highly public and remarkably enthusiastic support of Trump by some women of color in this nation still leaves me scratching my head.


"I am black, female, and Donald Trump is my friend." 

No folks, that's not a line from a Saturday Night Live skit, or the punchline of a joke.

Those were the opening words of a short op-ed piece by Omarosa Manigault that was published in a December issue of The Hollywood Reporter - actually her words as told to writer Seth Abramovitch.

Manigault is the reality show contestant who gained notoriety after appearing on various incarnations of Trump's reality television series The Apprentice, and later went on to appear in a variety of other reality shows including Fear Factor and The Surreal Life.

While her Wikipedia page notes that she held a position in the office of former Vice-President Al Gore and teaches at Howard University, she's basically "famous" for being liked by Trump before becoming his political surrogate.

In the THR article she basically tried to use her own experiences being on a reality TV show to make the case that Trump is not the bigot and misogynist that his own actions and words make him out to be.

From her appearances on topical news discussions about Trump's candidacy that I saw, Manigault, who served as Trump's "director of African-American outreach", always seemed to strike me as someone whose over-the-top enthusiasm was not rooted in any kind of specific policy analysis.

Her reasoning for supporting his candidacy seemed based more on a cult-like adoration and her comments reflective of Trump's intentionally vague style of political "non-speak" - like the debates where he talked as if trying to toss out disconnected sound-bites to earn applause or laughter without really saying anything of substance, relevance or meaning.

To me her support for Trump kinda borders on creepy.

For example, remember back in November the day after the election when Manigault hinted in an interview that Trump was calculating revenge against people who hadn't supported him?

"Mr. Trump has a long memory and we're keeping a list." 

That's what she told a journalist from the Independent Journal Review, partially in reference to Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham's statement that he'd supported Evan McMullin rather than Trump.

Note her use of the term "we're" too.

In the same interview she went on to say: 

"It's so great that our enemies are making themselves clear so that when we get in to the White House we know where we stand."

"Our enemies" sounds like decidedly Nixonian group-think - I mean what's next?

Bugging the private communications and correspondence of members of the Democratic Party?

Oh, wait, sorry they actually already did that.

Again, Manigault, or any other woman of color can vote for whomever they please, but the handful of black women I saw interviewed on local or national television who voted for Trump never seemed to articulate what I (as an African-American) considered to be an informed reasoning that outweighed the flagrant racism that the Republican Party actively cultivated during the 2015 - 2016 presidential campaign season.

Let alone the reprehensible ways in which Trump spoke about women and ethnic and religious minorities.

In the Hollywood Reporter article, Maingault said that Trump "does not judge people on their gender or race. He judges them on their ability to do the job."

Trump's Sec. of Education pick Betsy DeVos

Yet back in August, as his campaign made efforts to try and draw support from black voters, Trump stood in front of an audience in the overwhelmingly white Lansing, Michigan suburb of Dimondale and reduced black Americans to a narrow stereotype, famously telling the crowd:

"You're living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58% of your youth is unemployed - what the hell do you have to loose?"

While high unemployment amongst young African-Americans is at critical levels, and that needs to be addressed on the federal, state and local level, not all African-Americans attend schools that are "no good" - does Manigault think that Trump tapping right-wing billionaire Betsy DeVos, a person with no experience as a school administrator, as Secretary of Education is a good thing for those students (of all races and ethnicities) who live in poverty?

DeVos is part of a group of billionaires and wealthy financiers around the nation who actively lobby for shifting billions in tax dollars from public schools to charter schools and private schools - maybe Manigault (who attended Howard University) thinks that will be a good thing for those public schools serving at-risk communities that struggle to attract quality teachers and administrators.

And while her orange-haired benefactor is correct that poverty levels in the U.S. are highest for blacks, according to statistics, 72.6% of black Americans do not live in poverty.

Donald Trump and his father Fred were sued by the
federal govt. in 1973 for housing discrimination 

So contrary to Manigault's statements, Trump's sweeping generalizations demonstrate a man who sees black Americans almost exclusively from the perspective of the narrow generalizations based on race that he grew up with.

And reinforced when he helped his father exclude blacks from renting at apartment complexes owned by the Trump family in New York and Virginia.


Maingault's access to affordable health care or the kinds of preventative cancer screenings provided by Planned Parenthood is never going to be jeopardized by Trump's promise to work with House Republicans to dismantle the Affordable Care Act.

Thanks to her BA from Central State in Ohio and grad degrees from Howard University she doesn't have to work in the fast food industry, or a large retailer to make ends meet - so her income isn't going to be affected by Trump's pledge to oppose minimum wage increases.

So Omarosa Manigault can afford to support Trump, in fact as a reality television personality now serving on Trump's White House transition team who's angling for a job at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, she has a vested interest in continuing to do so.

As far as her assertion in the Hollywood Reporter article that "It's very difficult to make the argument that Donald Trump doesn't like black people and black women.", I must respectfully disagree.

His actions, personal history and words suggest quite the opposite.