Whoopi Goldberg: Dog Fighting is Just Like Being Boricua
Another great moment in Black-Brown relations….
According to the new token minority on the View, and despite the pleas of this blog to have Mirthala Salinas replace Rosie O´Donnell, dog fighting is just a quaint custom of people in the U.S. south just like that quaint Caribbean puertorican custom of cock fighting:
Picking up where Rosie O’Donnell left off, Whoopi Goldberg debuted on “The View” yesterday with a spirited defense of NFL quarterback Michael Vick’s role in a dogfighting ring.
Goldberg said dogfighting “isn’t that unusual” in the Deep South “where he comes from. … It’s like cockfighting in Puerto Rico. There are certain things that are indicative to certain parts of the country.”
Co-host Joy Behar looked horrified.
“How about dog torture and dog murdering?” Behar asked.
“Unfortunately, it’s part of the thing,” Goldberg said.
“Part of the fun, right?” Behar shot back.
OF COURSE NOTHING could be further from the truth: Dog fighting is a bloody sport that involves dogs and Cockfighting is a bloody sport that involves roosters... (how dare she compare Puerto Rico with the confederacy? What next? Bull fighting will be called a bloody sport?)
I haven´t seen white people so upset about torture since the Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, CIA secret prisons, Contra warfare… OH WAIT, they didn´t get all hot and bothered about those….
Themocracy
Just curious: do you mean white people or perhaps specifically southern white people, or is this really an ideological, rather than a purely racial, issue?
The reason I ask is because I know a lot of liberal/progressive white people who are pretty aggressive about Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, CIA renditions and secret prisons, civil liberties and so on, though they were not organized during the 80’s for the contras stuff.
They’re also pretty aware that when the country fails on those issues (as it is now), it’s the Padilla’s and the Louima’s of the world who are the first to be tortured, violated and sacrificed.
The progressive left is certainly not without racism; that’s not my point. But it’s not a racist movement the way the right wing is, and the more ideological of the progressives (as opposed to the DC power hacks) are pretty aggressive on the fronts you mention.
I agree that there is a minority of people of conscience in the U.S. that are outraged about torture and all the other abuses going on.
However when you compare the reaction and media circus surrounding Vick, the difference is astounding.
In Vick´s case seconds after his house was raided it seems like there was widespread condemnation, horror and panic and there were protesters at his court appearance etc…
Meanwhile, the republican prez candidates, all white men, try to out do each other about who supports torture more that the others (except Mccain)
and the prevailing view seems to be that soldiers who torture people are just following orders, under pressure etc, at it is all Rumsfelds fault, while Vick is a totally evil human who should be despised
Gotcha. Though I also think it’s helpful to separate out what the establishment media outlets do from what public opinion polls actually show. The polls I’ve seen on the FISA cave in, for example, seem to show, not a minority of conscience, but a majority, though we’d never know it watching the fucking television or reading the Washington Post.
The polling on Gitmo and Abu Ghraib also tends (if I recall correctly, no time for research and links at the moment) to show sizable opposition, but I think it also depends on how the questions are asked by the pollsters.
The media stuff pisses me off no end, of course, which is why work like what you do here is so important, and not just here, but in the progressive blogs generally. We’re the only counter-narrative to what is pretty much a right wing media establishment, running GOP talking points all the time.
Anyway, the media storm over Vick is like their obsessions with missing white women, and it is driven by (conscious or unconscious) racial stereotyping. The coverage of Katrina was another great (and by that I mean, totally fucked up)example.
What really amazes me is, in spite of all this horseshit that gets pumped to people, large majorities actually oppose the occupation in Iraq and its continuation, and people oppose warrantless wiretapping, and the majorities pretty much come to these conclusions in spite of a national propaganda system in the tank for the GOP race baiting assholes.
But its the polls and progressive reform history that I think make it necessary to look to find liberal, ideological allies across constituency groups so we can organize well enough to change things. The alternate media stuff bloggers do is really important, but by itself, it’s not enough to turn things around.
I wrote something l=kinda longish, but which I think still holds up, about this stuff in a post just before the 2006 midterms: http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/11/04/political-physics-2006-a-tale-of-three-parties/
Anyway, I’m a regular reader, even if I don’t always comment, and I’ve been sharing some of your links with my cobloggers, to help get them familiar with the site.
Come on are you really going to say “The Confederacy?”