The Black Commentator: Armstrong Williams (Strom Thurmond's fav. negro)

[Sandpiper]

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GOP to Blacks: Don’t vote

The Republican Party systematically demonizes the mass of Blacks in order to mobilize a critical mass of whites – it’s that simple, and there’s not a chance in hell that they will abandon this strategy. The GOP’s Black “outreach” effort is, in typical corporate fashion, outsourced to a small and grasping grouplet unofficially headed by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond’s favorite Negro, Armstrong Williams. The columnist and media entrepreneur got a chance to bum rush his patrons last year when Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott praised Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist Presidential campaign, a faux pas that led to Lott’s humiliating resignation as Senate Majority Leader. Williams staged a big show of demanding more money to recruit Blacks to the party. “Williams, for whom Hard Right Republicanism is the Living Word, pretended to slap his clients into racial sensitivity, demanding that they renounce lily-whiteness and buy into his bag of Black resumes,” we wrote in “Send in the Clowns: The GOP’s Two-Ring Black ‘Outreach’ Circus,” February 8.

Williams’ Washington-based activities have nothing to do with Republican Party policy-making or, aside from throwing money at image-building advertising in Black-oriented media, with grassroots Black mobilization. Most importantly, this circumscribed outreach poses no threat to the white mass base of the party, particularly in the Deep South. Rather, if Republicans follow the pattern of the 2002 campaign, they will produce extremely negative radio ads that are actually designed to suppress the Black vote – in line with the GOP’s traditional approach to the Black electorate. In a study of the effects of GOP political ads in 2002, Democratic National Committee operative Donna Brazile and pollster Cornell Belcher concluded: "Republicans are well-positioning themselves to suppress the turnout of African American voters via their specific negative attacks asserting that African Americans are taken for granted and Democrats are out of touch with the values of the community." (See , “Black Democrats Urge Media Counteroffensive,” November 28, 2002.)

Black appointees such as Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell are there to provide color to the national face of the Republican Party, assuaging residual guilt among white swing voters, the real “outreach” targets. That’s the general plan.

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http://www.blackcommentator.com/72/72_cover_serpent_pf.html

[HuskiesHowls]

1. "All I have is my integrity...."

was his comment in an NPR interview about being paid to push *'s No Child Left Behind education program.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4273827

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration paid a prominent commentator to promote the No Child Left Behind schools law to fellow blacks and to give the education secretary media time, records show.

A company run by Armstrong Williams, the syndicated commentator, was paid $240,000 by the Education Department. The goal was to deliver positive messages about Bush's education overhaul, using Williams' broad reach with minorities.
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Rep. George Miller of California, the top Democrat on the House education committee, asked for an inspector general investigation into whether the deal with legal and ethical. He and other Democrats also wrote Bush to call for an end to "covert propaganda."
http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/07/bush.journalist.ap/index.html

Just another fine example of how the neo-cons work!!