dcnovice
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Joined: 8/2/2006 Status: offline
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A discussion about race descended into chaos at CPAC on Friday when an attendee suggested slaves benefited from being given "food and shelter". The provocatively titled session, "Trump the Race Card: Are You Sick and Tired of Being Called a Racist and You Know You're Not One", had been billed as offering a way for Republicans to counter suggestions of racism and win over minority voters. But it fell apart when two people at CPAC, the largest annual gathering of US conservatives, interjected from the floor and and made a series of extreme remarks. The session's moderator, K Carl Smith, described himself as a "Frederick Douglass Republican", an audience member interjected. "When Douglass came through slavery … he [wrote] a letter to his former slave master and said: 'I forgive you for all the things you did to me'," Smith said. From the floor, Scott Terry, pictured, asked: "For giving him shelter and food for all those years?" * * * After the session, Terry, 30, claimed to the Guardian that he was a direct descendant of former confederate president Jefferson Davis, and that he was "not prepared to throw all my ancestors under the bus". Asked if he disagreed with slavery, Terry described it as a "complicated issue. I can't make one broad statement that categorically it was evil all the time because that's not true". Asked to clarify his comments about "shelter and food", Terry said: "The slaves couldn't just work without being supplied quarters and all that. And you couldn't just … it's not legal to murder a slave. Slaves even had rights under the old south." Terry was accompanied by Matthew Heimbach, 21, who decried Martin Luther King as a "Marxist". Heimbach is the president of the White Students Union at Towson University in Maryland, a white nationalist group that has been the source of numerous controversies. When the chairman made a reference to King, Heimbach shouted from the floor that King was a "Marxist" and said that CPAC was "Surrender Con" because it never supported running a true white conservative as a presidential candidate. "We are losing. We keep running moderate candidates." Source: The Guardian Well, I guess GOP strategists have identified two guys not to use in their minority outreach. As always with a story like this, the question arises: Were these just two isolated loons, or were they saying what others were thinking?
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No matter how cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up. JANE WAGNER, THE SEARCH FOR SIGNS OF INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE
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