Glenn Greenwald - National Review asks: Did WaMu fail because it employed minorities?

National Review's Mark Krikorian notes that (1) Washington Mutual became the largest bank to fail in American history yesterday and (2) its last press release touted the fact that it was named one of America's most diverse employers, having been "honored specifically for its efforts to recruit Hispanic employees, reach out to Hispanic consumers and support Hispanic communities and organizations"; for being "named (one of) the top 60 companies for Hispanics"; for "attaining equal rights for GLBT employees and consumers"; for having "earned points for competitive diversity policies and programs, including the recently established Latino, African American and GLBT employee network groups"; and for being "named one of 25 Noteworthy Companies by Diversity Inc magazine and one of the Top 50 Corporations for Supplier Diversity by Hispanic Enterprise magazine."

While juxtaposing these two facts -- (1) WaMu has a racially and ethnically diverse workforce and (2) WaMu collapsed yesterday -- the National Review writer headlined his post: "Cause and Effect?" He apparently believes that the reason Washington Mutual failed may be because it employed and was too accommodating to large numbers of Hispanics, African-Americans and gays. Is that why Lehman Brothers, AIG, Bear Sterns and so many others also failed -- too racially diverse of a workforce? Ironically, the night before, National Review's Mark Steyn and Hugh Hewitt agreed with one another that The Atlantic Monthly was forever destroyed as a journalistic entity because it employs Andrew Sullivan, whose writings about Sarah Palin are "a form of mental illness."

At roughly the same time, Law Professor Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds promoted this article by University of Oklahoma Professor David Deming, which described "Obama's thinly veiled hatred for this country's unique culture and institutions" and said he was "a hollow man that despises American culture," and the article predicted that "more Americans will come to this realization and elect McCain/Palin in a landslide." Professor Dunning explained that Sarah Palin compares favorably to Obama because she -- unlike he -- was "unassisted by affirmative action" and "is not embarrassed by being an American." Then, this shining light of the right-wing blogosphere lavished praise on that article in a post entitled "Alien Obama" and explained that "Barack Obama despises America and American values because he has never known or experienced them, as he did not grown up in a normal American culture"; that "Obama is un-American"; and that "(Obama) is not one of us" (Professor Reynolds then linked to that "analysis," too).

Yesterday, The Atlantic's Ross Douthat argued -- more or less persuasively -- that both presidential campaigns have decided, for different tactical reasons, that it's in their interests to ensure that the election entails no real substantive differences between the two candidates and that the election has therefore become "an election about nothing." Even if that's true, the need to banish the faction that has been driven by drooling, ugly cretins like these -- the people whose twisted mentality brought us torture and rampant lawlessness and endless authoritarian destruction and who crave still more of all of that (and economic crises always exacerbate hatemongering extremists and render their bile infinitely more dangerous) -- is, by itself, reason enough to care about the outcome.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/09/26/national_review/

Nazi slime-balls, these neo-cons...

Pigs.

like the Hispanic Teller counted out dollars as if they were pesos?

Cause and effect: Drinking water leads to alcohol abuse.

the investment banks failing?

lie. This is vile, vicious scapegoating of the kind that Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg indulged in.

The tsunami of public fury over how the GOP and their Wall Street owners have wrecked the economy frightens them. We see them now engaged in a ham-fisted effort to try to redirect that anger away from the GOP financial elite base, and pit working people against one another along racial divides.

It's possible they realize these tactics don't work as well as they used to, but they can't resist trying to squeeze a little bit more mileage out of one of their favorite wedge issues. Proving that it's not just the Republican brand that expired, it's the Republican product behind the brand. And they haven't yet come up with anything new to put out into the marketplace.

Regardless of what happens this November, this tactic has an increasingly limited shelf life (the changing national demographic alone tells us that), and like the Wall Street financial wizards who kept raking in the short term riches and ignoring that the game was destined to end in massive failure, the GOP with it's racial tactics is clinging to what's going to ultimately be a losing strategy.

Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Immigration_Studies

"The Southern Poverty Law Center has described the founder of CIS and many groups associated with it as linked to openly racist organizations."

RightWeb: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1452.html

CIS has also been critiqued as being part of a network of anti-immigrant groups that cater to a white supremacist constituency by right-wing economic libertarians who believe in the benefits of mass and unfettered immigration. A Wall Street Journal op-ed (June 15, 2004), that was widely praised and circulated by pro-immigrant groups, reported that despite the fact that CIS "may strike right-wing poses in the press," it and other like-minded groups "support big government, mock federalism, deride free markets, and push a cultural agenda abhorrent to any self-respecting social conservative." A follow-up article in the Wall Street Journal titled "Borderline Republicans" described the anti-immigration network this way: "CIS, FAIR, NumbersUSA, ProjectUSA-and more than a half-dozen similar groups that Republicans have become disturbingly comfortable with-were founded or funded (or both) by John Tanton. In addition to trying to stop immigration to the U.S., appropriate population control measures for Dr. Tanton and his network include promoting China's one-child policy, sterilizing Third World women, and wider use of RU-486." (5) Replying to this charge, Krikorian wrote in National Review Online that CIS does not take a "position on anything that does not involve U.S. immigration policy." (6)

real scumbags.....

Re "...Obama's thinly veiled hatred for this country's unique culture and institutions" and said he was "a hollow man that despises American culture,"

Barack Obama embodies the diversity of American culture. He is the very personification of the American dream, and he KNOWS that better than anyone! He said at the convention that his success would not have been possible in any other country.

I realize racist RW pundits like Reynolds hate diversity, but do that have to be so obvious about it?

:eyes: