White House Counselor Kellyann Conway asks reporter, "What is your ethnicity?"

[jserraglio]

CNN ANALYSIS & OPINION

by Chris Cillizza

Kellyanne Conway prides herself on her combativeness with the press. It's a trait that has long endeared her to President Donald Trump and kept her in his ever-shrinking inner circle of advisers.
But on Tuesday afternoon, she went too far -- even for her.
Witness this exchange between Conway and Breakfast Media White House correspondent Andrew Feinberg regarding Trump's racist tweets over the weekend:
FEINBERG: Following up on the previous question: If the President was not telling these four congresswomen to return to their supposed countries of origin, to which countries was he referring?
CONWAY: What's your ethnicity?
FEINBERG: Um. Why is that relevant?
CONWAY: No, no -- because I'm asking a question. My ancestors are from Ireland and Italy.
FEINBERG: My own ethnicity is not relevant to the question I'm asking.
CONWAY: No no, it is, because you're asking, he said originally, he said originally from.
FEINBERG: But you know I'm asking --
CONWAY: But you know everything he has said since and to have a full conversation --
FEINBERG: So are you saying that the President was telling the Palestinian [inaudible] to go back to—[crosstalk]
CONWAY: The President's already commented on that and he's said a lot about this since that one tweet. He's put out a lot of tweets and he made himself available to all of you yesterday --
FEINBERG: No, just to the pool.
CONWAY: He's tired. A lot of us are sick and tired in this country of America coming last. To people who swore an oath of office.
What. The. Actual. Hell.
This is not a conversation that happened on some Trump subreddit. These are the words of the White House senior counselor. This conversation happened on the White House grounds. The year is 2019.
This is, in a word, outrageous. What possible relevance does Feinberg's ethnicity have to do with the question he asked? Trump's Sunday tweets suggested that four Democratic congresswomen should go back to the countries where they were from. In the case of three of them -- Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York), Ayanna Pressley (Massachusetts) and Rashida Tlaib (Michigan) that country is the United States. (Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota was born in Somalia but is now a naturalized US citizen.) The question by Feinberg was designed -- presumably -- to force Conway to address the fact that the President of the United States had told four American citizens to go back home.
Where Feinberg's ancestors hailed from matters not at all. To the question or to Conway's answer to the question.
I'd be loath to put myself in her head, but my guess is that she was simply trying to be confrontational and provocative. To give a reporter a taste of his own medicine. But the way it came off was far, far different. Go back and read the exchange: It feels as though Conway is asking for proof of some sort of lineage before she is willing to answer the question from Feinberg.
Within hours of saying what she said, Conway was insisting that she didn't mean what she had in fact said.
"This was meant with no disrespect," she tweeted. "We are all from somewhere else 'originally'. I asked the question to answer the question and volunteered my own ethnicity: Italian and Irish. Like many, I am proud of my ethnicity, love the USA & grateful to God to be an American."
Uh, OK.
That Conway actually uttered the words "what's your ethnicity" to a reporter -- and refused to drop her line of inquiry -- amid an ongoing racial firestorm sparked by Trump's own willingness to tell non-white members of Congress to go back where you came from is stunning, even coming, as it did, from an administration that has repeatedly shown there simply is no bottom.
Conway, Trump and the like can try to spin what she said -- and what she meant -- all they want. But go and read the exchange. And then use some common sense about what Conway was getting at. Unreal.
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[lennygoran]

I prefer what her hubby had to say! Regards, Len

George Conway: Trump is a racist president


George T. Conway III is a lawyer in New York.

To this day, I can remember almost the precise spot where it happened: a supermarket parking lot in eastern Massachusetts. It was the mid-1970s; I was not yet a teenager, or barely one. I don’t remember exactly what precipitated the woman’s ire. But I will never forget what she said to my mother, who had come to this country from the Philippines decades before. In these words or something close, the woman said, “Go back to your country.”

I remember the incident well, but it never bothered me all that much. Nor did racial slurs, which, thankfully, were rare. None of it was troublesome, to my mind, because most Americans weren’t like that. The woman in the parking lot was just a boor, an ignoramus, an aberration. America promised equality. Its constitution said so. My schoolbooks said so. The country wasn’t perfect, to be sure. But its ideals were. And every day brought us closer to those ideals.

To a young boy, it seemed like long ago that a descendant of slaves had prophesied, five days before I was born, that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” We would be there soon enough, if we weren’t there already. I couldn’t understand why colleges required applicants to check boxes for race or ethnicity. I’m also part Irish and Scottish. What box should I check? Should I check one at all? Will that help me or hurt me? Never mind, not to worry, those boxes would someday soon be gone.
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How naive a child could be. The woman in the parking lot — there were many more like her, it turned out. They never went away. Today they attend rallies, and they post ugliness on Facebook or Twitter. As for the victims of historic racial oppression, no matter how much affirmative action (or reverse discrimination, or whatever you want to call it) the nation offered, they, too, had resentments that never went away — in part because of people like the parking-lot woman. Those resentments often led to more, not fewer, charges of racism as the years passed — charges of institutional racism and “white privilege.”



Which, in turn, bred another kind of resentment: Why, asked many an unaffluent white parent, who may never have uttered a racial slur or whose ancestors may never have held anyone in bondage, does my child have to check a box to her detriment, or be accused of “white privilege,” when the only privilege she has received came from the sweat of my brow? Why are people like me being called racist, when all I’ve done was mind my own business?

And how naive an adult could be. The birther imaginings about Barack Obama? Just a silly conspiracy theory, latched onto by an attention seeker who has a peculiar penchant for them. The “Mexican” Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel incident? Asinine, inappropriate, a terrible attack on the judiciary by an egocentric man who imagined that the judge didn’t like him. The white supremacists’ march in Charlottesville? The president’s comments were absolutely idiotic, but he couldn’t possibly have been referring to those self-described Nazis as “good people”; in his sloppy, inarticulate way, he was referring to both sides of the debate over Civil War statues, and venting his anger about being criticized.

No, I thought, President Trump was boorish, dim-witted, inarticulate, incoherent, narcissistic and insensitive. He’s a pathetic bully but an equal-opportunity bully — in his uniquely crass and crude manner, he’ll attack anyone he thinks is critical of him. No matter how much I found him ultimately unfit, I still gave him the benefit of the doubt about being a racist. No matter how much I came to dislike him, I didn’t want to think that the president of the United States is a racial bigot.

But Sunday left no doubt. Naivete, resentment and outright racism, roiled in a toxic mix, have given us a racist president. Trump could have used vile slurs, including the vilest of them all, and the intent and effect would have been no less clear. Telling four non-white members of Congress — American citizens all, three natural-born — to “go back” to the “countries” they “originally came from”? That’s racist to the core. It doesn’t matter what these representatives are for or against — and there’s plenty to criticize them for — it’s beyond the bounds of human decency. For anyone, not least a president.



What’s just as bad, though, is the virtual silence from Republican leaders and officeholders. They’re silent not because they agree with Trump. Surely they know better. They’re silent because, knowing that he’s incorrigible, they have inured themselves to his wild statements; because, knowing that he’s a fool, they don’t really take his words seriously and pretend that others shouldn’t, either; because, knowing how damaging Trump’s words are, the Republicans don’t want to give succor to their political enemies; because, knowing how vindictive, stubborn and obtusely self-destructive Trump is, they fear his wrath.

But none of that is good enough. Trump is not some random, embittered person in a parking lot — he’s the president of the United States. By virtue of his office, he speaks for the country. What’s at stake now is more important than judges or tax cuts or regulations or any policy issue of the day. What’s at stake are the nation’s ideals, its very soul.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... 597b8da2c6

[jserraglio]

Surely you are not suggesting that the person who once sword danced with Saudi kings is, like the parking-lot madam, "just a boor, an ignoramus, an aberration". That would amount to an act of lèse-majesté.

[lennygoran]

Surely you are not suggesting that the person who once sword danced with Saudi kings is, like the parking-lot madam, "just a boor, an ignoramus, an aberration". That would amount to an act of lèse-majesté.

I suggest we see more of these!

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ta ... y-n1030686

Regards, Len

[jserraglio]

Ancient Igbo proverb: He that sups with courtesans shall not break bread with kings.

[barney]

Not sure about that one. A lot of kings have spent a lot of time in the company of courtesans.