Just a reminder that other than influencing men to wear sharp suits, skinny ties and fedoras, and perhaps reintroducing the Old Fashioned cocktail back into the vernacular, AMC’s Mad Men series really wasn’t meant to be a how-to guide for life.
Mad Men episodes take their time getting there, but there are always one or two scenes of high drama – and often racial confrontation – per episode. In last week’s episode, taking place on Valentine’s Day 1969, after a personnel dispute involving two of the black secretaries at Sterling Cooper & Partners, Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks), still working as office manager despite being a partner in the firm, shuffles the women around, placing one of them as receptionist. On his way out of the office for the evening, Bert Cooper (played by veteran actor Robert Morse), the eponymous founder of the agency, notices the new receptionist, smiles courtly at her, and then promptly goes back inside, confronting Joan in her office:
Bert: I just wanted to say that, I was on my way to the club, and I noticed that there’s been a change in reception.
Joan: I had to shuffle the girls.
Bert: Well, I’m all for the national advancement of colored people, but I do not believe they should advance all the way to the front of this office. People can see her from the elevator.
Joan: I’m sorry. Do you want me to dismiss her based on the color of her skin?
Bert: I said nothing of the kind. I’m merely suggesting a rearrangement of your rearrangement.
Joan: Suggesting?
Bert: Requesting.
Bert shuffles off, leaving a clearly frustrated Joan to sort out of the mess.
Flash-forward back to 2014 and the mess that L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling created for himself, breaking today. Showbiz gossip Website TMZ has audio allegedly of a conversation between Sterling and his girlfriend, in which Sterling demands that, as TMZ paraphrases, “he does NOT want her bringing black people to his games … including Magic Johnson”:
TMZ Sports has obtained audio of Sterling making the racist declaration during a heated argument on April 9th with V. Stiviano … after she posted a photo on Instagram posing with Magic.
Sterling rails on Stiviano — who ironically is black and Mexican — for putting herself out in public with a black person (she has since taken the pic down). But it doesn’t end there. You have to listen to the audio to fully grasp the magnitude of Sterling’s racist worldview. Among the comments:
— “It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people. Do you have to?” (3:30)
— “You can sleep with [black people]. You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want. The little I ask you is not to promote it on that … and not to bring them to my games.” (5:15)
— “I’m just saying, in your lousy f******* Instagrams, you don’t have to have yourself with, walking with black people.” (7:45)
— “…Don’t put him [Magic] on an Instagram for the world to have to see so they have to call me. And don’t bring him to my games.” (9:13)
As those time indicators hint, it’s nine minutes of crude psychobabble, and Sterling’s strangely petulant and whining voice. Or as Donald Douglas writes at his American Power blog, “Liberal Democrat Donald Sterling Caught on Tape Screaming Ugly Racist Epithets,” along with the rest of the story, not reported in the shock TMZ article:
It’s been almost like clockwork this last couple of weeks. Leftist got a squirrelly reprieve with the fake Cliven Bundy sideshow, but then the left gets back on track with their racist repertoire of hate. Seriously. It’s too good. You just can’t make up these far-left Democrat Party supporting leftists spewing vile racial epithets, all caught on tape. Clockwork baby.
I say it all the time: the Democrat Party is the country’s natural home to racists and ethnic eliminationists. And now we have über liberal real estate mogul and sports owner, Democrat Party contributor and philanthropist, Donald T. Sterling in the news with yet another case of vile leftist racial hatred.
Douglas notes that Sterling has supported Democrats Gray Davis (the disastrous former governor of California) and Bill Bradley, the somnambulistic former senator and 2000 presidential candidate.
Additionally, Douglas quotes articles from leftwing journalists at the L.A. Times and the Huffington Post each accusing Sterling of racism:
A Google search with the name Donald Sterling and racial discrimination found nearly 12,000 results. Not one of them even remotely had Sterling doing anything to further racial goodwill. The checklist of reported Sterling racial escapades include a Justice Department housing discrimination lawsuit and forced settlement, slurs and gaffes against Hispanics and African-Americans, and that includes two high profile Clipper players, the shooing of minorities away from his pricey Beverly Hills condos and rentals, and an overblown and failed promise to build a Homeless shelter on L.A.s skid row. Then there’s the allegations and lawsuit by former Clipper General Manager Elgin Baylor that Sterling runs his operations like a Southern plantation.
“So, enjoy watching the sick racist Democrats squirm under the news of Sterling’s racism. That is, until the next distraction squirrel! runs our from the bushes,” Douglas concludes.
In 1962, George Preston Marshall (a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1932 and 1936) was the owner of the Washington Redskins and a stone cold racist — he was the last owner of the NFL to integrate his team, under the orders of NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle and Bobby Kennedy (in-between wiretapping Martin Luther King). If the TMZ tape is accurate, how can someone own a professional basketball team in 2014 and display that level of racism?
Sterling’s not-so-sterling leftwing worldview is merely a symptom of a much larger disease. After you’ve read Douglas’ post, checkout Jonah Goldberg’s latest G-File, in which, as he puts it “America Eats Itself,” noting that “America’s elite culture is in the painful throes of an ongoing autoimmune crisis,” Jonah concludes.
Update: As Jonah would say — though I may have the spelling slightly off — Schwheeeeoooooo:
NAACP was set to honor both Donald Sterling AND Al Sharpton. At least their total lack of judgment is colorblind. http://t.co/oFVZG1DHb7
— Popehat (@Popehat) April 26, 2014
More at the Daily Caller: “Race hate spewing Clippers owner is Democratic donor.”
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