Reince Prieus Said What!

The day before yesterday Reince Priebus announced that the Republican National Committee (RNC) would not allow the Republican Primary debates to be on either NBC or CNN because the entertainment division of NBC was planning on doing a movie of Hillary Clinton’s life, with an actress playing the role of Hillary, and CNN was to do a documentary on Hillary.  Neither of these two enterprises has even been written yet, and already the Republicans are complaining.  Priebus’ reasoning is that he wants to control the debates, and if these two stations air these two programs, he will know that they do not have the best interests of the Republican Party in mind.  On Morning Joe, Priebus actually insulted the objectivity of journalist Mika Brezinski because she is a Democrat, and said he would never have her moderate a debate.

Those two stations do not have the best interests of the Republican Party in mind?  What absolute gall.  Since when does a political party dictate to a member of the Fourth Estate what they can and can’t do?  In my mind this was absolutely outrageous.  We all know that big-moneyed interests put pressure on all of the media all of the time, but at least it is behind closed doors.  But the fact that Priebus seemed to think that the RNC had the right to dictate what NBC and CNN could or could not air was scandalous in the extreme. 

On 1/25/13 I posted “The Divine Right of Republicans”.  Here is an excerpt: 

“But I think the one thing that irritates me the most has been the Republican’s constant ploy to insist that every time President Obama or any other Democrat makes a statement that is contrary to what the Republicans want, the Republicans start whining that the statement is divisive.  Divisive?  Why?  Because it isn’t what the Republicans wanted to hear?  What they want from the President and every other Democrat in office is a strict adherence to the Republican’s talking points.  President Obama’s Inauguration speech was what the people who voted for him by a 5 million vote margin wanted to hear.  It was not divisive from the people’s perspective. The Republicans know that if they can ruin the economy, keep the Democrats out of office by gerrymandering Congressional districts, suppressing the vote, or any of the other shenanigans the Republicans have come up with, then they can rule. 

After all, it is the Divine Right of Republicans to rule.” 

Some of the pundits on MSNBC are also concerned about this announcement from the perspective that if Hillary Clinton does run and wins, the station will be accused of trying to influence the outcome, and if she loses, then they can crow about it.  I understand this concern, but I believe the larger concern is that the RNC actually believed that their threat was OK to issue.  What is it with these people?  

There is a history behind this attitude.  Early on while we were still a colony of England, the Puritans believed that the United States was the New Jerusalem, and that God had led them to establish the true faith on these shores.  Eventually this morphed into the United States being a city on a hill; a beacon of freedom to the whole world; we were an exceptional country because of this.  In the 19^th century Rudyard Kipling coined the phrase, “The white man’s burden”.  The definition of this phrase is: “The alleged duty of the white race to care for subject peoples of other races in its colonial possessions.”  Americans latched onto this phrase as justification for taking away the lands traditionally belonging to Native Americans for the Americans own purposes.   

Ronald Reagan expanded on this theme by calling the United States a “shining city on a hill”, and by stating that the United States must be prepared to fight the brown hoards threatening to bring the evils of Communism from Central, particularly El Salvador and Guatemala, and South America over the border from Mexico.  After President Obama was elected we kept hearing from the Tea Partiers, etc., that we needed to take our country back.  My question then, as now, is, take it back from whom?  Obviously from people of color, whether they are American citizens or not.  And if someone of color is elected President, then obviously he must have been born someplace else, and thus is not qualified to be President, according to the Constitution. 

There is nothing we can do about American history to change it.  It is our history, like it or not.  But it behooves ever thinking American to really study not just the events of our history, but the thinking and motives behind them, because if we allow a group of people who think it is their God-given destiny to rule, we, as a nation are in deep….yogurt.