Charles Lemos Poisons The Well

Former PUMA Chuckie Lemos is now blogging over at MyDD and he had this to say about the Rick Santelli video above:

After watching the above, I first had to check my calendar. Somehow I felt I traveled back in time to the early 1970s to witness first hand Richard Nixon’s “northern strategy,” his pursuit of white ethnic voters who were so deeply disaffected over Great Society programs ranging from desegregation (remember the Boston busing madness?) to affirmative action among others that they would desert the Democratic Party becoming “Nixon’s silent majority” and “Reagan Democrats”. As historian Joe Merton noted “Nixon possessed a keen awareness of the `ethnic revival’ of the early 1970s and engaged with specifically ethnic issues such as parochial school aid and ethnic heritage studies, and also shaped much of his early substantive policy to appeal to ethnics, culminating in the publication of the Rosow Report on blue-collar workers in May 1970.”

Rick Santelli is heir to this legacy laced with racist overtones.  Note the promo before the rant in the video link at CNBC. CNBC has an upcoming special entitled The Rise of America’s New Black Overclass.  Fear mongering, it’s worked before so let’s try it again. It’s back to the 1970s for the GOP and their rabid white ethnics.

Even when we disregard the factual inaccuracies (Nixon pursued a “southern strategy” and the Boston busing riots took place during the Ford administration) there is a major problem with Chuckie’s argument:  Santelli didn’t say anything remotely racist.

I’m not defending Santelli, I’m criticizing Chuckie for using a right-wing tactic to delegitimize opponents.  That tactic is called “poisoning the well“

Poisoning the well (or attempting to poison the well) is a logical fallacy where adverse information about a target is pre-emptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing everything that the target person is about to say. Poisoning the well is a special case of argumentum ad hominem, and the term was first used with this sense by John Henry Newman in his work Apologia Pro Vita Sua.

Rather than address Santelli on the merits, Chuckie accuses him of racism, thereby rendering anything Santelli says invalid.  To support this accusation Chuckie relates his own alleged experience with “white ethnics”

I spent a decade on Wall Street working for Alex. Brown & Sons, Deutsche Banc Securities and Goldman Sachs. I found Wall Street a largely liberal environment with one major exception, the trading floor. In my experience I found traders, who are largely white ethnics -Irish, Italian, Greek, Polish or Slovak among others- and graduates of the Seton Halls, the Boston Colleges, the Notre Dames, the Penn States were the most rabid conservative and foul mouthed people on the planet. 

Notice that Chuckie says they were foul mouthed rabid conservatives, but he doesn’t actually say they were racists.  However it’s obvious that we’re just supposed to infer that they are.  Poisoning the well is the same tactic used by right wingers when they accuse liberals of hating America.  Do we really want to be like them?

This isn’t the first time Chuckie has made false allegations of racism.  When he left the PUMA movement he falsely accused us of racism too.  But the real reason Chuckie left us was he concluded from polling data that Obama was going to defeat McCain and he wanted to jump on the bandwagon before it was too late.  (we still have the emails he sent)

But the only racism I see is Charles Lemos’ bigoted statements about “white ethnics.”

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UPDATE:

In a subsequent post Chuckie uses a common CDS tactic of recycling right-wing tropes to attack Bill Clinton:

Well, the President should tell it like it is and President Clinton is right that the President should talk to the public in greater detail about the economy and the President should never fail in assigning blame for the mess we face and that means placing some of it on Bill Clinton’s shoulders though obviously this is largely on the GOP.

I ain’t got no fancy Stanford degree but I know that Bill Clinton LEFT OFFICE EIGHT YEARS AGO.

Chuckie oughta ask Stanford for a refund of his tuition.  As my granny used to say “Iffen he’s so smart why ain’t he rich?”

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UPDATE II:

Chuckie is now deleting comments at MyDD challenging his factual inaccuracies, including some by Dakinkat, our Conflucian Professor of Economics.  Copies of some of the deleted comments can be found here.