Some racist insults are more newsworthy than others

Been on the road today and when I came home I found that an idiot had acted like an idiot and had received an idiots reward.

Here’s the despi­ca­ble racist tweet that got Uni­ver­sity of North Alabama player, Bradley Pat­ter­son, kicked off his team:

The tweet was brought to the University’s atten­tion after it was high­lighted by Deadspin.

Within the past sev­eral hours, Pat­ter­son deleted his Twit­ter account.

Good­bye and good riddance:

For­get­ting the stu­pid­ity, (assum­ing you have cable one could change the chan­nel to CNBC) this type of pub­lic racism deserves con­dem­na­tion and received it not just from Twitchy but from sites like Crooks and Liars:

How­ever, there was a seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion less taken with Obama’s speeech, espe­cially since it pre-​empted NBC’s cov­er­age of the 49ers/​Patriots game. A few of them took to Twit­ter to voice their com­plaints more…er…shall we say, colorfully.

I would offer a cou­ple of screen grabs of these tweets, but they vio­late our edi­to­r­ial stan­dards for hate lan­guage. Let us just say that there is some­thing so enrag­ing about miss­ing foot­ball that brings out the racists.

and Eclectablog

Uni­ver­sity of North Alabama kicks racist foot­ball player/​tweeter off the team

There is no ques­tion that this crossed a line and he deserves all he gets, but just a week ear­lier there was a dif­fer­ent involv­ing the same word said in pub­lic by an angry largely white crowd involv­ing destroyed prop­erty belong­ing to a fel­low named Clint Taver. I looked at Crooks and Liars to see how they reacted, after all an angry white crowd destroy­ing the prop­erty of a small black busi­ness man com­bined with racist state­ments spo­ken in per­son is much more seri­ous than a sin­gle tweet:

or not.

While Crooks and Liars finds Clint Taver not news­wor­thy in the least, Eclec­tablog did a bit bet­ter but their post was…interesting here is the title

A bit of truth-​telling about the Lans­ing “Hot Dog Guy” whose “cart was destroyed by union thugs”

As you might guess it goes down hill from there:

Nonethe­less, much like, Ken­neth Glad­ney, the St. Louis guy who faked get­ting injured at the hands of union mem­bers then solicited funds for his hos­pi­tal bills even though he had health insur­ance, a col­lec­tion has been taken up on Tarver’s behalf. Accord­ing the arti­cle, they have raised over $10,000 for him (UPDATE: MIRS News reports that it’s now over $16,000.) The total value of what he lost in the scuffle?

$500.

I won­der what they’ll do with the thou­sands of extra dol­lars not needed to buy more buns, hot dogs, ketchup, mus­tard and a cou­ple of fold­ing tables and coolers?

Appar­ently there is a deductible that must be applied when white lib­eral Union mem­bers cost a black man money. It’s also a poor reflec­tion on Mr Taver that strangers gave money in excess of his base expenses. Some­how that some­how makes it illegitimate.

After 12 para­graphs along these lines from the author we finally see this:

Cer­tainly Clint Tarver didn’t deserve to be treated as shab­bily as he was by the union folks there. His wife claims he was called a “nig­ger” and jeered for work­ing for the enemy. If true, that’s rep­re­hen­si­ble and inex­cus­able. But the off-​the-​charts poutrage from the right on this is an absolute joke. Some of the same peo­ple decry­ing the ver­bal taunts that Tarver expe­ri­encde are here on this very web­site call­ing union mem­bers all sorts of hideous names. So let’s keep it real, shall we?

By this stan­dard the foot­ball player on Twit­ter shouldn’t have been kicked off the team because so many peo­ple on the left have hit Michelle Malkin with racist & sex­ist slurs.

But maybe because what hap­pened to Clint Taver is all about an evil con­ser­v­a­tive plan to dis­tract the public:

Let’s not kid our­selves about what “Tent­gate” and “Hot Dog­gate” are all about: dis­tract­ing the coun­try from notic­ing that cor­po­ratist ide­o­logues have turned the birth­place of Amer­i­can orga­nized labor into a Right to Work for Less state.

I sub­mit and sug­gest that if Mr Taver had been a demo­c­rat and the peo­ple involved Tea Party mem­bers this would not con­sider it a “distraction”.

But then again, I sus­pect the stan­dards being used are based upon the Obama/​Liberal ver­sion of the Bill of rights so I don’t expect better.

And for the record I’m sure con­ser­v­a­tives would LOVE peo­ple to see what Michi­gan had done, because as time passes the ben­e­fits for peo­ple in Michi­gan will be appar­ent for all to see.