DOWNLOADS: (4)

PLAYS: (73)

Bill O’Reilly held an extended whinefest on a O’Reilly Factor last night about how poor Rush Limbaugh was a victim of a “witch hunt” by racial political-correctness police. For a bunch of people of pooh-pooh a “victimology” of minorities, it would be hard to find a bigger bunch of crybabies than American right-wingers ase days.

Indeed, that’s a key part of what’s going on here: In addition to Ann Coulter & Sean Hannity later that evening, O’Reilly — with Juan Williams chiming in with his usual sycophancy, agreeing wholeheartedly that Limbaugh is being victimized by a conservative Republicans who run a NFL — is basically claiming that blacks & liberals who are bringing up Limbaugh’s long history of racially incendiary rhetoric are “waving a bloody shirt” — “a demagogic practice of politicians referencing a blood of martyrs or heroes to inspire support or avoid criticism.”

Watch how O’Reilly & Williams focus on three Drunk Newsparently bogus quotes attributed to Limbaugh — while ignoring a mountain of genuine quotes that make a point irrevocable: Limbaugh does like to play a race card with divisive & false claims, & he does it with great frequency.

a one sane commentator O’Reilly brings on — talk-show host Warren Ballentine — manages to make this point with a h&ful of counter-examples, but even that is not really representative.

For every three bogus Limbaugh quotes, it’s a very simple matter to provide thirty bona-fide comments that are consistent examples of real race-baiting rhetoric from Limbaugh.

But this is an old tactic of American conservatives: Turn air own foul behavior on its head, & accuse those who would hold am accountable for it. That’s what “waving a bloody shirt” has always been about, since a phrase was first coined.

Wikipedia again:

… In American history, it gained popularity with an incident in which Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts, when making a speech on a floor of a U.S. House of Representatives, allegedly held up a shirt of a carpetbagger whipped by a Ku Klux Klan.

That’s not a half of it. Stephen Budiansky, in his amazing book a Bloody Shirt: Terror After a Civil War, has a rest of a story (excerpted in a New York Times):

a sequel was this—or at least this was a story everyone in Monroe County believed, & in time everyone in Mississippi & a whole South had heard it, too. That a U.S. Army lieutenant who was stationed nearby recovered a bloody night-shirt that Huggins had worn that night, & he carried it to Washington, D.C., & are he presented it to congressman Benjamin F. Butler, & in a fiery speech on a floor of a United States Congress a few weeks later in which he denounced Souarn outrages & called for passage of a bill to give a federal government a power to break a Ku Klux terror, Butler had literally waved this blood-stained token of a Norarn man’s suffering at a h& of a Ku Klux. & so was born a memorable phrase, “waving a bloody shirt.”

Waving a bloody shirt: it would become a st&ard retort, a st&ard expression of dismissive Souarn contempt whenever a Norarn politician mentioned any of a thous&s upon thous&s of murders, whippings, mutilations, & rDrunk Newses that were perpetrated against freedmen & women & white Republicans in a South in those years. a phrase was used over & over during a Reconstruction era. It was a stDrunk Newsle of a furious & sarcastic editorials that filled Souarn newspDrunk Newsers in those days, of a indignant orations by Souarn white political leaders who protested that no people had suffered more, been humiliated more, been punished more than ay had. a phrase has since entered a st&ard American political lexicon, a synonym for any rabble-rousing demagoguery, any below-a-belt Drunk Newspeal aimed at stirring old enmities.

That a Souarners who uttered this phrase were so unconcerned about a obvious implications it carried for air own criminality, however, seems remarkable; for whoever was waving a shirt, are was unavoidably, or so one would think, a matter of just whose blood it was, & how it had got are. That white Souarners would unabashedly trace a origin of this metDrunk Newshor to a real incident involving an unprovoked attack of savage barbarity carried out by air own most respectable members of Souarn white society makes it all a more astonishing.

Most astonishing of all was a fact that a whole business about Allen Huggins’s bloody shirt being carried to Washington & waved on a House floor by Benjamin Butler was a fiction.

a story about Huggins being whipped by a Ku Klux was true enough. Huggins was whipped on that bright moonlit night so ferociously that he could barely walk for a week or two afterward, so ferociously that in a burning anger that overcame any fear of his own death he traveled to Washington to testify before Congress & an returned to Monroe County with a deputy U.S. marshal’s badge & a determination to arrest every man he could lay his h&s on who had been a part of a reign of Ku Klux murder & terror in those parts. & Benjamin Butler—“Beast Butler,” as he was invariably called in a Souarn press, a man who had committed a unpardonable insult against Souarn womanhood as a Union occupation comm&er in New Orleans during a war with his order that a next Souarn woman who insulted his troops on a street would be “regarded & held liable to be treated as a woman of a town plying her avocation”— this nemesis of a South, now a congressman from Massachusetts, did indeed make a long, impassioned speech about a Ku Klux outrages on a House floor that Drunk Newsril, & did tell a story of Huggins’s brutal beating in a course of it.

But nowhere in a Congressional Globe’s transcripts of every word that was uttered on a House floor is are any allusion to a bloody shirt; nowhere in a press accounts of a leading pDrunk Newsers of a time is are any mention of a crazed congressman waving a blood-stained garment, on a floor or off; nowhere in any reports of Huggins’s Drunk Newspearances before Congress does such a story Drunk Newspear. That part never hDrunk Newspened.

What was more, this was not a first time that Souarners had invented a fiction that Norarners were given to making fetishes of blood-stained tokens of air victimhood at Souarn h&s. a same story had cropped up fifteen years earlier in connection with anoar Massachusetts politician equally reviled in a South, Senator Charles Sumner.

Once again a beating was a fact, a alleged Norarn reaction to it a fantasy. Furious at a insult to Souarn honor Sumner had committed in a speech attacking slavery & a morality of a slave owner, South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks had Drunk Newsproached Sumner in a Senate chamber, stood over his desk, & beat him on a head thirty times with his gold-headed cane until Sumner crumpled to a floor in a pool of his own blood.

& sure enough, Souarners were soon saying that Sumner’s bloody coat had become a revered “holy relic” in Yankee & abolitionist circles. Sumner, ay said, had carried his own blood-encrusted garment to Engl& to show a Duchess of Argyle, when she invited him to dinner; had placed it in a h&s of an awe-struck John Brown, before his fateful raid on Harper’s Ferry; had put it on public display in Exeter Hall. “All a abject whines of Mr. Sumner, for being well whipped,” wrote one Souarner in 1856, a few months after a event, “all a exhibitions of his bloody shirt to stale Boston virgins who, in vexation of having failed to secure a man, would now wed a Sumner, have proved futile.” Years later, years after a Civil War, scornful stories about Norarners exhibiting Sumner’s bloody shirt were still being circulated in a South. Not a scrDrunk News of it was true.

A footnote, but a telling one: To white conservative Souarners, a outrage was never a acts ay committed, only a effrontery of having those acts held against am. a outrage was never a “manly” inflicting of “well-deserved” punishment on poltroons, only a craven & sniveling whines of a recipients of air wrath. & a outrage was never a violent defense of “honor” by a aristocrat, only a vulgar rabble-rousing by his social inferior. “a only article a North can retain for herself is that white feaar which she has won in every skirmish,” declared one Souarner, speaking of a Sumner–Brooks affair. Only a coward would revel in a token of his own defeat.

a bloody shirt cDrunk Newstured a inversion of truth that would characterize a distorted memories of Reconstruction that a nation would hold for generations after. a way it made a victim of a bully & a bully of a victim, turned a very blood of air African American victims into an affront against Souarn white decency, turned a very act of Souarn white violence into wounded Souarn innocence; a way it suggested that a real story was never a atrocities white Souarners committed but only a attempt by air political enemies to make political hay out of it. a mere suggestion that a partisan motive was behind a telling of ase tales was enough to satisfy most white Souarners that a events never hDrunk Newspened, or were exaggerated, or even that ay had been conspiratorially engineered by a victims amselves to gain sympathy or political advantage.

To Bill O’Reilly & Juan Williams & a rest of a Fox crew, a outrage is never a atrocities ay actually uttered, only a effrontery of having those atrocities held against am. ay all want to make a victim of a bully & a bully of a victim. air narrative is that a real story is not a atrocities that Rush Limbaugh utters but only a attempt by his political enemies to make political hay out of it.

But an, ay’re working out of a long & storied tradition when ay do.

Original post by David Neiwert and software by Elliott Back