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Is this politician Racist?

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Anonymous

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Michigan GOP official: ‘Herd all the Indians’ to Detroit, build a fence and throw in corn


By Toyacoyah Brown on January 22, 2014


A Republican county official in Michigan is in hot water after making racial comments about Detroit, including the idea that the city should be turned into a detention center for “all the Indians.”

In a recent interview for a profile by The New Yorker titled “Drop Dead, Detroit!” Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson admitted, “Anytime I talk about Detroit, it will not be positive. Therefore, I’m called a Detroit basher. The truth hurts, you know? Tough sh*t.”

Patterson also proposed a fix to Detroit’s financial problems: Turn the city into a reservation for Native Americans.

“I made a prediction a long time ago, and it’s come to pass. I said, ‘What we’re gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and then throw in the blankets and the corn.’”

After Detroit officials and activists reacted with outrage, Patterson’s office released a statement accusing The New Yorker of having an “agenda.”

“It is clear Paige Williams had an agenda when she interviewed County Executive Patterson,” the statement said. “She cast him in a false light in order to fit her preconceived and outdated notions about the region.”

Activists with Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network had planned a news conference on Tuesday to call for Patterson to apologize.


Read more: http://www.powwows.com/2014/01/22/michigan-gop-official-herd-all-the-indians-to-detroit-build-a-fence-and-throw-in-corn/#ixzz2uXj0bNMO

This picked up a lot of activity on my local FB page yesterday-- with everyone outraged about it... Maybe this is because we have interacted with the Indians for so long with them owning farms, ranchs, business's, and so many in my area are related to Native American Indians... Also locally we don't have as many nutcases that want to create anarchy and refight the wars of a century and a half ago...These type of folks like Nugent and this guy- that the Tea Party seems to adore- are the exception and not the norm in my part of the world...

But I thought the best comment came from a lady from Alabama who commented "OMG. And I thought only politicians in Alabama could be this bad."
 

Mike

Well-known member
What he’s saying is that people have been promised things in Detroit in much the same way they were on Indian reservations. Read the whole thing and extended articles. It’s more or less a statement on the broken promises of government. With so many decades of failure – it’s an analogy – how Detroit has been treated is much like how the Indians were once treated.
:roll: :roll:

He is a VERY well respected Executive. And FAR from being a racist.

http://www.oakgov.com/exec/Pages/about/patterson.aspx

Sorry, OT. You need to stop reading Borowitz, you've gotten your satire mixed up with reality. :lol: :lol:
 

Tam

Well-known member
How many Conservatives do you think have Friended Oldtimer on FB? :? :lol:

I'm willing to bet that all those Liberals that were once here bragging about Obama and left because they can no longer defend their FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT'S action are hiding out on FB where they and Oldtimer can control who is allowed to read/comment on their re-writing of History where Republicans are ALL members of the KKK and do not want Blacks or anyone else to have their CIVIL rights and be able to Vote and are limiting all women's rights to Birth Control. And feeding on the PARTS of the stories that eases their guilt for voting for a guy because of his SKIN COLOR.
 

Martin Jr.

Well-known member
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January 21, 2014 at 1:00 am
Nolan Finley: In defense of L. Brooks Patterson

Nolan Finley
247
Comments
Purchase Image Zoom Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson. (John T. Greilick / The Detroit News)I’ve always said if Brooks Patterson weren’t so quotable, he’d be governor, or a U.S. senator, or who knows what.

The Oakland County executive is the greatest political talent of the last half-century in Michigan. But every time he opens his mouth it’s an adventure. No political foe has hurt Brooks over the years as much as he’s hurt himself with unchecked quips and quotes.

He can’t help it. If something funny or clever pops into his head, he has to let it out of his mouth or burst.

So is anyone really surprised that Brooks finds himself in the hot seat again for untoward remarks about the city of Detroit?

The comments were made to a reporter from New Yorker magazine who, Brooks says, also dug out eye-popping comments dating back 30 years to oh-so-neatly fit the narrative that Brooks is a Detroit-bashing racist running against the current in denying the city’s comeback.

It’s pure bullwhacky. I know Brooks well enough not to doubt he fed the reporter a notebook full of juicy quotes, each one begging to be a headline. He’s unfiltered, and it never seems to occur to him how his words might look in print.

The words make a better story than the reality of what Brooks Patterson has meant to this region, and to Detroit.

The economic strength and sound management of Patterson’s Oakland County kept Metro Detroit breathing during the Great Recession, when everything else here was collapsing.

In those long years before downtown Detroit was a cool place to be, Patterson’s Oakland County provided the region with a de facto center, offering the housing, shopping and entertainment essential for attracting jobs and residents.

While other political leaders were going to jail and marching their communities to insolvency, Patterson was running an ethical, competent administration recognized nationally for its innovation. His stable leadership kept this region from being written off as a third-world outpost.

Patterson took heat for demanding a greater suburban voice on the Cobo Hall authority. But the governing model he pushed for has changed Cobo from an ATM for crooked politicians and greedy unions into a beautiful, money-making convention center.

He’s making similar demands of the new water authority, and rate payers in southeast Michigan better hope he gets it.

Does Brooks harbor some deep animosity toward Detroit? I don’t believe it. I was there last week at the Detroit Economic Club when he extended his hand to new Mayor Mike Duggan and said, “whatever I can do, call me.”

He made a similar pledge to former Mayor Dave Bing, offering to loan the city his crackerjack finance team to straighten out the city’s books.

He is resentful of the notion that he should sacrifice the interests of Oakland County for the good of Detroit. That’s not what he was elected to do. His ego does get bruised when Detroit overshadows Oakland — he once complained to me the media yawns at a new half-billion dollar office development in his county, but gives the opening of a pancake house in Detroit four days of coverage.

And he sometimes can’t help but gloat when comparing the government of Detroit to the one he runs. That can lead him to say insensitive things.

This time, he told the New Yorker (the New Yorker? What was he thinking?) he warns his children not to stop for gasoline in Detroit. Well guess what? After education activist Sharlonda Buckman had her car stolen from a station at gunpoint last fall, I heard a lot of people — black, white, Detroiters and suburbanites — say the same thing.

As for his comment about the fulfillment of an old prediction he made that Detroit would become the equivalent of an Indian reservation, with the people waiting for corn and blankets to be tossed in, well, the remark was crude, but not far off the mark. Get off the freeways and drive into the city’s neighborhoods. You’ll see vast wastelands of blight and abandonment, with a population largely dependent on government hand-outs.

Brooks is blunt. He talks too much. The things he says can make us cringe. He’s also honest, effective and totally committed to his people.

I’ll take a leader who sometimes puts his foot in his mouth over one that can’t keep his hands out of my pocket any day.
 

TexasBred

Well-known member
Mike said:
What he’s saying is that people have been promised things in Detroit in much the same way they were on Indian reservations. Read the whole thing and extended articles. It’s more or less a statement on the broken promises of government. With so many decades of failure – it’s an analogy – how Detroit has been treated is much like how the Indians were once treated.
:roll: :roll:

He is a VERY well respected Executive. And FAR from being a racist.

http://www.oakgov.com/exec/Pages/about/patterson.aspx

Sorry, OT. You need to stop reading Borowitz, you've gotten your satire mixed up with reality. :lol: :lol:

Mike that should send his old ass back into hibernation. :wink:
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Mike said:
What he’s saying is that people have been promised things in Detroit in much the same way they were on Indian reservations. Read the whole thing and extended articles. It’s more or less a statement on the broken promises of government. With so many decades of failure – it’s an analogy – how Detroit has been treated is much like how the Indians were once treated.
:roll: :roll:

He is a VERY well respected Executive. And FAR from being a racist.

http://www.oakgov.com/exec/Pages/about/patterson.aspx

Sorry, OT. You need to stop reading Borowitz, you've gotten your satire mixed up with reality. :lol: :lol:

He may be- but he is an idiot... No executive/politician comes out making those type of remarks about fencing in anyone-- let alone Native American Indians and "throwing them in blankets and corn"... Either that or he is illiterate to his history of the reservations...

As you can see by the comments after the article- everyone sees it as an extremist racist statement and no analogy complimentary to Indians.... Definitely does nothing to the Republican cause of building a big tent to win national elections...

But as the lady on my page indicated- being from Alabama its not surprising you wouldn't.... :wink: :( :( :cry:
 

Mike

Well-known member
No OT. YOU are the idiot. Believing "Everyone" when they don't know the context is proof.


Two years ago, Patterson got what should have been a stiff challenge from Kevin Howley. A Huntington Woods resident with two small kids, Howley is a Harvard MBA who also has a Masters’ in public policy and a record as CEO and chief financial officer of a number of traditional and high-tech, venture capital firms.

Patterson, meanwhile, spent much of the campaign in a coma (this was kept from the voters) as a result of an August 2012 car crash in which neither he nor his driver was wearing a seat belt. Yet on election night, Patterson cruised to victory.

It was a personal triumph. Oakland County residents were once heavily Republican, but they are largely educated, sophisticated and have increasingly turned away from the intolerant women- and gay-bashing national party. They haven’t voted GOP for president in two decades.

But they sent Brooks back by the usual landslide, 57 to 43 percent. Now 75, Patterson has already said he means to run again in two years. Much of his popularity stems from the county’s huge economic success. Howley tried to make a case that this was built on smoke and mirrors and the slowly evaporating legacy of the past, but no one would listen.

They listened big time, however, when Patterson showed up between the pages of America’s snootiest magazine. The comment that got the most attention was: “What we’re going to do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation where we herd all the Indians into the city, build a fence around it, and throw in the blankets and corn.”

Everyone freaked out — except me. I remembered very well the first time I read that Brooks had said those words, and I checked to make sure I was right. It was in the now-extinct Detroit Free Press Sunday Magazine for Sept. 21, 1975.

Thirty-eight-plus years ago, in other words! President Obama was then 14. Lt. Gov. Brian Calley wasn’t even a fetus.

Worlds change, nations disappear, but Brooks goes on being Brooks. This was one of his golden oldies. I don’t doubt he said it again, or the other things.

However — nobody should be surprised. Yes, that saying is outrageous, so much so that nobody really believes he means it. Patterson is, indeed, often the clown prince of local politics.

Much of the time, he behaves the way my dog does when my sweetheart plays with her little granddaughter: Hey! Pay attention to me too! But to their credit, The New Yorker article — and Patterson himself — are more complex than the news coverage seems. The fact is that even if you disagree with his love of urban sprawl — and I do — his administration has done some good and forward-looking things in Oakland County.

The New Yorker author (Paige Williams) notes that independent sources like Governing magazine have praised Patterson’s economic stewardship, including his use of a three-year budget that allows government to more efficiently plan.

Nor does Patterson see Detroit in completely stark terms. Eleven years ago, I sat down with him for a long interview.

While the New Yorker makes it appear that he was a gleeful Detroit-basher, Patterson told me “I never was a Detroit-basher; I grew up in Rosedale Park. I was a Coleman Young-basher. Dennis Archer was a decent guy; he certainly ended the hostility, and we more than met him halfway. But he didn’t halt the [economic] slide.” Fact was, that Mayor Young gave as good as he got. Two years before he died, I went to see him.

“Who is that son of a bitch you’ve got out there in Oakland County?” asked hizzoner. I couldn’t resist observing that we had a lot of them, which annoyed him.

“No, that chief executive MF,” he said, using the entire 12-letter term. When I said L. Brooks Patterson, he triumphantly said, “That’s him! That’s the son of a bitch.”

Ah, yes. The truth is that both Patterson and Young scored points with their voters by bashing each other.

Those days are long ago now. True, Brooks Patterson is in style and culture, something out of the ’50s, in many ways. He drinks too much and refers to women as “gals.”

But in fairness, you have to give him this: For years, he has no use for the religious right in the Republican Party, who he calls “the Taliban,” and none for gay-bashing.

Brooks was in favor of protecting sexual orientation with hate crime laws years ago, before some Democrats were.

Often, he is guilty of bad taste. But not everything he said about Detroit was totally untrue. Though he caught hell for his claim that stopping to get gas in Detroit was “a call for a carjacking,” I’ve heard liberal parents — some of whom happened to be black — give their kids the same warning.

In many ways, L. Brooks Patterson represents an era whose time is gone. I think his serving six more years is a terrible idea. Clearly, that car accident has taken a toll.
Yet he is more than a one-dimensional figure, and we need to acknowledge that. There are times when it would have been nice if some other politicians had something Patterson does: a sense of humor, and the ability to laugh at themselves.

Besides that — a Detroit that elects and puts up with George Cushingberry as council president pro tem is just giving those who sneer at the city a puck and an empty net.

For years, he has no use for the religious right in the Republican Party, who he calls “the Taliban,” and none for gay-bashing.

Brooks was in favor of protecting sexual orientation with hate crime laws years ago, before some Democrats were.
 

Mike

Well-known member
TexasBred said:
Mike said:
What he’s saying is that people have been promised things in Detroit in much the same way they were on Indian reservations. Read the whole thing and extended articles. It’s more or less a statement on the broken promises of government. With so many decades of failure – it’s an analogy – how Detroit has been treated is much like how the Indians were once treated.
:roll: :roll:

He is a VERY well respected Executive. And FAR from being a racist.

http://www.oakgov.com/exec/Pages/about/patterson.aspx

Sorry, OT. You need to stop reading Borowitz, you've gotten your satire mixed up with reality. :lol: :lol:

Mike that should send his old ass back into hibernation. :wink:

Probably not. He likes to keep digging his hole until he can't get out.

If he weren't so brazen with his ignorance, he would be pitied. What he is, is Psychotic.

By the way, the analogy was made in 1975. :lol: :lol:
 

jigs

Well-known member
leave the Indians alone...round up all the liberals, throw them in Detroit. no fence, but a giant wall...ten foot tall, and fill with water......
 

Steve

Well-known member
since I was asked a question.

instead of making a knee jerk reactive statement like you and your liberal face-book friends did OT. I actually looked at who he was and what and when he said it.. and I looked at the context..

this came up in almost every blog or article..
Everyone freaked out — except me. I remembered very well the first time I read that Brooks had said those words, and I checked to make sure I was right. It was in the now-extinct Detroit Free Press Sunday Magazine for Sept. 21, 1975.

Thirty-eight-plus years ago

but time wasn't in the question or your response..

even 38 years ago I would have seen this as a racist comment..

now for the rest of your off-base TEA party comments.

I looked at his record and career,.. and I wouldn't be supporting him..
my bet is absent his Detroit Indian statement you would have voted for him..
“But when the ‘Taliban’ – my name for the religious right –

Ironically, as his party has become further right on social issues, Patterson has gone in the opposite direction, attacking religious extremists and denouncing hate crimes against gays.

he has been around and in politics for most of his life..

as anyone with a half of a brain knows. the TEA party often runs against the established party candidate..

so yes.. his statement is racist.. and yours shows what bigot you are..
 

Tam

Well-known member
Oldtimer said:
He may be- but he is an idiot... No executive/politician comes out making those type of remarks about fencing in anyone-- let alone Native American Indians and "throwing them in blankets and corn"... Either that or he is illiterate to his history of the reservations...

As you can see by the comments after the article- everyone sees it as an extremist racist statement and no analogy complimentary to Indians.... Definitely does nothing to the Republican cause of building a big tent to win national elections...

But as the lady on my page indicated- being from Alabama its not surprising you wouldn't.... :wink: :( :( :cry:


Joseph R. Biden told a largely black audience Tuesday in Virginia ......
The vice president then lowered his voice and said, “They’re going to put y’all back in chains.”

Nope Oldtimer No executive/politician comes out making those type of remarks about fencing in anyone but they sure do tell Blacks that Republicans will put them back in chains :wink: :roll:
 
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