Tuesday, February 09, 2016

Beyonce makes the poor right-wing heads hurt

Poor right-wingers. There they were, enjoying their Superbowls, probably chuckling a little - "look, someone on Twitter has posted a picture of an owl with a monocle because it's a superb owl" and then Beyonce happened.

Pretzels were spat out. Hot dogs dashed to ground. Amusing pictures of owls wearing top hats went unretweeted as the very LOLZ went out of the moment.

Beyonce had brought politics into the Superbowl. And that isn't allowed. How can you sully a sporting event by turning it into a political platform?

Well, obviously that would be different.

But you can't have the NFL's showcase being used to promote an ideology, can you?

The NFL reportedly accepted millions of dollars from the defence department over the course of three years in exchange for honouring troops and veterans before games, the New Jersey Star Ledger reports.

The Pentagon reportedly signed contracts with 14 NFL teams — including the New York Jets, the Indianapolis Colts and the Baltimore Ravens — between 2011-2012 stipulating that teams would be paid sums ranging from $US60,000-$US1 million each (in federal taxpayer money) to pause before the start of games and salute the city’s “hometown heroes,” according to nj.com.
Well, obviously, that would be different, probably.

Amongst the first to rush to the microphones to suggest that saying policemen shouldn't kill black people on a whim was somehow a controversial idea was former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani, a man who nowadays spends his time running Presidential Campaigns in his head:
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani blasted Beyoncé’s Black Panther Party tribute at the Super Bowl, calling the performance an “attack [on] police officers.”

“I thought that she used it as a platform to attack police officers, who are the people who protect her and protect us and keep us alive,” Giuliani said Monday on Fox and Friends.

“What we should be doing, in the African-American community and in all communities, is build up respect for police officers and focus on the fact that when something does go wrong, okay, we’ll work on that,” Giuliani said.
Yeah, come on Beyonce, what more do you want? If the police accidentally choke a black man to death, or shoot him dead, Rudy's saying they'll certainly add it to some sort of list of things they need to think about. Let's not suggest that police need to earn respect rather than be gifted it, right?

Elsewhere on Breitbart - which is pretty much like Craigslist for Americans who believe their income levels means they can have their racism reclassified as "simple common sense" - the inability of the right to hold more than one idea in their minds at a time is displayed in the way they assume nobody else can, either:
But the pop star might have been late to the performance if she hadn’t received a highway-clearing police escort to deliver her to Levi’s Stadium on time.

As some users pointed out on Twitter, police cleared the highway so that Beyoncé could make it to Santa Clara without sitting in pesky game-day traffic
[...]
But during the Super Bowl halftime show, the pop star performed a full-scale tribute to Black Lives Matter and the militant, anti-law enforcement Black Panthers, with her backup dancers clad in Panther uniforms with fists raised in the “black power” salute.
[...]
Needless to say, social media users were eager to weigh in on the pop star’s apparent hypocrisy.
Needless to say.

The possibility that you can see that some police behaving badly and out of control doesn't mean that all police officers are like that doesn't exist in the minds of Breitbart, its readers or some social media users, needless to say.

That you can say 'stop shooting us' without it meaning 'I believe that every single police officer will shoot an unarmed black person at the earliest opportunity'.

That Beyonce isn't attacking the police, she's attacking the police for not doing more to ensure that those officers who are trigger-happy, or choke-happy, and, yes, racist as fuck, don't remain within the ranks and when they commit crimes, get punished for those crimes.

That's not hypocrisy. Knowing it isn't hypocritical, but pretending you believe it is? That's actual hypocrisy.


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