“Who would have guessed that he would look so bad in that interview?”
If a Republican affiliate has to force its chairman to resign after he proves to the nation that he is 1) so racially insensitive that he might dress up in blackface, tell the AP that Steppin Fetchit was ‘hilarious,’ and call President Obama a “jigaboo”on “Meet the Press” and he 2) doesn’t see what the fuss is, such an affiliate is not responding swiftly to newly revealed crisis. Such an affiliate has a much bigger problem. It has a surfeit of racists, incompetents and idiots. True, Don Yelton, the recently sacked two-term chair of the Buncombe County Republican Party in North Carolina, didn’t quite go that far in his jaw-dropping interview on Comedy Central, but he still spouted enough offensive comments for Match.com to pair him with Michael Richards. Watching the interview, which one can see here, the first impulse might be to ask, “What was he thinking?” Upon reflection, however, the proper question is “Is this man capable of thought?”
First of all, Yelton agreed to subject himself to a Daily Show interview. A modicum of due diligence would reveal that this is the equivalent of political suicide, as the Daily Show staff is expert in conducting and editing its interviews so as to make Stephen Hawking sound demented, and Yelton is no Stephen Hawking. Heck, Don Yelton is barely a toaster. Hubris is a bad flaw in a politician; hubris that makes a man think he can match wits with a trained and experienced satirist when he barely has two IQ points to rub together for brain warmth is more than a flaw, it’s a death wish. Then, while purportedly defending North Carolina’s voter ID law, a task that any thoughtful and well-prepared 12-year old should be able to do with ease, he noted that if a law “hurts a bunch of lazy blacks who just want the government to give them everything, so be it.” He also noted in passing that he has been called ” a bigot.” Imagine that!
Asked by interviewer Aasif Mandvi about a controversial cartoon Don sent to colleagues showing President Obama “sitting on a stump as a witch doctor,” Yelton brushed it off as harmless, merely a mockery of the “white half” of the president. Thanks for clearing that up, Don! Then he managed to get on the topic that somehow only people who like to call African-Americans “niggers” find fascinating, which is how some blacks use the term themselves. “Now you have a black person using the term, nigger this and nigger that, and it’s OK for them to do it,” Yelton mused trenchantly, prompting Mandvi’s best line: “You know that we can hear you, right?”
Yelton even stooped to that last resort of the clueless bigot, the claim that one of his best friends is black.
If Yelton, who naturally says that his interview was just fine and that he is simply another innocent victim of political correctness, could reveal himself as being frozen in 19th Century racial attitudes—19th Century Mississippi, that is—and having such an obvious intellectual deficit that an average Brittany spaniel could whip him in Words With Friends, how is it that he managed to be elected and tolerated as the chair of Buncombe County Republican Party for two terms? Surely the interview didn’t come as a surprise to anyone who had spent five minutes with the guy. He was chairman, obviously, because they wanted him to be, and because they liked him, which means that a critical mass of that branch of the Republican Party is just like Yelton, and maybe even dumber, since he was their leader.
When any group’s leader is a fool, the real ethics dunces are his followers.
ERRATA NOTE: In the original version of this post, I inadvertently referred to Yelton as Felton. I apologize to both Yelton and my long-suffering readers.
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Sources: Business Insider, Mediaite, The Blaze, The Citizen-Times
Ethics Alarms 
Sadly, this is not the fist time such a moral faILURE happened, and it will almost certainly not be the last.
But even if this was the only moral failing of its kind ever in all of human history, and there was a guarantee that it would never happen again, it would still be one too many.
I think it’s Yelton, but unfortunately correcting his name doesn’t help his IQ.
It’s Yelton. I know not one but three Feltons, including a dear departed friend, and maybe this was what confused me. Fixed. An idiot by any other name is still, alas, an idiot.
Yep, this man is a dunce! He discredits all on the conservative side and plays into racists like Al Sharpton who have more ammunition to claim all conservative whites are crackers keeping the black man down!
He doesn’t disredit all on the Conservative side. But he does expose the reason behind many of these “voter integrity” laws. They claim it is simply to make sure only people who are supposed to vote are voting. But in reality they are set up to make sure that certain people who should be able to vote have roadblocks set up to make it harder for them to vote.
Add that to the gerrymandering issue and we have a real problem that needs to be solved.
When you win an election (like the GOP did in many races in 2010) you should be able to win reelection by just proving you are the right people for the job. You should NOT win reelection by changing voting rules and redrawing districts to make it electorally hard to overcome.
In a word, Baloney.
There are many long threads here on this, but the bottom line is: if a security measure is reasonable and justified, as requiring people who vote to prove their identity certainly is, it doesn’t matter who it inconveniences. And if requiring ID is the right thing to do, and it is, the fact that some turds are happy that it might affect Democrats more than Republicans doesn’t make it the wrong thing to do.
“There are many long threads here on this…”
He knows this, because most of those threads involve his arguments (including the one above – a false generalization) being thoroughly debunked.
In the abstract this is true, but incidents like this should not be viewed as coincidental when they happen in a community that is likely to apply such laws with specific political purpose. It’s the difference between “We Reserve The Right To Refuse Service To Anyone” – a perfectly reasonable philosophy – and “We don’t serve your kind here.”
Except that a public accommodation does NOT have the right to refuse to serve anyone, and should not. It doesn’t matter if the attitudes are coincidental or intentional, either. If I like to see African American criminals locked up for their crimes because that’s justice, or because I just think African Americans should be locked up, and the more the better, criminals should still be locked up when they are guilty of crimes.
answer to your “rights” question in an older discussion from which you may not see a notification of reply
Dayum. Dat argument texagg04….
Dan: Saying that one party that wins elections strives at every opportunity to turnout-skew and election-rig to its advantage, while not admitting that the chief rival party does the same, is a form of lying. Pushing Voter ID is one way the game is played (less corruptly, in my opinion); pushing Motor Voter, Early Voting, Black Panther patrols, and no-ID-required plays the same game another way.
Uh, it’s not tit for tat. Voter ID laws secure elections and DO NOT EXPLICITLY deny ACTUAL CITIZENS the ability to vote, since obtaining a valid ID is NOT an unreasonable burden (hardly at all).
“Uh, it’s not tit for tat.” It doesn’t have to be. But it can be, and mark my words, will be – done first, by Democrats, in “competitive red” jurisdictions, where ID fraud will provide the edge. It just costs more, and the election-riggers don’t want to spend so much election-rigging money (and take so much risk of getting caught) on ID fraud – not yet, anyway. But with sufficient monopolization of DA offices and courts, Voter ID will become just another pathway for using fraud to rig elections with no accountability for perpetrators.
I may be mis-reading your original comment:
“Pushing Voter ID is one way the game is played” Sounds a lot like ‘yeah we don’t mind doing what is necessary to reduce likely democrat voter turnout for that reason’.
Yet, since it isn’t for that reason, it isn’t a way to ‘play the game’. If we accept that the objective is to cheat and reduce democrat voters and we’re doing it because they cheat to increase democrat voters or reduce republican voters, then yes, that is ‘tit for tat’.
However, since the intention behind Voter ID laws has nothing to do with reducing democrat voter participation and only to further ensure sanctity of the elections, then it cannot be tit for tat.
And ensuring the integrity of the vote is not a game. It goes to the essence of participatory democracy.
Criminy. My writing skills need work. I tried to get to that point.
I am glad you admit that the real reason for things like universal background checks on firearm purchases is to make sure that certain people who should be able to legally purchase firearms have roadblocks set up to make it harder for them to legally purchase firearms. .
All toasters are going to boycott Ethics Alarms for your comparison of them to Felton. For shame… 🙂
Yelton…
Right. Fixed. I blame Bob Filner…
It is refreshing to be reminded why not to register or vote Republican. This must be a case of a “safely red” voting jurisdiction – so safe, or presumed to be so, that the quality of “headship” (I refuse to say “leadership”) can be as poor as what Don Yelton reflects. He’s sacked – good. But it’s no use. Any marginal improvement in the party’s headship in that little burgh is meaningless. If anything, the sacking of Yelton only opens doors a tad wider to Democrats who are even more staggeringly stupid than Yelton, to afford them better prospects of taking their turns at gerrymandering; turnout-skewing; bumbling and fumbling while in elected and appointed offices; splashing luxuriously and unaccountably in the rains and pools of corruption, drunk on power courtesy the ever abundant flow of favors-for-interests-and-cronies money; and getting re-elected for life.
I am convinced that the Buncombe County Republican Party is only one microcosm of the “surfeit of racists, incompetents and idiots” (and add to that, CROOKS) that is incurably, irreversibly pandemic nationwide in both Democrat and Republican parties. The stagnation of politics is self-evident; the melodramatic hyper-partisanship between Democrats and Republicans is mere Oz theater, to cover up the stench. What we have now is a stale, lame, two-named, one-party system – a racket, for giving voters the illusion that real leadership is rising up to really solve problems. “How do we get out of here?” The only way is the hard way. We’re dealing with racketeers here. The racket must be busted. And the only way to bust it is by creating the conditions for an acute accumulation of a rotting, Everest-high pile of dead former voters, with survivors who have enough sense and ethics to comprehend why all those dead got to where they were, and how to keep themselves out of the pile. Revolutions have ways of cutting taxes and spending, and cleansing for renewed efficiency; the current racket has none.
I guess that’s what the Tea Party was initially designed to focus on and deal with. They haven’t been very successful for many reasons: targeting the group from above, personalities of some of the spokesmen that are obnoxious, and resistance from RINOs like John McCain.