Sunday, September 11, 2011
The President and those evil Teamsters, Part II
Someone emailed me to say he didn’t understand my post the other day on the Teamsters. Perhaps I was too rushed and cryptic when I wrote the post. So let me be more explicit: I was making fun of the conservative bee-hive indignation over President Obama’s association with the Teamsters, putting past presidential ties with Teamsters into larger historical perspective, starting with Ronald Reagan’s embrace of the ethically challenged union in 1980 and 1984. I could have gone back much further in presidential history.
The conservative movement’s latest gotcha point of the week (i.e. Obama and the Teamsters) has been utterly fascinating to watch unfold. I think it was either Tom Bethell or Joseph Sobran, both conservative writers, who used to describe liberal activists as worker-bees, buzzing around their hives (Mother Jones, Village Voice etc.) awaiting their orders and then launching coordinated bee-hive attacks on their ideological opponents, even if they didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. I always loved that bee-hive metaphor – and I’ve simply applied it to conservative activists. Most of them are nothing more than conservative worker bees at this point. …
Not that Obama’s association with the Teamsters isn’t troubling. But it’s no more troubling than Reagan’s or Nixon’s associations with the Teamsters, who have a long history of throwing their amoral support behind whatever party isn’t issuing indictments against them at the moment.
Someone emailed me to say he didn’t understand my post the other day on the Teamsters. Perhaps I was too rushed and cryptic when I wrote the post. So let me be more explicit: I was making fun of the conservative bee-hive indignation over President Obama’s association with the Teamsters, putting past presidential ties with Teamsters into larger historical perspective, starting with Ronald Reagan’s embrace of the ethically challenged union in 1980 and 1984. I could have gone back much further in presidential history.
The conservative movement’s latest gotcha point of the week (i.e. Obama and the Teamsters) has been utterly fascinating to watch unfold. I think it was either Tom Bethell or Joseph Sobran, both conservative writers, who used to describe liberal activists as worker-bees, buzzing around their hives (Mother Jones, Village Voice etc.) awaiting their orders and then launching coordinated bee-hive attacks on their ideological opponents, even if they didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. I always loved that bee-hive metaphor – and I’ve simply applied it to conservative activists. Most of them are nothing more than conservative worker bees at this point. …
Not that Obama’s association with the Teamsters isn’t troubling. But it’s no more troubling than Reagan’s or Nixon’s associations with the Teamsters, who have a long history of throwing their amoral support behind whatever party isn’t issuing indictments against them at the moment.
