Yes, This Allen West Attack Ad Is Kind of Racist; No, That Does Not Change the Fact That Allen West Is Terrible
It brings me great pain to have to agree with Congressman Allen West of Florida, a violent loon who is one of two black Republicans serving in the House of Representatives, about anything. Alas, I have to admit that what he says in this video of a Fox News appearance from today is actually right on.
West and many other conservative pundits have taken issue with an attack ad created by the liberal Sunrise American PAC. In it, West is depicted as a boxer punching out white women. Race isn't the point of the ad, which mainly goes after West's record on Medicare and women's rights, but political ads are well planned enough that someone somewhere knew what they were doing when they animated the black Army guy to knock out two white ladies.
Naturally, West is irritated by the ad, but he's also irritated by the fact that none of the usual suspects who normally watchdog racist slights like this one are standing up for him. "Think if the Republican Party or some conservative PAC ran a picture of a black Democrat politician punching white women and white seniors," he says in the clip above. "I'm sure MSNBC, NBC, Huffington Post and everyone would be going apoplectic right now."
He's not wrong about the ad, but he's also psychotic, and it's important that we acknowledge this. In 2003, West, then a lieutenant colonel in the Army, was fined $5,000 and forced to resign from his post after he admitted to allowing his soldiers to beat an Iraqi policeman while pumping him for information about an ambush. West then threatened to kill the policeman, took out his handgun, and fired it next to the man's head. What a guy.
West's time in office has been similarly unhinged, almost from the start. His first top aide, a former shock jock named Joyce Kaufman, had to resign after just weeks on the job for statements that included her saying illegal immigrants who commit crimes should be hanged and "if ballots don't work, bullets will."
With Kaufman gone, West has been forced to constantly say insane nonsense all on his own: In just two years in office, the congressman has already proclaimed that the government should make every American own a handgun, said that the U.S. should be "censoring news agencies," accused up to 80 House Democrats of being registered communists, suggested that national debt is a consequence of liberal women making "subservient men," and called the president a "low-level socialist agitator." In a word, the dude is bonkers, but he's got a massive Tea Party following that emboldens him to say even crazier shit all the time.
All this to say that though I'm loath to admit it, I think he's right about the ad—proving, once again, that even a broken, torturous, lying, disgraced, reckless, misogynistic clock is right twice a day.