First.
“Andy Beshear doesn’t share our Kentucky values,” said the one Matt Bevin campaign commercial that told the truth. Beshear’s values aren’t Bevin’s values.
Bevin’s values are Donald Trump’s values. “Even Trump couldn’t save Gov. Matt Bevin tonight,” said Democratic activist Daniel Hurt. Trump held a big rally for Bevin in Lexington Monday night.
Bevin-Trump values include shameless pandering to prejudice, notably nativism and religious bigotry. Governor-elect Andy Beshear’s values don’t.
Bevin is a petulant, thin-skinned, narcissistic, serial dissembler who demeans, denigrates, and demonizes, any and all who dare disagree with him. Beshear is not.
Second.
Memo to that veteran reporter on KET who bemoaned Kentuckians who call each other “socialists” and “fascists.” He didn’t name parties. But Republicans on the stump and in ads repeatedly slammed the Democrats as “socialists.” Nowhere on the campaign trail or in ads did I hear or see a Democrat rip the Republicans as “fascists.”
I’m an old reporter. I understand that you play news stories straight up the middle and give both sides their say. But it’s time for reporters, who should know better, to stop making these false equivalencies in the name of “fair and balanced” news gathering.
Third:
Kudos to Dr. Ricky L. Jones of the University of Louisville for calling out Scott Jennings, the right-wing Republican pundit, on KET. Jennings said state Sen. Ralph Alvarado, Bevin’s running mate, and now attorney-general elect Daniel Cameron, are proof that that the Bluegrass State GOP embraces diversity.
Alvarado is the first Hispanic elected to the state legislature. Cameron has become the first African American elected individually to a statewide office in Kentucky history. (Jenean Hampton, Bevin’s running mate in 2015, is African American.) On the stump and in ads, Cameron engaged in his share of Bevin-Trump style xenophobia and immigrant-bashing.
Jones rejected Jennings’s premise “that Republicans don’t have a serious problem with race because someone like Daniel Cameron, in the vein of Tim Scott in Carolina, in the vein of J.C. Watts in Oklahoma, who have very, very poor to no African American sensibilities,” was on the ticket.
Scott is a South Carolina U.S. senator; Watts, a former congressman. Jones, who is a professor, graduate director and chair of the U of L Pan-African Studies Department, said Cameron, Scott, and Watts are “black people who do not have their fingers on the pulse of the African American community at all, have no serious ties to the African American community.” (At the state NAACP convention, Cameron said he wasn’t an NAACP member and that he was proud of Trump’s endorsement.)
Jones added that to claim that the GOP is embracing diversity “because of these anomalous candidates is incredibly diversionary.”
Jones also said that “to say that Republicans have not used race in this election, as well as in others, is not just diversionary, it is an absolute lie.” To prove his point, he cited Bevin commercials “painting Hispanic Americans, and all Hispanics, as members of MS 13 … and scaring people about sanctuary cities and painting Andy Beshear as somebody who wants to just have a free flow of the Mexican, the dark horde” into Kentucky.
Jones said the commercials reminded him of Kentuckian D.W. Griffith’s virulently racist 1915 movie Birth of Nation in which “white women are going to be carried off into the night. We understand what those overtones and undertones are. And people who don’t admit to that, I think, are either being willfully ignorant, or they’re absolutely lying to your face, and we can’t allow that.”
Mum was the word from Jennings when moderator Rene Shaw quickly called for “a hard pivot” from Jones’ remarks.
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