From ABC's This Week, regular and former Bushie Matthew Dowd weighs in on the panel discussion on wingnut Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and the racist remarks this weekend by NBA owner Donald Sterling and blames the backlash on their remarks on the two of them being "out of the mainstream."
They may be "out of the mainstream" when it comes to a majority of the public, but they're exactly who the Republicans have been pandering to for decades on end now. They just made the mistake of saying what they actually believe out loud and where someone was recording them.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Cliven Bundy. You know, I'm glad you said that, because I want to bring that up as well. He's of course the ranger Cliven Bundy of Nevada who had a lot of support for his anti-government stance on federal grazing until he gave this interview that was reported first by the New York Times. Listen to this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CLIVEN BUNDY, RANCHER: They put the young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I've often wondered, are they better off as slaves picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, you shake your heard when you first hear it, Matthew Dowd, so many Republicans immediately who had been rallying in part to Bundy just refuted him immediately, said we want no part of this. But he does seem to be tapping in, not with the racist comments, but with his overall stance, into something going on in the country out there.
DOWD: Well, first, this is when you have a problem when you adopt a man and you don't adopt the message. And I think that when they adopted a man who was the wrong man, obviously, and turns out to be sort of totally out of the main -- way out of the mainstream out on this, just like the owner of the L.A. Clippers, which actually kind of makes me think of Michael Panetta, the guy who had the tar -- that put in the tar in the baseball, he was big in baseball, is that people will trial rate some like things, but when you go so flagrant in stuff like this that the country just doesn't tolerate them. Both of these guys were totally out of the mainstream, what out on this.
But it does say something about the country that though we have an African-American president this stuff still goes on.
It says what most of us have known since we saw Republicans lose their mind on the day President Obama was first elected -- that electing a black president in no way, shape or form ever meant that racism was dead in the United States.
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