You'd think I of, all people, would be sympathetic to Michael Steele's effort to bring some slanguage to the GOP. You know how I do--if at least a third of my readers, at any given time, aren't headed to google then I'm doing something wrong. I've got no problem with speaking in native tongues to foreigners. My beef is simple--From citing ancient rappers, to shouting out "urban-suburban hip-hop settings," Michael Steele is abusing the language I love. The last straw is below where Steele tells Neil Cavuto, "I'm always open for everything, baby."
Dear Michael. For the black in all of us. Please stop now. Talk like a regular human being and stop trying to teach the dun language. You are not prepared.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
'For the black in all of us. Please stop now.' you crack me up dude.
The new Republican public relations campaign is gonna be Off Da Hook! we gonna be Knockin Da Bootz! i'm the Mack Daddy, yo!
Are we living in a Saturday Night Live skit here?
Too late Coates, Michael Steele just today was talking about Bobby Jindal and "slum love."
The man is an embarrassment.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0209/Steele_offers_Jindal_slum_love.html?showall
I guess you didn't do wrong this time, TNC. This middle-aged white guy googled "dun language".
Michael Steele is going to be responsible for ushering in the real post-racial America. White, Black, we all just want him to stop.
What do you think the GOP would say if Obama spoke like this?
What's the dealings, TNC? It's like Steele's been soft ever since Barack came through and crushed his buildings... lol... this man, whom I used to enjoy listening to on News and Notes, has become a caricature.
Trying to decide if it's more or less embarrassing when I try and talk "the dun language."
A am open for everything, baby!
The immortal Peter Sellars giving Michael Steele lessons:
(watch the whole thing)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsQ_ClWBeRI
Kris: WOW. I don't know if blacks or Indians should be more offended by that. Just damn.
And I'm going to need Michael Steele to take a time out on this mess. If this is what we're destined to become, I quit blackness. Effective immediately.
You could tell Cavuto was a little shook. FWIW nobody does 'baby' like Dave Chappelle or Avon Barksdale. Check out the youtube grapejuice segment.
"I want some grape juice baby"
Cringe-inducing, yes, but he is not an embarassment to anyone but himself.
It's like listening to your grandparents try to talk "hip." Like when my Mom would try to decipher the lyrics to dancehall reggae songs in the 90's and she always came up with something close but just different enough to make me holler!
And slum love to Bobby Jindal? What???? It's just so awful. Wow. Clown shoes.
Hard to believe "Hollywood Shuffle" was over 20 years ago. So far, and yet so near...
Poor Michael Steele - another helpless victim of Randy Jackson Syndrome.
And I'm going to need Michael Steele to take a time out on this mess. If this is what we're destined to become, I quit blackness. Effective immediately.
Girl, me too.
Now that's talent, yo. You just sonned Michael Steel by invoking Mobb Deep.
That "baby" talk always reminds me of "white lines." ("dont you get too high... baby"!)
He really needs to stop. I mean, is he being advised to act like a NARC? ("I'm hip to the scene").He got sonned by Cavuto for eff's sake. Can you imagine him in a serious debate?
The GOP needs to find more a more competent black spokesman. Condi's schedule looks wide open. W's taint will wear off eventually.
The point is, Steele has never once sent us white folks scampering to Google. Not that his slang isn't cutting edge, but I believe some of it was originally popularized by Run DMC. He talks like someone's idea of how a white person expects a black person to talk.
Mission accomplished, TNC. But honestly - I'm not very well educated and therefore I need to run a Google on most of what Douthat writes, too.
Anyone laying odds on long till Steele pops off with a full throated, Clayton Davis "Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeit!"?
How a black person is supposed to talk to who?
To whom.
(Sorry. Had to restore balance to the universe.)
Anyone talking about what Condi does to George Bush's taint should be banned.
Coates has got money stacks bigger than Steele.
Yo yo there he go!
Personally, I'm loving Steele and his gift of gaffe. The more the GOP sends him out jumping up to get beat down, the farther away their tentacles are from the sordid display of power we've seen most of this past decade.
Watching him spout off is like watching the annoying "woo baby" bravado of SportsCenter wreck in a head-on collision with the hucksterism of a Shamwow infomercial.
Michael Steele sounds like Stuart Scott.
Holla at a player if you see him in the streets!!
Seriously, wtf is "slum love" anyway ... that's got to be a mistake in the transcript, right?
Even more disturbing to me in that quote was Steele's use of the word "friggin'" ... has that really graduated to the point where it's acceptable public speech? Doesn't exactly push the same Ebonics buttons, admittedly, but it's an indication that this guy has real trouble being appropriate in his code switching.
BWAAHAHAhaHAhahAHaHAHA!
And uh...Slumdog Millionaire governor?
Really?
Talk about backhanded compliments. Im guessing this is the kind of ignorant pat on the back GOP minorities have to painfully grin at regularly.
Wait:
When people are offended by your perfect "black" voice, they are supposed to STFU and listen to Etta. Steele speaks in the voice of the Maker's Mark generation and it is just shameful? No, its the same thing, home language spoken outside of home.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunn_language
First time google for a daily reader.
Seems pretty localized to me. I have always had the impression that Bay Area hip hoppers are very much into their own thing and don't look back to the east coast for inspiration.
And I wonder if they feel that way in LA, about the Bay Area and back east.
No more or less trouble than the GOP leadership as a whole.
whoops. meant to close out that block quote
"Anyone talking about what Condi does to George Bush's taint should be banned."
Fugness: You're a dirty-bird, I didn't even mean it that way.
thanks Juba. That makes sense if the young fans are still into the roots.
I am old enough to remember where it came from, but I haven't closely followed how it has all worked out.
sometimes I think Steele is doing this on purpose.
I think one of the best documents to come out of Republican primary season 2008 is that video with Mitt Romney and the little black kids. It's as if Mitt Romney is running the point on media strategies here.
WHO LET THE DAWGS OUT!!!
Word TNC..
He is being humored as a sort of new counter-Obama. Obama is the anomoly, African Americans are really inarticulate, uneducated and easily distracted baby!! Hip Hop Outeach...ftw!
Being from the hood, the inauthenticity is just weak, Steele could use a beatdown but middle america will nod their head to this...
Kat says: Michael Steele is going to be responsible for ushering in the real post-racial America. White, Black, we all just want him to stop.
And I'm sure the Hispanic, Asian and Native American folks will join us in the "No! MC Steele Raps" parade.
Thanks a lot folks. I read this thread right before CNN's "Black In America" came on. By the time it started this line of thought had my head so out of joint that at first I thought I was listening to an unusually good Chappelle routine.
I must have missed something. I didn't see a problem with what Michael Steele said or how he said it. Michael Steele is a good man, and I don't get the debate over this clip. People have too much time on their hands.
Steele keeps making a fool of himself, like a grandpa trying to talk slang to the kiddies. It's not that him doing this makes him a bad guy per se, it just makes him look like a tool.
Same as Mitt Romney looked like a tool saying "who let dogs out."
Yo, M-Steele, getting jiggy with da kids.
Cripes.
The dun language line had me crying.
See Steele in the streets and hit him with:
What the drilly wit that tho? He's definitely lying to the pop(ulation) dog like he got it. He does'nt have it. He never will. May his ineptitude ruin everything his party t to accomplish.
"You be da man!"
classic--four words, and she makes a grammatical error.....
Can we call her Michelle Blachmann from now on?
That didn't actually happen did it? I mean I can fully imagine it happening but only in the way that I can imagine being in some sort of horrible car crash. Its too horrifying to contemplate casually.
Thank god I wasn't the only one thinking it.
"Michael Steele! You be da man! You be da man," she said.
MAKE IT STOP !!!!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MAKE IT STOP !!!!
He's the gift that keeps on giving:
"We know the past, we know we did wrong. My bad..."
Stop. Just. Stop.
"What do you think the GOP would say if Obama spoke like this?"
President, please?
That interview in the video was bad.
But that transcript of that other Steele interview that's on the Politico.....it's utterly surreal. Sully linked to it and I spent some time trying to figure out just what the hell Steele thinks he's doing.
I mean, really, Steele can't be this stupid. Obviously he has a political tin ear and has advanced only through non-elected positions. But he can't be that stupid, can he?
I think I figured it out. Maybe. The GOP is a party of hyper-nationalism, fundamentalist Protestantism and big business. It's a Southern party and deep south at that. They either don't want to change or can't change without falling apart altogether. Using most any demographic measurement tool, the future is not bright for the GOP.
So they do the only thing they think they can; obstruct Obama at every turn, try to wait out his wave of popularity and hope he fails. Worst comes to worst, no matter what, they figure the odds practically guarantee they don't loose many more seats in Congress and that they win the WH in 2016.
To the extent that they are trying to find a national leader, they just want someone who will regurgitate the stale GOP talking points without deviation...but they also want someone who isn't a red-faced, smug, pudgy white Southerner. A bitter old wine in a flashy new bottle.
Steele knows all of this and plays what cards he can. He can't duplicate Palin's torch and pitchfork rallies and he doesn't have Jindal's pedigree. But he figures that he's a black Republican who's trusted enough not to be crazy like Alan Keyes and not to be honest like Colin Powell.
You see, the people he is trying to impress with his language are the conservative Republicans who keep putting him into positions of power. He's talking like this to try and convince a bunch of clueless, aging white men that he can reach youth and minority voters. Who else could be so clueless as to think that the foolishness Steele is exhibiting could actually ever win anyone's vote? Only the cocooned power-brokers of the GOP, a group Steele will never be able to join.
Steele is not that far gone, he is just trying to keep a posh political job. And he is not going to let any lingering trace of self-respect get in the way.
A cable news anchor could have real fun with him if they were sharp enough. I bet money Steele would respond to Vanilla Ice lyrics. "Word to your mother Mikey"!
The "slum love" stuff reminds me of when all the RNC candidates were talking about the twitter, how they would grasp the twitter and use it to enhance the skills with the people in the communication. Hip-ish talk is just another communication strategy the GOP has heard about and yet fails horribly to enact. (I'm reminded of a debate on Ben Smith's blog when McCain's campaign launched its new hip blog, and half the people swore it was obvious parody and half insisted that while it READ like a parody, the web address was legit. I mean, you could purchase McCain golf cozies and everything.)
Steele is a fool in any dialect, and it's nice to see that he is so good at talking himself and the GOP into a hole. But it must be said that the slum love bit is not very notable given that he was just repeating what the interviewer moronically said first.
I, for one, am glad the RNC chairman is stuck in 1994. He's straight out of a Mo Money! infomercial
Also, I think we finally reached post-racialityness when the black guy starts "talking black" [i]after[/i] he starts represent white guys
the GOP doesn't get it. America got tired of them pandering to the redneck base and pretending that ignorance is good, that they all go to walmart, etc, that they're all like Sarah Palin. Now they're trying to reach hip hop america by pandering so condescendingly by talking in ebonics. Do they really think black america is that dumb?
Obama didn't win by doing this. He made very little attempt to pander to any one group. His half-hearted attempt at bowling was about as far as it went.
Sigh.
The Daily Show had a bit on this kind of thing before he was even elected to RNC chair. They had a focus group try to rebrand the GOP and came up with a character called Reagraham Lincool. So prescient.
http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=215929&title=reagraham-lincool
TNC, You da man! YOU DA MAN!
Thank the Gods someone has finally commented on this!! I started thinking it was just me. I think it's part of Steele's plan to bring hip hop to the GOP and it's failing miserably.
It's not a white person's idea of how a black person would talk. It may be a black person's idea of a white person's idea of how a black person would talk. It may even be a black person's idea of a white person's idea of a black person's idea of a white person's idea of how a black person would talk.
Most likely, though its how a person talks when he has nothing to say and no idea what he's doing.
Annoying.
I can't stand it when people try to sound black or white and sound ridiculous.
"You be da man" is grammatically incorrect - it's supposed to be "you da man". (in black vernacular, the present tense of 'be' is dropped like it is in Russian)
Be is only when you're talking about doing something for a long time. "he be talking" - he was talking and talking and talking. It is *never* used for the present tense of "to be."
"I ain't be got no gun!"
Ta, Thanks for making it clear to all that you are a racist.
If it was mine to award, the prize would go to easterpig for this:
I understand that the GOP will be shifting its approach over the next few years from group to group to prove how hip they are. Next up? "All your votes are belong to us."
Michele Bachman clearly pronounced the "the". "You be the man". I thought she was proposing taking turns? GOP be weird.
And Condi will never get to far from the taint.
Michael Steele is embarassing. He just is.
He really needs to stop with the "baby" talk and the hey homie crap. Its unbecoming of someone who's got a top spot in a political party. If he really wants to attract young urban voters like myself, he needs to stick to the message of his party and/or work on repairing it.
I realize that I am only some poor little black Californian female but I have a sense of humor and I know a bad joke when I see one. Michael Steele is a joke. A bad one.
Please tell him to act like he's got some damn sense before its too late. The first black ANYTHING doesn't need to crash and burn this quickly.