IT MUST BE ABOUT RACE

Huntsville City Councilman Showers

Is it possible to use the word “black” anymore and not have to contend with over-sensitive, uneducated, dimwitted race-obsessed relics coming out of the woodwork crying racism? Must every phrase or expression that employs the word “black” – or references anything to do with blacks – be cleared by a panel of civil rights arbiters before it is acceptable to use in public?

(Remember when Dallas Commissioner John Wiley Price went ballistic because fellow commissioner Kenneth Mayfield used the phrase “black hole” to describe misplaced paperwork?)

Recently, the NAACP muscled Hallmark into removing a talking greeting card that featured the words “black hole” because some blacks heard it as “black whore.” The graduation greeting card, which had an outer-space theme, referenced such things as the solar system and Saturn’s rings. But because some folks inexplicably heard the words “black whore,” – a conspicuously uncelestial phrase – the card was yanked. Even when told that the words being said were “black hole,” some swore they could hear an “r” at the end.

Welcome to post-racial America.

One cannot help but wonder if it is at all possible to disagree with a black person in public office anymore and not be branded a racist. Can one actually take a stand against unfavorable or unpopular policies supported by people of color and not have to withstand accusations of bigotry or prejudice? Is it conceivable to the floundering remnants of the race-baiting, intellectually vapid left that a black person could be wrong simply because his or her policy is, you know, a bad idea?

Better yet, is it possible for a white man to behave inappropriately against a black man and not have it be because of racism? Or latent bigotries? Or deep contempt for those with melanin-heavy skin? Can inappropriate behavior against someone of color ever happen because the person perpetrating the act is being an undisciplined, boorish ass?

In Huntsville, Alabama, the idiocy of the city’s mayor apparently cannot be a result of a lack of self control or bad values. It must be about race.

From the Huntsville Times:

Mayor Tommy Battle, acting in frustration with councilman Richard Showers, threw a plastic bottlecap into the dais at the end of Thursday’s city council meeting.

A member of the audience, the Rev. Mitchell Walker of Church Street CPCA, later that night sent a strongly worded email to Battle, as well as dozens of church and community leaders. Walker demanded an apology.

“Well, I can just say for me,” wrote Walker, “to see an elected authoritative Caucasian male mayor totally lose his cool and have the utter gall to throw something at or near a senior African American male Councilman … I’m just speaking for me … very much carries ‘racial’ overtones.”

I cannot possibly be the only one who is infinitely tired of this crap.

To the left, everything under the sun is about, related to, defined by or measured in terms of skin color. To them, all that comprises every day life in the United States of America, in some context, can be filtered through the prism of race. Whether we are redressing grievances – such as opposing the destructive policies of half-white Barack Obama – or reacting childishly by tossing a bottle cap at a city councilman, rest assured that if the recipient is a person with dark skin, the motivations must be racial.

Whether Mayor Battle will be charged with a hate crime is unknown at this time.

THAT OLD RACE CARD

It’s been played so much in recent times, handled by so many Obamacrats, that the race card must be nothing more than a mass of frayed wood pulp and lint by now.

From the party of tolerance, acceptance, character-over-color, unity, and plummeting poll numbers comes the latest appeal to potential voters, from none other than the Head Cheese himself.

Try to imagine, if you can, how fast the Reverend Al Sharpton would jettison himself from behind his cheeseburger to find the closest open microphone had a white Republican President, looking to garner support for an upcoming election, said: “It will be up to you to make sure the young people, Caucasians, folks of European descent, and men who powered our victory in 2008 stand together once again. It will be up to each of you to keep our nation moving forward, to keep working to fix Washington, to keep growing our economy, and to keep building a fairer, stronger and more just America.”

Arteries would be bursting in the necks of liberals everywhere.

The collective sound of millions of liberal conniptions would wake the dead and trigger seismograph activity across the globe.

It would be uglier than a surfboardless Keanu Reeves trying to act.

Thank God we don’t have to worry about such things. Thank God there is a Messiah “in da house.”

It is, once again, a Kumbaya liberal bringing all of America together (except those reluctant Limbaugh wing nuts) by breaking out that old tattered race card in the name of justice, fairness and whole lot of blah, blah, blah.

Everybody’s president has spoken.

And no, the Reverend Al Sharpton won’t be needed this time around.

And why not?

Because the President did not single out Caucasians. Instead, Obama appealed to African-Americans.

The President never mentioned “folks of European descent.” Rather, he kept his focus on Latinos.

And Obama did not reach out to men, God forbid. Instead, he was all about the female vote (i.e., the pro-abortion chicks).

Yes, the President of the United States actually said those words in a clip put out by the Democratic National Committee yesterday.

That’s because “fair” means singling out specific races and ethnicities. That’s because “just” means taxing the so-called “rich” – the job creators in this country – even more so that those who don’t earn it themselves can get it anyway. That’s because “stronger” means punishing those who succeed instead of trying to elevate those who haven’t (without handouts).

As Dems continue to do their best to label the Tea Party movement as “racist” and “angry” and “exclusionary,” it is the President himself who just cannot seem to free himself from his own skin-color and ethnicity fixation.

I humbly ask: Who exactly is the divider?

Has there ever been a man to occupy the Office of President of the United States (as well as the Office of President-Elect) who was less Presidential than he?

Hillary Clinton doesn’t count.

POST-RACIAL, MY EYE

Let me be perfectly clear.

In the grand scheme of things, a person’s race is the least relevant factor to me in determining appeal, worth or moral fiber. On the list of things that matter to me when assessing someone’s merits, his or her favorite fifteenth century Gaelic philosophers carry more weight than skin tone.

Because I am not a modern liberal, I do not obsess over one’s race. Amidst the trials, tribulations and travels of my daily life routine, I just couldn’t care less. I respect Thomas Sowell, for instance, because he is a brilliant thinker and writer, not because he’s black. I oppose almost everything Barack Obama does politically because he’s an inexperienced, in-over-his-head, arrogant, leftist, not because he’s black. By the same token, I dislike Michael Steele because, as Chairman of the RNC, he’s an incompetent clod, not because he’s black.

To that end, I think Black History Month should be abolished. I believe the Black Congressional Caucus needs to be disbanded and tossed onto the ash heep of history. And if Martin Luther King Jr. has a national holiday in his honor – and I certainly think he should – then the mockery that is “President’s Day” needs to be wiped off the calendar and George Washington’s Birthday reinstated as a federal holiday. (How is it that arguably the greatest American of them all is lumped into a catch-all, mattress-sale day that includes such giants as Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and Jimmy Carter?)

I would ask … What exactly does a “post-racial” America look like in the eyes of those who say there is still much work yet to be done in the ever-contentious area of race relations? How would such a nation look to those who still see everything through the prism of race? How do we know when we get there? Is it even possible to do so? Or do race baiters, victicrats, excuse-makers and pop culture icons continue to define the parameters of the game?

No one is denying that racists exist in America. But America is not a racist nation. There also exist pink-haired teenagers, but we are not a pink-haired teenage nation. There are atheists in America as well, but we are not an atheist nation.

We are the United States of America – one nation under God.

We are the freest, most accommodating, most welcoming nation the world has ever known. We are the least racist nation on earth.

Enough already.

(Deep breath)

You may ask, “Okay, Andy, what prompted you to write this today?”

Recall that when Barack Obama was still a candidate, back in the summer of 2008, he spoke out against Rene Marie. You may remember that Marie sparked quite a controversy when she unexpectedly sang what is known as the “black national anthem” before Mayor John Hickenlooper’s “State of the City” address in Denver, Colorado. She did so without anyone’s prior knowledge or approval, saying later that, “I realize the mayor’s State of the City address was not my personal platform, I know that. But an artist tends to take advantage of situations where we can make an artistic statement, we tend to do that. I like knowing that my art leads to dialogue.”

At the time, Barack Obama said that America had only one national anthem – the Star Spangled Banner – and that Marie was wrong to do what she did. Marie said, “I am not signing the national anthem anymore, it just doesn’t represent me.”

Fast forward to February, 2010.

The White House hosted a concert a couple of nights ago called, “In Performance at the White House: A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement.” It was a Black History Month celebration featuring a slew of black artists, civil-rights era performers, and other dancing Obamacrats.

The grand finale was the singing of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ – the black national anthem.

Barack Obama joined the artists on stage, grabbed a microphone and sang along.

No, they weren’t singing the national anthem. They were singing the “black national anthem.”

There he was – the leader of the free world – shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Smokey Robinson and Morgan Freeman, not singing God Bless America or America the Beautiful, but rather, singing the song better known as the “black national anthem.” There he was, the President of all the United States – the President of all Americans, regardless of race, color, creed, religion, or party affiliation – up on stage in the People’s House, singing the “black national anthem.”

Did I miss the on-ramp to “post-racial America?”

Is he kidding me?

Is this the same man who said he wouldn’t wear that “flag pin” on his lapel? Is this the same man who wouldn’t say the Pledge Of Allegiance? Or put his hand over his heart? Is this the guy who, as the most powerful man in the world, apologized on several occassions for his own country on foreign soil? Or the one who bowed to foreign heads of state? And the Mayor of Tampa? Or the one who laughed when Wanda Sykes made tasteless jokes about Rush Limbaugh’s death?

Yes. The same.

There may be only one national anthem, but there are obviously two Barack Obamas (or more) - the less-threatening, all-race-friendly President of all the people (save for conservatives) … and the one who finds no problem getting on stage and singing the “black national anthem” at the White House.

I will hand over the deed to my house to the first passer-by the day we see Barack Obama grabbing a microphone and singing the national anthem on stage with anyone anywhere.

Or God Bless America.

Or America the Beautiful.

Incidentally, the President hosted a meeting yesterday with “black leaders” to discuss the economy - including the race-baiting, riot-inciting hate-merchant, Al Sharpton. NAACP President Benjamin Jealous, in the spirit of post-raciality, compared Senate Republicans to “Dixiecrats” who blocked civil right legislation over over four decades ago. Said Jealous: “If the Senate Republicans want to kind of keep on using tactics … from the last century that were used against black people in this century, against working people, then we’re going to hold them to account.”

Hope and change, hope and change …

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OKAY, MY MICHAEL STEELE TOLERANCE BAG HAS DRIPPED DRY

No, that sound you heard was not another tongue-clacking liberal demonstrating why leadership needs to be left to the adults.

It was simply Michael Steele … again.

With every ounce of due respect I can muster, this man’s act is painfully tired.

It’s time to pull out a “farewell to thee” out of petty cash.

I’m sure he’s a wonderfully personable guy – the kind you’d like to hang out with while watching the game, or share a platter of cocktail franks with – but so is the guy who replaced my shocks. That doesn’t mean he is qualified to be the head a political party.

I hate to be the one to break it to Mr. Steele, but it is not advantageous or strategically sound for the Chairman of the Republican National Committee to sound like a typical, non-substantive liberal whinycrat.

I’m out on a limb, I know.

Not that I have ever found him particularly motivating or very effective at his job. I don’t really care for the way he’s “led” the Republican Party – especially during this time of across-the-board Democrat implosion and plummeting poll numbers.

As the Obamacracy continues to sputter, you’d think one would realize, at least in theory, that the door is wide open for the GOP.

This should be the time when a real party leader steps in and makes things happen for the party. This should be a time when a real leader picks up the ball and marches it down the field – especially when the opposition’s defense is non-existent. Outside of a two-thousand foot tall, two-million watt neon sign outside of RNC Headquarters flashing, “Hey, Republicans, This Is Your Shot!” I’m not sure how much more obvious it can be.

Unfortunately, Steele has fallen far short.

One minute he’s convinced Republicans can’t win in November, the next minute he’s saying they can – maybe, sort of.

You may recall that, according to Steele, white Republicans are afraid of him. You may also recall his inability – or reluctance – to respond when D. L. Hughley said the Republican National Convention looked like Nazi Germany. Steele sat there like a soggy Wheat Thin and let it go.

Of course, Steele, by his own admission, never ever plays the race card.

On that point, he‘s absolutely right … except, of course, when he plays the race card.

Greg Sargent at the Plum Line blog writes:

It’s been awhile since Michael Steele has landed himself in the news, but this might stir things up again: In a new interview, Steele bluntly suggests criticism of his tenure — and all the media coverage it’s garnered — may be motivated by racism.

The story, called “Up in the Air,” is in the February issue of Washingtonian magazine, and it isn’t online yet, but here’s the key passage, buried way at the end of the piece, on page 96 of the mag:

Steele acknowledges that at times he has a tendency to take things too far. “And I get checked on that, just as when I was a young boy and I pushed the envelope too far and my Mama was there to check me.”

But there’s an edge to his voice when he talks about a double standard that he believes has been applied by his critics, and he posits racism as the cause: “I don’t see stories about the internal operations of the DNC that I see about this operation. Why? Is it because Michael Steele is the chairman, or is it because a black man is chairman?”

The larger context of the story is the tension created by the fact that Steele continues to take constant criticism, despite the GOP’s undeniable gains and the likelihood of more advances in the future.

There are two ways of reading Steele’s stab at an explanation: Either Steele is suggesting the media gives more ink to the RNC’s inner workings because a black man is chairman, or he’s suggesting that fellow Republicans are leaking damaging info about the RNC because a black man is chairman.
Either way, it seems at odds with his claim back in November that he doesn’t “play the race card” or “play the race game.”

On one hand, I agree whole-heartedly with the assertion that liberals are far more obsessed with race than conservatives. It is demonstrably so. And perhaps there is some truth in the notion that the left-leaning mainstream media pays a little extra attention to Steele because he’s black. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit. The media is always looking to pounce on right-leaning blacks for any sign that their “blackness” is inauthentic.

But Steele has been such a stunning disappointment to conservatives, and has shoved his foot in his mouth so many times, my initial reaction to all of this is to tell him (respectfully) to shut up, step aside, and allow a real leader to step in.

Incompetence is color blind.

Many of us on the right are disgruntled with him because he is bad. Not black.

Besides, Mr. Steele leaves himself open to easy pot shots. If criticisms of him are based on his color, as he suggests, Steele loses a whole lot of credibility when he says that criticisms of Barack Obama are not.

It makes our side look like Democrats.

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HOW NOW BROWN IMMIGRANT?

I can sum this up in short order. 

It’s simple.

Not that anything I say will make any difference to my leftist brethren, mind you. (I don’t expect it to).  I’m a conservative, so any policy position I support will confirm in the suspicious minds of the tolerant class that I am motivated by sinister motives.

Because true compassion is not possible from a conservative – only conniving manipulations devised to feed fat cat wallets at the expense of the everyday American – I am to be considered any one (if not all) of the following: homophone, xenophobe, sexist, racist, intolerant and bigoted. (Thank you Dennis Prager for the list).

What else could explain it?

Only embittered, child-eating, puppy punching, gun-wielding, Neanderthal beasts who enjoy putting butterflies in the microwave to watch them explode, or feed Alka Seltzer tablets to baby ducks, can really support conservative positions. It’s simply not possible to support such things as traditional marriage, gun ownership and less-intrusive government without being an intolerant, knuckle-dragging troglodyte.

Well, to the best of my ability, I’ll make this catastrophically simple so even a caveman can understand it … or a liberal.

I am tremendously confident that I speak for the overwhelming vast majority of conservatives when I say that those of us who are proponents of a strong immigration policy (i.e., a strong anti-illegal alien policy) couldn’t care less about the skin tones, ethnicities or ancestral origins of the infiltrators.

Not a damn thing.

Do you hear?

Nothing.

Naturally, I can hear the screeching Leftocrat class call me a liar, pointing their fingers, proclaiming that folks like me would rather see illegal alien babies rotting in the gutters of our American cities than fork out any more tax dollars to feed them, clothe them and give them, at the very least, some old newspapers to wrap up in to stay warm.

Lib perceptions of how Conservatives think can be summed up in what Howard Dean famously said in 2005: “Our moral values, in contradiction to the Republicans’, is we don’t think kids ought to go to bed hungry at night.”

Busted.

Dean must’ve had someone well-disguised sneak into one of our meetings, because I’m not sure how he found out. It’s only a matter of time before the Dems find out about our “My Little Swastika” line of stuffed animals and snack cakes.

I’ve said this before, and I will say it until I am Massachusetts-blue in the face: There is nothing less relevant to me than one’s race or ethnicity.

But that’s not what some of the big boys on the Left believe.

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the genius behind the Daily Kos, truly believes, for instance, that because we on the right are for securing our borders and cracking down on illegals, we obviously “hate brown people.”

From CNSNews.com:

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, a Democratic strategist and founder of the left-wing blog “The Daily Kos,” told reporters Thursday that “comprehensive immigration reform” legislation sponsored by Rep. Luiz Gutierrez (D-Ill.) — which would provide a “pathway to citizenship” for illegal aliens — has a good shot at passage this year.

But Moulitsas said that “teabaggers” and Republicans who “hate brown people” would try to push back against it.

“I think the votes want to be there in the Senate — I think the House is fairly solid — I think the votes want to be there,” he said of an immigration bill’s chances, “but you have this growing ‘teabagger’ movement that is going to be pushing very hard from the other side.”

There’s that word again … “teabagger.”

Not that the word is meant in the pejorative sense or anything.

He and Roger Ebert ought to play mahjong.

The fact is, the people who come into America illegally from the country south of the Rio Grande could be pasty, white-skinned, blonde-haired, hazel-eyed English-speakers who look like they just came from summer camp in the North of Ireland, and conservatives like me would still feel the same exact way about them – that they have no business being here, and they need to go about the process of entering (and eventually staying) in the country legally. It has absolutely nothing to do with “hating brown people.”

It’s about national security, economic stability, controlling crime, and making America a better place for her citizens and those who wish to come here the right way.

My Lord, can liberals ever get off the race and ethnicity thing?

Ever?

Incidentally, there already exists a “pathway to citizenship” … the same one my ancestors followed: the law.

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ANOTHER FROM THE “IF THIS WAS A REPUBLICAN” FILE …

The horrific scenes of chaos and destruction coming from Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake are as disturbing as any I’ve seen a long time. The country has descended into total bedlam. Reports of violent gangs running wild are abundant. Grizzly accounts of corpses lining the streets as far as the eye can see have become commonplace. No one knows who is in charge. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people are in immediate need of assistance, unable to get the help they require.

Words like “catastrophe” and “unspeakable” fall short.

The humanitarian response has been overwhelming. But the airport there is small and dangerously congested. There are at least a dozen airplanes full of supplies sitting on the tarmac with many more waiting on the grass with nowhere to go. There is no reliably functioning communications system and no real idea on how to coordinate the distribution of badly needed supplies.

The people of Haiti are desperate. It is difficult to imagine the situation there getting any worse.

My heart is breaking.

But imagine for a moment a Republican was in the White House. Imagine George W. Bush being the Chief Executive while the enormous difficulties in getting relief to Haiti’s beleaguered citizens were taking place. (Hint: Think about how the Left reacted to President Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina).

Talk show host Mark Levin – the Great One – on his radio program Friday evening put it this way:

It needs to be said, and you know it … If Ronald Reagan were President, or Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford, or either of the Bushes, this would be an issue of race and politics … It would be said we’re not doing enough, no matter how much we do, no matter how difficult the circumstances, it would be said we’re not doing enough; it would be politicized; it would be called racism, because that’s exactly what happened with (Hurricane) Katrina.

…

No matter how much supplies we sent, no matter how much military went down there, it never mattered. And Bush, foolishly, apologized. And he’s still attacked for it.

Meanwhile, in Haiti – before we know exactly what’s going on down there – we’re told that the job we’re doing is terrific.

Well, let me say this … the men and women who are actually doing the work are terrific. But why is it that if supplies are stuck at the airport, that’s not Obama’s fault, but it would have been Bush’s fault?

I’ll tell you why.

Because the media in this country is so bastardized that they will take facts and twist them any way they wish to. And we’ll be told to focus –and focus only – on the desperate condition of the Haitians. Fair enough. But during Katrina, half the focus was on politics was it not?

I don’t hear Charles Rangel, or John Conyers, or Jesse Jackson, or Not-so Sharpton. I don’t hear them. I don’t see the liberal media, the anchors, going on and on about the failures of American assistance and leadership at the top.

And you won’t.

And I might add, you shouldn’t.

After Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, it was utterly reprehensible to hear many claim that George W. Bush’s supposed laxidasical response had anything to do with the fact that predominantly black areas of New Orleans were hit particularly hard. Bush didn’t just react slowly to the tragedy, they groaned; it was his prejudism against blacks that caused more damage and loss of life than there needed to be. He simply didn’t respond with the same urgency he would have afforded primarily white populations, they exclaimed. 

Remember that load of steaming excrement?

One positive to come out of all this is the fact that it may be much easier now to predict when an earthquake is on the way.

How?

Check the thermostat.

Actor Danny Glover – activist, certifiable idiot – says that the Haitian earthquake was the result of man’s inability to deal with global warming … or climate change … or whatever it’s being called this month.

Really.

It must’ve been one of the six remaining polar bears known to still exist falling off one of those breakaway blocks of melting ice in the Arctic, hitting the rapidly warming waters with such ferocity that it set off a chain reaction that (naturally) led to the shifting of the earth’s tectonic plates.

Makes sense.

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POST-RACIAL AMERICA – SOME QUICK THOUGHTS

Georgetown Professor Michael Dyson on MSNBC

This has been some post-racial era since the dawn of the Messianic Age, hasn’t it? The topic of race relevancy was supposed to (finally) be an archaic one – or at least one that simply wasn’t going to matter nearly as much anymore – where the significance of American skin tone was going to be irrelevant; where character would finally triumph over color.

The long-desired colorblind American society would, at long last, be upon us once Barack Obama hit the White House and started transforming things – and if, after saving America (and the world) by his mere presence there still existed a surplus of disunity in the country, it could then be rightfully blamed on stubborn conservative racists unwilling to meet the future.

Remember, Obama’s election was “historic,” “groundbreaking,” “game-changing” and whatever other blah-blah-blahs were tendered by the orgasmic media. A new era of understanding, universal love, snuggly puppies and big fat hugs was being ushered in, despite a significant portion of America’s population unwilling to let go of its racist, unjust, slave-owning, prejudice, exploitative past. During the campaign season, news outlets opted to pay minimal attention to Barack Obama’s actual message, choosing instead to latch on to his wonderful sounding platitudes, treating each word he uttered as if it had never before been heard by human beings. They didn’t bother to focus too much on his history (what little we were able to learn), or on his glaring lack of experience (unlike the detailed scrutiny given Sarah Palin). Instead, the media made the 2008 Presidential election all about his skin color – and that alone became the message: he’s black, vote for him, love him, let him take care of things.

It was left’s finest hour.

Barack Obama’s “blackness” made a whole bunch of things okay that probably would have been subjected to far more scrutiny had he been anyone else: an association with a known terrorist, having an anti-American race-baiter for a spiritual mentor, his unambiguous support of redistributing wealth, etc.

After Obama’s election, instead of race issues finally becoming the promised societal dinosaurs they deserve to be, the indomitable crusaders of the left sprung into action, hell-bent on seeking out and proving that racism still existed in this country, lest their own existences be rendered meaningless. In short order, as many had predicted, it became perfectly legitimate to conclude that racism played some of sort of role when one stood up to disagree with Barack Obama. Indeed, in the minds of many, to oppose him was to oppose the election of a black man. Democrat after Democrat told us so.

One thing is clear … Democrats are obsessed with race.

Whether it was Hillary Clinton talking about Ghandi running a gas station in St. Louis, Joe Biden commenting on how “storybook” it was that Barack Obama – a black man – was so clean and articulate, or Sonia Sotomayor talking about the superior judgment capacity of Latinas over whites, Democrats have been no strangers to foot-in-mouth disease. They get away with far more than any conservative ever could because the media presumes to know what exists in the hearts of Democrats – and to liberals, nothing matters more.

Their intentions are good, and that is the bottom line as far as the media is concerned.

Personally, I couldn’t care less what is in a politician’s heart. I don’t care what he or she thinks, and I certainly don’t care what they say in private. I care only about their public actions and statements – not their private ones (unless, obviously, they are breaking the law or are plotting to do so). I care about the deeds of people, not what may or may not be buried in their hearts. Their feelings may matter on a micro level, but on a macro level, their feelings are irrelevant to me.

Let’s say, for instance, a man privately wrestles with feelings of anti-Semitism, for whatever reason. If that man, conflicted as he may be, still manages to do good works that benefit the Jewish community – charity work, for instance – then his feelings are as irrelevant to me as his skin color, his favorite song or what toothpaste he uses. I don’t care. Neither do those in need. His deeds are what matters. Isn’t it more desirable to have someone who may be struggling with their faith or their prejudices doing good for others than to have someone who espouses togetherness and harmony doing nothing? I believe this with ever fiber of my being. As a Jew, it doesn’t matter to me what someone thinks. I care what they do.

Let God deal with what exists in a man’s heart.

What makes people good is their ability to weigh thoughts and feelings privately, whatever they may be, and to ultimately choose to do the right thing. Human beings, indeed, are entitled to their private thoughts and feelings, but they are not entitled to act on those feelings.

In this country, with such travesties as “hate crimes” on the books, private thought is being taken into account where it has no business being. The notion that someone’s feelings can lead to harsher penalties for a crime that is already wrong is outrageous.

By the same token, that someone can say something so disgraceful and contemptible – and get away with it – simply because the media presumes to know what is in one’s heart is indicative of a dangerous trend.

In an appearance yesterday on MSNBC, Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson had the following exchange with the anchor woman (whose name is unknown to me at the time of this posting):

Professor Dyson: Let me tell you this: We should push the President. This President runs from race like a black man runs from a cop. What we have to do is ask Mr. Obama to stand up and use his bully pulpit to help us. He is loathe to speak about race … As a result of that, his disinclination to speak about race means that he won’t even take this teachable moment to help America understand. He shouldn’t do that as a black man, by the way. He should do that because he’s President of the United States of America.

MSNBC anchor: We’re out of time, and I certainly appreciate it, but Professor Dyson, I will have to ask you: Are you going to apologize now for saying that the President runs like a black man from the cops, or are you sticking by that one?

Professor Dyson: I’m sticking by that because the brother runs very well, and he’s running like a brother running from a cop.”

I must give credit where credit is due to the anchor; at least she recognized that the professor’s eyebrow raising comments were, at the very least, worthy of revisiting before ending the segment.

But if, according to Dyson, the President needs to “take this teachable moment” (referring to the now infamous remarks made by Harry Reid) and “help America understand” what is going on - not as a black man, but as Chief Executive - then why was was it necessary to use the “black man running from the cops” metaphor? Why call him a “brother” who “runs very well“?

This is what passes for intellectual discourse at the university level?

“A brother who runs very well“?!

Are you kidding me?

If a white man were President, and Harry Reid made the same sort of comments regarding a high-ranking black politician, would anyone say that the President was like a black man running from the cops?

The fact that such a comment would be made at all demonstrates which side remains obsessed with skin color.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA3oqycCBvQ]

 

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WHAT DOUBLE STANDARD?

It isn’t that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid isn’t a bungling, incompetent excuse for a public servant.

He is.

It isn’t as if he hasn’t put his foot in his mouth so many times that he assuredly suffers from athlete’s gum.

He has.

It isn’t as if conservatives cannot set their watches to the next asinine comment Harry Reid will make.

They can.

No, I don’t think Harry Reid is any more or less racist than your average, garden-variety, race-obsessed modern liberal. His comments, published in a new book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin called Game Change - private comments when they were uttered, incidentally - in which Reid referred to then-Senator Barack Obama as “a light skinned” black man “with no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one” may have been ill-phrased and a “poor choice of words,” as Reid himself admitted over the weekend, but that isn’t the real issue here. (Isn’t President Obama’s mother white?)

People can choose to waste their time pretending to be outraged over the word “negro,” if they choose – and maybe some are. My grandfather used the word “colored” until the day he died, and he was one of the least racist people I ever knew. I truly don’t believe Reid is a racist – not in the white-hooded sense of the word. He may be a grandiose political joke in almost every sense of the word, but he’s not a cross-burning racist. His uneven talcum powder voice, scraggly mannerism and inability to speak rationally about anything is already enough to warrant his plummeting poll numbers. This latest boner only throws a few cherries onto an already monstrous sundae of idiocy and ineptitude.

The fact is, almost all Democrats are obsessed with race. Why should this be any sort of revelation? The outrage really should exist in how liberals are constantly portrayed as being race-blind when they clearly aren’t. No one brings up race, filters things through the prism of race, or creates policies based on race like liberals.

It isn’t even close.

The real issue is how this Reid thing is being handled by the mainstream media. The in-your-face double standard being applied here is as obvious as a nipple at a belly-button convention. Harry Reid is being given every pass in the world – and then some. Democrats from every nook and cranny of the political muffin are coming out in defense of this wretched little rube with offerings of forgiveness – something that would never have been afforded any Republican had one said anything remotely resembling Reid’s comments.

Outraged liberals are nowhere to be found.

Where are the Democrat calls for his removal from the Senate?

Where is the NAACP?

Where is Maureen Dowd? Is there a man-hating vacation retreat somewhere that she has yet to return from? Maybe she doesn’t have the ability to see dead people, but what about that amazing talent of hers to hear the word “boy” after political commentary? (Maybe it only works when Republicans speak).

I wonder … Does the name Trent Lott ring a bell?

Even the contemptible race-baiter Al Sharpton let Reid slide, saying:

While there is no question that Senator Reid did not select the best word choice in this instance, these comments should not distract America from its continued focus on securing healthcare or creating jobs for its people. Nor should they detract from the unquestionable leadership role Senator Reid has played on these issues or in the area of civil rights. Senator Reid’s door has always been open on hearing from the civil rights community on these issues and I look forward to continue to work with Senator Reid wherever possible to improve the lives of Americans everywhere.

More disturbing than the mainstream media’s default position to snuggle up close to Democrats in peril is their even more mystifying reflex to call upon the always-disgusting and morally reprehensible Al Sharpton whenever something “black” makes the news. If someone somewhere says anything that could even be perceived to be disparaging to people with melanin-rich skin, all eyes in the mainstream media instinctively turn to the race hustler, Al Sharpton – the arbiter of all things “black” (or “negro,” for those who speak Reid) – to see what he thinks.

Next to trying to figure out why Keanu Reeves is a movie star, there is nothing more perplexing.

That this whole thing is America’s lead story is, perhaps, more pitiful than anything else.

 

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HARRY REID, SLAVERY, HEALTH CARE, HISTORY

Harry Reid

If not for racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and any other “ism” or “phobia” they can exploit, exactly what points of argument would liberals ever use to defend their positions? If the issue cannot be compared to some social injustice of the past, or if the policy cannot be framed around tapping into the raw emotions of constituents, or if the opposition cannot be marginalized and characterized as the spawns of Satan, how would liberals ever be able to convince anyone of anything?

To say that Senate Majority leader Harry Reid is beneath dignity is to assume he possesses any – and I’m not prepared to make that leap. The man is a veritable fountain of imbecility, never once failing to prove the point when afforded the opportunity. Even if he never spoke another foolish word, he has long since removed all doubt.

But speak he did from the Senate floor yesterday morning – with an inflection of numbskullery that would make Joe Biden proud.

With the prowess and grace of a can of mushroom soup, and a command of history rivaled by only Congressman Alan “Our Healthcare System is like a Holocaust” Grayson of Florida, Senator Reid said that Republicans who oppose ObamaCare are modern day versions of those who opposed abolishing slavery and affording women the right to vote.

He didn’t go as far as calling GOPers baby rapists, but Reid’s time on floor was limited.

From The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room, Jordan Fabian writes:

“Folks tend to crack under pressure,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) at a press conference. “It is an indication of desperation.”

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said he was “personally offended” by the remarks that were “beneath the dignity of the Majority Leader…and the Senate.”

Senate Republican Policy Committee chairman John Thune (S.D.) called the comments “inflammatory and irresponsible.”

Speaking on the Senate floor this morning, Reid said “Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, ‘slow down, stop everything, let’s start over.’ If you think you’ve heard these same excuses before, you’re right.”

He continued “When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said ‘slow down, it’s too early, things aren’t bad enough’ … He continued: “When women spoke up for the right to speak up, they wanted to vote, some insisted they simply, slow down, there will be a better day to do that, today isn’t quite right.”

 

Whether he was trying to be clever by delivering a well-cadenced, “themed” commentary about the infamous “slow downs” of history – his pitiful, weasel-like attempt at a mini “I Have A Dream” missive – or whether he was just “winging it” around some loose index card scribblings, his asininity is epic.

That he could speak as clearly as he did with both feet firmly ensconced in his mouth is the real story here.

Surely Mr. Reid is aware that more Democrats, as a percentage, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than Republicans. Surely Mr. Reid is aware that the Republican Party was the anti-slavery party. (More on this history in a moment).

But far more relevant than that is the absolute absurdity in trying to compare the concern of American citizens who oppose – or at least question – the concept of revamping the entire health care delivery system to those who enslaved other human beings. It is inconceivable that any clear thinking human being could draw such a comparison in good conscience. The notion that Americans who worry about costs, or who are concerned about the decline in quality of health care, or are wary about the government seizing far too much power, is akin to owning other human beings and denying them their basic human rights is contemptible.

According to Reid, simply by virtue of the legislation being a “health care” bill, it should be reflexively supported by the American people, no questions asked.

Okay, Harry.

The irony is … health care reform, as Reid sees it, creates an unprecedented level of servitude to the federal government.

Recall the famous screeching screed of Senator Hillary Clinton exclaiming how everyone has the right to debate and disagree with any administration, regardless of who they are. (It’s a sound bite well played on talk radio, annoying as it is). That’s all well and good, of course, but when conservatives do it, it somehow harkens back to a time of lynchings and whippings.

Nice.

But returning to history for a moment … Through the middle of the twentieth century, segregationists overwhelmingly voted Democratic – and that includes four election victories for the patriarch of quintessential modern liberalism, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. University types conveniently ignore this long standing “relationship” of racism and political ideology – that is, until white Southerners began voting Republican in the 1960s. Suddenly, such connections mattered. To academia, the affiliation between racism and liberalism was nothing more than sheer coincidence prior to the 1960s, but once the GOP began drawing Southern whites, the connection somehow became obvious and worthy of mentioning.

Incidentally, I happen to agree that early twentieth-century Roosevelt liberalism was not inherently or philosophically tied to the racism that permeated the Democrat Party (especially in the South).

Precisely my point.

Through the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, as the Democrat Party continued to shift more blatantly leftward, older segregationists were, in essence, forced to choose between the lesser of two evils in terms of party affiliation. Theirs was a weakening coalition anyway – certainly not strong enough to form a third party - so their leanings, in the absence of anything better, tended toward more race-neutral politics and smaller government.

The Democrat Party, meanwhile, was reinventing itself, becoming the anti-war, big government, welfare party. Liberals were, among other things, promoting abortion rights, bussing and affirmative action.

Many middle class Americans didn’t like what they were hearing from Democrats and began jumping ship – and not just in the South either.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that most white southerners actually identified themselves as Republicans. And it wasn’t until a decade later when Republicans finally held most House seats in the South.

That the decline of racism – particularly in the South – coincides with the steady rise of Republican affiliation is, to say the least, most interesting.

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STEELE CAN PLAY THE RACE CARD TOO

Roland Martin and Michael Steele

There’s no question about it; when anyone in the public eye (particularly politics) decides they’re going to take a page from the “Idiot’s Guide to Being a Monumental Idiot” and break out the brutally tattered but always readily available race card, I’m all over it. I’ve littered this blog with endless examples of liberals (and other children) making melanin an issue of absurd importance. From Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman, when someone goes racial, I make mention of it. As a conservative, if there is anything less significant to me in the grand scheme of things than the color of someone’s skin, I’ve yet to find it.

The grooming habits of eleventh century Byzantines hold more relevance for me.

Thus, in the name of intellectual honesty (and fairness), when someone on “my side” of the aisle says asinine things – particularly when it comes to matters of race – I am obliged to shine a light on it and crack some GOP skulls.

Enter the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele – who apparently believes that white Republicans are afraid of blacks. Or afraid of him, specifically.

He said so while speaking with Roland Martin on TV One’s Washington Watch over the weekend.

Here was the exchange:

Martin: But your candidates got to talk to them. One of the criticisms I’ve always had is Republicans — white Republicans — have been scared of black folks.

Steele: You’re absolutely right. I mean I’ve been in the room and they’ve been scared of me. I’m like, “I’m on your side,” you know, so I can imagine going out there and talking to someone like you, you know, who [says] “I’ll listen.” And they’re like “Well.” You know, let me tell you. You saw in Christie and you saw in McDonnell a door open because they went in and engaged. McDonnell was very deliberate about spending…

Martin: Right.

Steele: I mean, Sheila Johnson was on his team. I mean, that was a big deal. That’s because he engaged her and she helped navigate him through that relationship.

Enlightening – in a narcissistic, unproductive, neanderthal sort of way.

So, if I’m to understand … Michael Steel has actually been in the room with “them?”

And he knows “they’ve” been scared of him?

How exactly could he tell?

They were already white, so what other indications were there?

Did they walk on the other side of the room when they saw him coming?

Most importantly, how on God’s green earth is it good for the Republican Party to have its own chairman dump on his fellow party members the moment he hits a forum hosted by a liberal’s liberal like Roland Martin? Why would he so effortlessly throw members of his own team under the bus? Because the “shoot-your-own-when-in-the-enemy-is-looking” approach worked so well for John McCain? Because making liberals salivate by feeding their archaic perceptions of Republicans helps the party grow?

Mr. Steele, I can assure you … neither I nor my fellow conservatives are “afraid” of you because you’re black. Or because we may be white. Or because you sounded almost tweenish with your multiple use of the word “like.”

What we are afraid of is you may not be the right man for this job. Period.

Bad move, Michael.

Dumb move, Steele.

SHARPTON – FIRST CLASS ASS

contemptible, as always

Whenever the repugnant slice of human debris that is Al Sharpton declares anything a moral victory, it should be an unmistakable signal to anyone with a functioning cerebrum that taking the opposite position is the best – and ethical – course of action. So sure am I in making such an authoritative statement that I am willing to stand up on any stage, in any forum, in any location, anywhere on God’s green Earth to not only state it with conviction, but explain in impassioned detail why it is so.

Sharpton is to civil discourse what ulcerative colitis is to the large intestine. That the repulsive race-baiter Sharpton is given even a whit’s worth of credence by anyone in the mainstream media, let alone camera time and print space, indicates that white America is still very afraid of him.

It also shows that the bulk of racist Americans live and thrive on the Left.

It is they who infuse race into every nook and cranny of American life.

It is they who reject assessing their fellow human beings based on the content of their character, and instead focus like laser beams on the color of their skin.

Do the names Maureen Dowd, Charlie Rangel, Henry Louis Gates, Diane Watson, Paul Krugman, Jessie Jackson, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi (among others) ring a bell?

Following Rush Limbaugh’s booting from the investment group looking to purchase the St. Louis Rams football team late Wednesday, the lying, riot-inciting, shakedown king Al Sharpton said in a statement, “It is a moral victory for all Americans — especially the players that have been unfairly castigated by Rush Limbaugh. This decision will also uphold the unifying standards of major sports.”

This statement fascinates me, because if there is anything I am obsessed with, it is the truth.

What players, pray tell, have been unfairly castigated by Limbaugh?

Who are they? What was said about them?

Are these “castigations” as provable as the malicious falsehoods spread across the internet about Limbaugh’s sympathies with James Earl Ray? Or Limbaugh’s belief that there was good that came from slavery?

Mr. Sharpton, you are a boldface liar.

I am an American, sir, and this is no moral victory for me.

Unlike Reverend Al, I do not see people in terms of race, and I do not slander those with whom I disagree.

And just where has the melanin-obsessed reverend’s moral compass been during the NFL’s ethically-challenged nine-year period dating back to the year 2000? Surely he’s aware that over 450 NFL players have been arrested since then for a veritable cavalcade of offenses, ranging from sexual assault to domestic violence to drugs.

I’d love for the slick-haired, unapologetic slanderer of innocent men to explain the moral victory in keeping someone like Leonard Little in the National Football league. Remember him? Eleven years ago, he killed a 47-year old mother of two while driving drunk. Where was Sharpton on behalf of the innocent back then? Where was Sharpton’s deep concern for the “unifying standards of major sports” then? And where was he when Mr. Little found himself arrested yet again for drunk driving six years after that?

Sharpton went on to say that major sports leagues like the NFL shouldn’t welcome owners who are “divisive and incendiary.”

Divisive and incendiary?

Kettle, meet pot.

And yet, Rush Limbaugh – who hasn’t a racist bone in his body, and adores the game of football - is a moral threat to the National Football League? 

Rush Limbaugh is somehow more intolerable than convicted felons?

Excuse me, have I slipped through a crack in the space-time continuum?

Do the names Dante Stallworth, Adam Jones, Plaxico Burress, Michael Vick and Travis Henry ring a bell for the adjudicator of all that is morally sound and ethically conscious, Al Sharpton?

This isn’t an issue of race. It’s an issue of values.

By all means, let the scrupulously upright powers-that-be in the National Football League (and those outsiders who influence it and shake it down) crucify Rush Limbaugh and stand in the way of his free-market right to invest in a team that can use all the help it can get, but let’s be sure bona fide criminals are afforded infinite chances to play the game.

Do the words “upside down world” mean anything?

Please don’t misunderstand me.

League owners, players and observers can certainly hold any opinion they wish regarding Rush Limbaugh. The NFL is well within its rights to deny Limbaugh the opportunity to invest in one of its teams as a minority partner.

However, all credibility within the ranks of the anti-Limbaugh brigades is shattered as they squawk about what’s good and bad for a league that accomodates thug players with no regard for decency and the law. It is laughable to hear these people portray Rush as being the worst thing that could ever happen to the game because of things he never said or did while common criminals are accepted and embraced as heroes.

How about a little moral clarity?

Moral victory, my ass.

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PLANTATION GRANDEUR

Did you know that Elvis Presley was not only seen at the Payless Shoe Source on North Avalon Street in Memphis, but he is contemplating a state senate run as an Independent? I know this is so because I read it on the internet.

Were you also aware that only two days before Michael Jackson died, both Madonna and Dick Cheney were seen tinkering with the gas meter outside of Jackson’s California home? I know this is so because I read it on the internet.

And have you read about the latest evidence that proves Desi Arnaz had a role in the murder of John Lennon? I know this is so because I read it on the internet.

So then, how does a Pulitzer Prize winning jouranalist and Professor of Journalism at Hunter College in New York – a professor, mind you – verify the accuracy of an allegation regarding a well-known celebrity? How exactly, in the name of professionalism and integrity, does she get all of her journalistic ducks in a row before speaking publicly on a highly controversial subject? How does that professor, who has presumably spent her entire professional life in the realm of investigating the unknown, conveying the news, uncovering the truth, and mentoring those who wish to forge their professional paths in the fields of objective and opinion journalism, go about getting to the bottom of something that is causing such a stir?

She googles, of course.

Such is the case with Karen Hunter.

Indeed, she is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, a successful author, and a teacher of Journalism, among other accomplishments.

But she is not too happy that talk show host Rush Limbaugh is interested in becoming part owner of the St. Louis Rams football team. In fact, her discontentment with Limbaugh’s bid – according to her – is based, in part, on negative things she found about him on the internet.

During a segment on MSNBC yesterday afternoon, Hunter – the obvious choice for a discussion of football ownership (author of such dazzling titles as “Pimpology: The 48 Laws Of the Game” and “On the Down Low: A Journey Into the Lives of “Straight” Black Men Who Sleep With Men”) – showed the nation why her journalistic prowess is in such high demand.

Hunter said:

I can just see the visions of plantation grandeur dancing in (Limbaugh’s) head as we speak. Yeah, it doesn’t make you a racist to want to own a team. But, it does kind of with all his history question his power position over these players who make millions of dollars and his ability to be able to move them around, deny them contracts and do whatever he wants willy-nilly. It’s the ultimate power position to be an owner of an NFL team.

Plantation grandeur?

If that phrase alone – coming from the mouth of an allegedly well-read, well-spoken, highly-respected journalist – does not summon the gastric secretions to bubble up into your throat, you need to have your decency meter re-calibrated.

What in the name of Sam Hill is she talking about?

Moving people around and denying players contracts are what all owners in the National Football League do, Professor Hunter.

And yes, there are plenty of conservative white owners in the National Football League – and they all have a large number of black athletes working for them.

My Lord, do knee-jerk, victimization-happy liberals ever listen to the things they say?

But hold on … that was not the sweetest plum to come from the intellectual tree of the Pimpology Queen.

Hunter went on to say:

You even put up two of the statements he said about the NFL looking like the Crips and the Bloods. He even said that Dr. Martin Luther King, his killer, James Earl Ray should have a medal given to him, a medal of honor. He says, ‘We miss you, James.’ You can go online as to the top 10 Rush Limbaugh racist comments.”

Is there anything else that needs to be said?

“You can go online …” she says.

Such rectitude. Such honor.

Karen Hunter

Incidentally, I happened to read online that Karen Hunter did not author her own books, and instead hired a twenty-one year old white girl to do the job, so it must be true.

I also read online that she had a torrid affair with a West African man who made his fortune in the sex slave trade, so it must be accurate.

I’m still a bit sketchy as to whether or not the reports of her transexuality are true, but I’ve read it enough times on the internet to believe there must be some truth in it.

Right?

The fact is, if Limbaugh had even come close to ever saying the reprehensible things that are being attributed to him by his enemies, it would have, by now, seen more reprintings than the King James version of the Bible. And because there are liberals who are actually paid to sit down, record, and take out of context every word that comes from his lips, the sound bites extracted from such despicable commentary would have been played and replayed incessantly via every news outlet this side of his golden EIB microphone.

There can be no doubt about that.

Talk show host Dennis Prager, never one to resort to name calling – and one of the most cordial and civil talk show hosts in the country – announced today that he will begin referring to MSNBC as M-Sewer-N-B-C until “they apologize and do right after this. It is now, in my mind, the ‘Sewer Network.’”

For me, MSNBC became permanently gutter worthy the day Keith Olbermann accused talk show host Michael Medved of endorsing and supporting American slavery.

By the way, as far the “ultimate power position” is concerned, I wonder if Karen Hunter has ever heard of Barack H. Obama?

___________________________________________________

Update October 14, 2009 – 6:57 PM

Mark Levin, on his radio program, had a great line just a few moments ago in reference to Karen Hunter.

He said, “They’ll give a Pulitzer Prize to anyone. The next thing you know, they’ll give Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize.”

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DAVE AND THE SAVIOR

Barry and Dave

I suppose the easiest thing would be to just call everyone involved a racist and have done with it. Unfortunately, the two players in this interesting little saga are not only black, but painfully liberal – which automatically renders the “Clarence Thomas/Uncle Tom” angle unusable.

Still, the David Paterson-Barack Obama story keeps getting better all the time.

On one side is David Paterson, the beleaguered, do-nothing, impotent, in-over-his-head, stumbling, bumbling Governor of New York. He is the man whose approval rating is often confused for his shoe size. He is the man who has already blamed a racist press for his unpopularity, despite the fact that New York is among the bluest of the blue states.

On the other sides is Barack Obama. He is the Messiah.

The story almost writes itself.

Paterson says he is still running for Governor, period. Despite reports that he was asked to drop out for the good of the Democratic Party by Obama henchmen (after saying that American black leaders, including the President, are treated unfairly by the media), Paterson has refused to throw in the towel.

Whether or not President Obama personally agrees with Paterson’s perceptions of a racially biased media doesn’t matter, nor is it particularly relevant, because almost immediately after the Governor’s comments, the White House decided that Paterson was – pardon the expression – a “black eye” on the Party and needed to go away.

After all, with so much of the national dialogue consumed with matters of race in recent times, it just wouldn’t do to have the President associated with race-baiting twaddle such as Paterson’s – especially with health care yet to nationalize and so much government yet to grow.

Hence, the request from the White House for Paterson to bow out.

Paterson predictably took offense to the White House meddling in Empire State politics, brandishing an attitude that was something akin to, “Stay the hell out of New York!“

(If Paterson was white, Maureen Dowd would have undoubtedly heard the word “boy” at the end of that sentence).

And so we begin the latest chapter of this twisted tale.

As it stands now, the New York Governor is effectively blaming Prseident Obama’s ineffectiveness as Chief Exceutive for the friction that exists between the two of them – and ultimately for Paterson’s own deficiencies.

Azi Paybarah at PolitickerNY.com writes:

Paterson chalked up Obama’s intervention to Washington politics.

“I understand the president’s concern and I understand concern of staff members at the White House. If you look at it from their perspective, they haven’t exactly been able to govern in the first year of their administration in the way that other administrations have, where you would have, theoretically, a period in which the new administration is allowed to pass the needed pieces of legislation.”

But Paterson said Obama “was gracious to me. He asked me how I was feeling” and “he expressed a little chagrin about the process in this situation.”

Paterson also said it was untrue that he had been given a “direct message from a congressman” as had been reported in the New York Times, which named Representative Gregory Meeks as the messenger.

Bam and Company are not exactly thrilled about being tied to Paterson’s failures.

I guess Governor Dave shouldn’t expect any invites to supper at the White House any time in the forseeable future.
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LIBERAL RACIST RADAR

Columnist Maureen Dowd, among her other enviable attributes and talents, has sensory perceptions beyond those of most mortals. She can actually hear things that have not been said. She knows what others are saying without them having to say it because she hears the words in her mind.

Impressive doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Such was the case when Congressman Joe Wilson spat out the “You lie!” heard ‘round the world. It was after Wilson became Hitler-light to the left and a hero to the right that Dowd afforded all of us the opportunity to witness her miraculous gift. While the rest of us may have heard his outburst as two now infamous words, Ms. Dowd heard three: “You lie, boy!”

She said so.

No one is quite sure how she did it exactly (or how she will undoubtedly continue to do so), but one thing is for sure –  this is a skill set that must be developed and exploited properly.

Extraordinary as her Godless-given ability is, there is one thing that Ms. Dowd falls short on – namely, the ability to hear things that actually are there.

Of course, that can be a decidely difficult thing in and of itself.

To be fair, one can hardly blame her.

Having to deal with the things that resonate only in her head can predictably have a detremental effect on comprehending the tangible.

It’s not easy being Maureen.

Recall these controversial words by Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

While the shallow (and less clairvoyant) among us might have heard what were seemingly racist sentiments coming from Sotomayor, Dowd heard no such thing, writing in a column called “White Man’s Last Stand“:

“You can’t judge a judge by her cover. Despite the best efforts of Republicans to root out any sign that Sonia Sotomayor has emotions that color her views on the law, the Bronx Bomber kept a robotic mask in place. A wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not know that a gaggle of white Republican men afraid of extinction are out to trip her up.”

Clever.

How delightfully discerning.

Note how selective and unpredictable liberal racist radar can be.

There are times when its trigger mechanisms are tripped falsely by innocuous phrases like “black eye,” or “in the black.”

Call them false positives.

And there are other times when the alarms are dead silent, like when rap artists use the “n” word in their songs, or when Charlie Rangel opens his mouth.

Recall earlier this week when former President Jimmy Carter said:

I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.

Radar systems were apparently offline.

Carter is so morally detestable on so many levels that it’s hard to be angry with him anymore when he reaches new highs in taking the low road.

To him – and all other desperate Dems – health care reform’s demise, should it come to that, will be because the President is black.

What was the excuse when it failed under Bill Clinton?

I know he was called “the first black President,” but come on ….

-

 

CONTEMPTIBLE HANK

Congressman Hank Johnson

“He did not help the cause of diversity and tolerance with his remarks,” said Congressman Hank Johnson about colleague Joe Wilson, “If I were a betting man, I would say that it instigated more racist sentiment.”

Tolernace is a peculiar word to use.

I would say something about the pot calling the kettle black, but I might get accused of being a Grand Wizard or something.

I don’t recall Mr. Johnson – or any of his fellow Dems – condemning anyone during the nearly eight-year cavalcade of vitriolic Bush bashing that took place prior to the Messianic Age. Where exactly was Mr. Johnson when swastikas were being substituted for the letter “s” in any number of anti-George W. Bush protest signs? Where were his thoughtful remarks after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called President Bush a liar? Where was the call for civility when former Vice President Al Gore bellowed like an angry old man returning socks at Wal Mart, screaming that Bush had betrayed this country.

I suppose Dems were just being tolerant.

If I were a betting man, I would guarantee that the overwhelming vast majority of Americans are at (or near) their breaking points, tired of this ongoing desperation game being played by panicked Democrats.

Johnson went on to say, “I guess we’ll probably have folks putting on white hoods and white uniforms again, riding through the countryside intimidating people.”

Contemptibility, thy name is Hank Johnson.

Come now, Congressman, do you actually believe that people will now start sporting white hoods and uniforms? Are you serious? Do you truly think that in this day and age Ku-Klux-Klan-like bands of angry racists are going to take to the “countryside” and terrorize people? Because of two words blurted out by one congressman?

Are liberals born this way, or is it a contracted condition?

I don’t expect the mainstream media, in its infinite uselessness, to question such ignorant and embarrassing comments made by a black congressman. The fact is, from Charles Rangel to Diane Watson, when black politicians cry racism, the rest of the world is expected to take it, accept it as truth, fold up like a cheap table, and go find other racist conservatives to yak about.

But aren’t Johnson’s claims of a possible return to burning crosses and lynching at least as provocative, or worthy of at least the same media attention, as the assertion by the President that illegals would not be covered by his health care reform plan? Is there no one in the mainstream media who thinks that Mr. Johnson needs to explain himself any further? Are there no follow up questions anywhere to be asked of this man? Are journalists simply exhausted from expending all their energy and resources into covering Joe Wilson and the aftermath of his ruthless “You lie!” attack on the President?

I would ask Mr. Johnson, and every other coward who has used racism to explain away opposition to the President’s agenda, if it is possible to disagree with Obama and not be a racist? If so, what would that opposition look like or sound like?

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LEFTIST INTELLECTUALISM – BECAUSE HE’S BLACK

What is wrong with these people?

It makes no sense.

It’s almost as if those who oppose Him don’t wish to be saved. Can’t these contrarians and malcontents understand that when they cry afoul and moan about the erosions of personal liberty, they are helping to extinguish moral and economic imperatives being proposed for their own good? Can’t these rabble-rousing, tea-party drones cool it with their tiresome talk-radio inspired “personal responsibility” chatter and all that “liberty” rhetoric?

Clear-thinking reasonable citizens of the world would never oppose such a battery of forward thinking policies as we are now seeing nine months into the Messianic Age. It thus stands to reason that to be against Him is to be mired in timeworn obsoleteness. To oppose Him is to oppose all that would unify. It cannot possibly be the substance of an Obamacratic policy that causes people to take an opposing position; not when the policy in question is cut from messianic cloth. It can only be the myopic citizenry wallowing in their antiquated prejudices and bigotry, hell-bent on stifling an uppity black man with vision. And since asking the question, “What is wrong with these people?” will never bring an answer that satisfies the disciples, there can only be one reason why there still exist those who won’t board the Obama transformation train.

His skin color.

That’s what we’re told by the most serious thinkers on the left.

Those who postulate and predicate modern liberalism are doing all they can to create new conventional wisdom – namely, that what sits at the core of the uproarious opposition to Barack Obama’s push to drop the health care delivery system on the lap of the federal government is the darkness of his skin.

It has to be, they say.

What else could it be?

Fair and open-minded people would never argue that there will be a major problem in adding thirty million people (formerly forty-seven million) to the nation’s insurance rolls while the number of physicians and nurses remains stagnant. No way. That’s race-based gobbledygook.

Rational thinkers would never question how such an expansive plan could possibly save money, as He suggests it would, even though demand would explode to astronomical proportions. No chance. To do so would be engaging in masked racism.

Level-headed policy wonks would never question Him when He says that illegal aliens would not be covered with taxpayer dollars, even though there is no provision that allows for the citizenship status of potential patients to be verified. No sir. To suggest He is being dishonest about this, as Congressman Joe Wilson did last week, is akin to burning a cross, or using the “n” word.

In short, those who stand up against the policies of Barack Obama do so because he is black.

And they hate having a black President.

Period.

So we’re told.

If it were Joe Biden (God forbid) making the same speech last Wednesday, Joe Wilson would have said nothing.

The ever-effervescent Maureen Dowd in her most recent column writes:

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

…

Wilson clearly did not like being lectured and even rebuked by the brainy black president presiding over the majestic chamber.

Dowd goes on to point out that Wilson, at one time, belonged to the Sons of the Confederacy - an offense so hanus, its equal has yet to be realized. I’m not sure exactly how much weight Ms. Dowd really puts in the past associations of elected officials, but the names Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright immediately come to mind. The organization ACORN also rings a bell.

Nowhere did the magnificent Ms. Dowd bother to mention that Mr. Wilson is also a colonel in the National Guard.

She’s silly that way.

Sports-scribbler-turned-incoherent-leftocrat Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News wrote:

This is an America where Rep. Joe Wilson, whoever he is, thinks he can call the President of the United States a liar, Wilson talking to the President the way he would the help, or some waiter who was supposed to bring him another drink.

Wilson really did sound like somebody who had been on hold for an hour, waiting to scream about socialism to Rush.

But why wouldn’t Wilson scream out the way he did? This is a time when a radio host like Mark Levin routinely refers to President Obama as “that jerk,” all in the name of liberty, of course, and the fight against tyranny. Or maybe this all just comes out of a fury that there weren’t enough screamers to keep the black guy from getting elected.

Such is the intellectual left.

Note that race magically becomes a negligible component when the likes of Ms. Dowd and Mr. Lupica, i.e., white liberals, speak out in opposition against powerful black conservatives, like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (black). Does Thomas’ “blackness” – or lack thereof as some have suggested – suddenly become irrelevant when lefties espouse criticisms of his positions? Why does no one accuse Dowd of harboring deep-seated racist inclinations when she criticizes a black who happens to be conservative? Or Lupica? Or any white on that side of the garden? Surely, they have no great love for the positions and philosophies of people like Larry Elder, J C Watts and Walter Williams. So then, when white libs criticize black conservatives, where are the “You’re not black enough, boy!” accusations?

The answer?

Because race is an issue only to conservatives, even though liberals are the ones who keep bringing it up. Even the ever-affable and lovable Bill Cosby referred to Clarence Thomas as a “brother lite” not too long ago.

I suppose that when “one of them” criticizes “one of their own,” there is truth in it.

So, when columnist extraordinaire Paul Krugman takes the opposing view of conservative thinker Thomas Sowell, is it because of Sowell’s race? Shouldn’t Krugman be branded a racist by default?

How about columnist Frank Rich? Safe to say, he’s no supporter of RNC Chairman Michael Steele. If he lambastes the Republican Party in his columns (which is like saying, “if he breathes”), should those of us on the right now fit him for a white sheet and hood?

As long as guilt-ridden white people can point out how awful other white people are, with a whole lot of black people looking on, modern liberalism will never run out of nourishment.

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CHARLIE’S TURN

New York Congressman, Charles Rangel - the Ethical One

I’m convinced; it is hard wired into the liberal brain. It is an automatic – like seeing someone talk to himself on a subway train, or that smell you get at your grandmother’s house. The reflex in libs to demonize and marginalize those with whom they disagree is involuntary. It’s like a back spasm or a reality television program - you can’t control it and it just won’t go away. As one reader of my blog noted, to even bother mentioning this phenonmena anymore is akin to breaking the news that grass is still green.

Yet, I admit to being captivated by it. It fascinates me – like an overturned truck on the side of the highway or an ever-expanding blood blister.

To the liberal mind, opposing a leftist positions can only be attributed to that which is unsavory - such as greed, prejudice  or lack of compassion. There can be no other reason to want to see liberal policies fail, according to liberals. That’s because the conservative is not merely a bearer of a contrasting view; he or she is driven by sinister motives. And because only liberals really care about people, those motives must be exposed to a nation in desparate need of some good old fashioned big government healing.

Nothing soothes the boo-boo like a little liberty-raping liberalism.

Thus, if something is repeated often enough, regardless of how farcical it is, it will just blend into the nooks and crannies of conventional wisdom.

Recently, New York Governor David Paterson blamed a racist media for his failures and unpopularity. The fact that he governs – using the term loosely – a state so prevailingly blue doesn’t seem to matter. It just isn’t possible that he is inadequate. After all, he’s black. It has to be racism.

Last week Congresswoman Diane Watson – a black woman – said that those opposed to ObamaCare wanted to see a President that looked like her fail. It just isn’t possible that the idea of universal health care is a bane to Americans who are paying attention. After all, the President is black. It has to be racism.

And now, added to the simmering bouillabaisse of race-card playing intellectual lightweights is everyone’s favorite corrupt politician – a man whose integrity and ethical standing can be placed on the surface of a diminutive electron with room to spare – Congressman Charles Rangel of New York.

Carl Campanile from the New York Post writes:

Rep. Charles Rangel said Tuesday that “bias” and “prejudice” toward Obama are fueling opposition to health-care reform.

…

“Some Americans have not gotten over the fact that Obama is president of the United States. They go to sleep wondering, ‘How did this happen?’ ” Rangel (D-Manhattan) said Tuesday.

Speaking at a health-care forum in Washington Heights, Rangel said that when critics complain that Obama is “trying to interfere” with their lives by pushing for health-care reform, “then you know there’s just a misunderstanding, a bias, a prejudice, an emotional feeling.”

“We’re going to have to move forward notwithstanding that,” said Rangel, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and a chief health-care negotiator.

Rangel then likened the battle over health-care expansion for the uninsured to the fight for civil rights.

For all the nuance and astuteness that liberals are supposed to possess, they regularly expose themselves as nothing more than emotionally-driven wells of featherbrained fribble.

Unquestionably there is bias in the health care debate.

Shouldn’t there be?

Liberals are biased in thinking the government can ride in on a white horse and save the masses from impending doom. Conservatives are biased in thinking that decisions are best made by individuals.

Aren’t leftists, by definition, biased against conservative positions? And vice versa?

What point is supposedly being made here?

Frankly, Charles Rangel is an elitist ass.

He cannot muddle reality or redefine the terms of the game simply because he doesn’t want to accept the fact that Americans are exceedingly well-informed on the subject of ObamaCare and don’t like the idea of a government run system. Rangel and his ilk are in sheer denial that opposition to universal health care is really about defending liberty and preserving the power of the individual. His elitist instincts tell him that people really cannot be opposed to the messianic visions of health care coverage for all. Rather, it must hinge on racial prejudice – it has to.

Yes, Mr. Rangel is correct in saying that many Americans haven’t gotten over the fact that Obama won the White House – but it is not based on his blackness. (It isn’t even based on his half-whiteness). Conservatives marvel at the fact that last November nearly 53% of Americans decided on a leftist candidate with a conspicuous history of Marxist sympathies.

Do liberals ever respond to criticisms of their precious government-expanding agenda with anything that does not involve knee-jerking idiocy?  

And what better way of overloading the aforementioned cultural nooks and crannies of conventional wisdom with emotional twaddle then to tie the health care debate in with the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s? After all, once you do that, how can any self-respecting, decent human being argue against Obamacare?

Critics of ObamaCare blasted Rangel for taking the low road.

“Charlie Rangel knows that race has nothing to do with the health-care debate. He should not be implying that race has anything to do with it,” said Rep. Peter King (R-LI).

State Conservative Party leader Mike Long called Rangel’s comment “outrageous and outlandish” — and suggested the congressman might be trying to deflect attention from his ethics woes.

“Rangel is playing the race card. It’s clear that the congressman is trying to galvanize the minority community that this is ‘us against them.’ It’s going to backfire. A majority of people will see through this,” Long said.

Taking a page from the Paterson, Watson and Rangel Handbook of Politics, Logic and Foot Stamping, I cannot help but ask: Since President Obama is half-white, shouldn’t half of his plan be deemed acceptable?

I suppose the IRS is racist too, demanding all those back taxes from the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Commitee, Charlie Rangel.

-

LOVE THAT DIANE WATSON

Serving California’s 33rd Congressional District is Los Angeles native, Congresswoman Diane Watson. Among her other laudable attributes is not only her titillating support of Fidel Castro and his country’s exemplary health care delivery system, but her capacity to deal cards from the race deck effortlessly.

At a town-hall meeting on Thursday, Watson declared that those who oppose ObamaCare do so because they wish to see the President destroyed. As sure as there are pungent armpits in a summertime New York subway tunnel, it is no surprise to learn that the President’s skin color is the real reason. Indeed, according to Watson, the desire to see Bracak Obama’s initiatives defeated – and thus, his presidency branded a failure – comes down to good old-fashioned, let’s-break-out-the-hoods-and-matchstick racism.

From the well of incisive thought and seasoned analysis that is Diane Watson, there are two comments she made during that meeting that I’d like to dissect.

First, said Watson:

“You might have heard their philosophical leader. I think his name is Rush Limbaugh. (She pronounced it Lim-BO). And he said early on, “I hope that he fails.” Do you know what that means? If the President – your Commander-In-Chief – fails, America fails.”

To begin with, the term “philosophical leader” is about as meaningless as the words that roll off an Obama teleprompter, or a New York Mets baseball game.  However, seeing as I’m in a particularly festive mood this morning, I’ll roll with it.

Rush is certainly one of conservatism’s finest “spokesmen” (for the want of a preferable phrase), but he didn’t invent conservatism. To the great dismay of liberals, leftists and other children, he happens to articulate it exceedingly well – almost as well as the “drive-by” media misinterpret, misquote and misunderstand almost everything he says. And while there is definitely a profusion of weak-kneed, mushy-in-the-middle, pseudo-conservatives who attempt to redefine conservatism by abandoning its principles for more leftward ideals, Rush does no such thing.

His “philosophy” has remained steadfast since his Sacramento radio debut in 1984. That fact alone is enough to send the undergarments of liberals into vexatious knots.

Again, assuming the “philosophical leader” tag is applicable, the most entertaining part of Watson’s statement is when she says she “thinks” his name is Rush Limbaugh – as if trying to decide whether or not she’s heard of him.

There isn’t a single self-respecting, self-serving, big-government liberal taking in oxygen today who has not heard of Rush Limbaugh.

He haunts their dreams.

Additionally, Limbaugh’s “I hope Obama fails” remark has been so well explained, so painstakingly explicated and so remarkably misunderstood by the saliva-danglers who spend countless hours frantically collecting fractured phrases and out-of-context hateful commentary from him, that Watson – like all Democrat notions – comes across as weak, tired and pedestrian. However, for those who came in after the credits, read my articles The Limbaugh Fetsih – The Democrats Are Obsessed and My Two Cents On Whether You Can Support The President While Not Supporting His Policies. 

In short, if the Commander-In-Chief fails to apologize on foreign soil for his own country; and fails to expand the deficit to unsustainable record-breaking levels; and fails in his quest to nationalize the greatest health care delivery system in the world; and fails in his attempts to have the government take over automobile companies and financial institutions; and fails to weaken the defenses of the country he is charged to protect by keeping agencies like the CIA from doing their job; and fails to recognize the ongoing battle against murderous Islamo-fascists as a genuine war; and fails to understand that enemy combatants captured on the field of battle are not to be afforded the same rights as American citizens; and fails in adopting industry-killing, job-killing “global warming” legislation … then America wins.

It’s pretty simple, really.

Watson continues:

“Now when a Senator says that this will be his Waterloo – and we all know what happened at Waterloo – then we have him, and he fails. Do we want a failed state called the ‘United States?’ So remember, they are spreading fear, and they’re trying to see that the first President who looks like me fails.”

Regarding fear … it was not a conservative who scared America into believing that the nation would be ravaged by heterosexual AIDS in the 1980s. It was not a conservative who promised that food supplies would run out by the year 2000. It was not a conservative who warned that natural resources would be depleted by 1990 due to human over consumption. It was not a conservative who foresaw a world in peril due to global cooling. It was not a conservative who promised a planet devastated by overpopulation by 1996. It was not a conservative who said the bird flu would wipe out countless numbers of humans. It was not a conservative who promulgated the impending Y2K disaster and set up numerous agencies, websites, roundtables, taskforces and contingency plans to save the world from it. It was not a conservative who predicted widespread catastrophe due to mad cow disease.

And as far as the “first President who looks like me” remark … is there any group of people more intolerant, more race-consumed, more fixated on the skin color of people than leftists? Time after time, these sorry excuses for thinkers hurl their character-assassinating bombs into the public square, accusing conservatives of harboring animosity toward President Obama due to his race, never once realizing that everything they project is a direct reflection of how they think. To leftists, everything that carries even the slightest negative connotation regarding Barack Obama can only be about his color. It must be about his color. It simply isn’t possible for anyone to legitimately disagree with President Obama policy-wise and not be bad; it has to be because they hate blacks or resent the fact that America would put a black man in the White House.

Frankly, people like Watson need to get their antiquated behinds out of the 1960s and enter the real world. If Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream of a nation where character previals over color is at all being asphyxiated, it is happening because of the likes of Watson and her race-obsessed ilk. 

To people like me, President Obama needs to fail because of his desire (and promise) to transform America into something the country has never been – a nation where the State is more important than the individual.

Obama’s failures assure that such a transformation cannot – and will not – take place.

Watson also threw in these gushing words about Cuba’s world-class health care:

Let me tell you, before you say, ‘Oh, it’s communist,’ you need to go down there and see what Fidel Castro put in place. And I want you to know, you can think whatever you want to about Fidel Castro, but he was one of the brightest leaders I have ever met. And you know, the Cuban Revolution that kicked out the wealthy – Che Guevara did that – and after they took over, they went out among the population to find someone who could lead this new nation and they found … well, just leave it there … an attorney by the name of Fidel Castro.

Perhaps Ms. Watson could use a paper towel or a sedative … or a cigarette.

As Jay Ambrose wrote in October, 2007, outside of Guevara’s reckless extermination of “people proven guilty of absolutely nothing,” his desire to use Soviet missiles against America, and the fact that he “ran a Havana prison in which he killed, killed and then killed some more, and later helped start the labor camp system in which homosexuals and others considered undesirable were to be confined as nothing more than slaves,” what’s not to love? 

Does anyone love a war criminal more than a leftist? Or a t-shirt manufacturer?

And as for Cuba’s health care system … until Congresswoman Watson ditches her inferior Capitol Hill health plan for CastroCare, the discussion is closed. 

Diane Watson is a first-class farce and a genuine disgrace.

The great Breitbart.com website has the audio.

-

BAM AND THE PROFESSOR

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

And now the President has weighed in.

Admittedly, he doesn’t know all the facts, but he is familiar enough with the case to place blame with the authorities.

How could it possibly be anything else?

The police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he said, acted “stupidly” in last week’s arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. – who happens to be black. (Such a wordsmith, that Bam). In fact, according to the Chief Executive of the United States, blacks and Hispanics are still singled out unfairly for arrest in this nation. (I’m glad he cleared that up).

There’s nothing quite like having the most powerful man in the world throw police officers under the bus for doing their jobs.

Hopefully, the President was afforded the opportunity to dry his soaking wet feet (from all that water walking) before he inserted them squarely into his mouth last evening.

No one likes to speak with an excessively wet tongue.

Yes, there is much one can draw from the vast well of emotion and knee-jerkism that impels modern liberal thought – confusion, non sequitors, rhythmic bumper sticker slogans, suggestions on how to live a “green” life, how to punish the rich, and so on.

And among those things least likely to be found in almost any leftist contention is good old fashioned down-to-earth reasonability.

In the matter of Mr. Gates’ arrest – and in reading some of the articles on the subject over the past few days from left-leaning sources – one would have to come to the conclusion that if two unfamiliar people wearing backpacks are seen breaking into a home, that it is perfectly all right to assume they are doing something wrong – that is, unless they’re black. In those instances, reasonably suspicious behavior – like trying to force entry into a house – should be approached differently. The history and sensitivities of an entire race of people should play a determinative role on how such a situation is handled.

That’s because liberals see everything branded with the very labels they claim they want to see removed.

Perhaps even more outrageous to today’s liberal is the idea that police actually respond to – and deal with – situations without racial bias. To lefties, prejudices against nonwhites are simply hard-wired into many cops. Sure, those who call the cops may or may not be acting on personal biases, but police officers who respond to those calls are almost always predisposed to racial bias.

Or so it would seem.

Forget the fact that in this day and age – the era of wretched political correctness and hyper-victimization – where Americans are regularly reminded of the racial sensitivities of minorities (thanks to such wonderful initiatives as Sensitivity Training courses and the constant bombardment of multiculturalism at school), it is now intrinsic in law enforcement officials to carefully weigh almost every action and word for fear of being labeled racist. Set aside the reality that this country is the least racist and most accommodating on Earth, and that the men and women of law enforcement overwhelmingly bend over backwards to avoid situations where racism could even be considered a factor in any action.

It’s insignificant to crusading leftists clinging to relevance. There are battles to be fought – even battles that have been won already.

In an age where useless yet somehow influential human debris like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson continue to be given importance, big corporations (in fear of being strong-armed by the blackmailing likes of Jackson), law enforcement agencies, small businesses, and media types continue to run scared at the prospect of these race-baiters causing them any trouble.

Gates being arrested. Note the black police officer in the foreground.

So what precipitated this latest tedious excursion into liberal regressiveness?

What is this Gates thing all about?

Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 16th for disorderly conduct – charges that were dropped a couple of days ago – after he broke into the house he had been renting from Harvard University. Mr. Gates is considered a prominent black scholar – not to be confused with simply being a prominent American scholar – and has been on the faculty at Harvard since 1991. He is, unquestionably, an accomplished man. Upon returning home from a trip to China, where he was working on a documentary, he found that the front door of his home was jammed. He called upon his driver to help him try to force it open. It was at that point that a neighbor woman, who obviously did not recognize the two men, called the police to report what the overwhelming vast majority of people would consider reasonably suspicious activity – two men apparently trying to bust into the home.

It isn’t exactly a routine event.

Gates eventually got into the home through a back door.

When police arrived, Gates was asked to show his identification and proof that he lived there – a completely reasonable action.

It was at that point that Gates did what any consummate, learned scholar would do under the unusual circumstances – he refused. He then accused the police – specifically Officer James Crowley – of being racist.

(See Crowley’s police report).

“No I will not!” he yelled, when initially asked to produce identification.

“You don’t know who you’re messing with!” he exclaimed, according to Officer Carlos Figueroa in a separate corroborating report.

“This is what happens to black men in America!” he bellowed, heard by many.

Melissa Trujillo of the Associated Press writes:

Police said Gates was arrested after he yelled at an officer, accused him of racial bias and refused to calm down after the officer demanded that Gates show him identification to prove he lived in the home.

Gates’ lawyer, fellow Harvard scholar Charles Ogletree, said his client showed his driver’s license and Harvard ID — both with his photos — and repeatedly asked for the name and badge number of the officer, who refused. He followed the officer onto the front porch as he left his house and was arrested there.

Gates told The Root that the police handcuffed him behind his back but moved the cuffs to the front when he told them he walked with a cane. He noted that at least one of the officers in the group outside his house was black.

He spoke of a “terrifying and humiliating” experience at the Cambridge jail, where he was booked, fingerprinted, photographed and questioned, then locked up in a tiny cell that made him claustrophobic.

He said that he doesn’t know the woman who called police, Lucia Whalen, and that “she was probably doing the right thing.” Whalen didn’t respond to Associated Press requests for comment.

Gates said he harbors more anger toward the officer who arrested “the first black man” he saw and arrested him on a “trumped-up charge.”

So, let’s see if this all makes perfect sense up to this point …

A concerned neighbor saw two men, unknown to her, trying to break into a home. Assuming she would have reacted the same way had the two men been aqua, she called the police to investigate. They arrived to find the man – whom they had not yet identified – inside the home. The police asked the man for identification – standard operating procedure. The man, instead of handling the situation with the dignity and decorum one might expect from someone of his experience and education, chose not to take the minute or so it would have cost him to peacefully clear everything up, and decided to play his victim card, almost reflexively demanding the badge number and name of the police officer doing his job.

And just like that – because Mr. Gates decided it was – it became a racial matter.

It all sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it?

(It is unclear whether the police officer would have dared to levy such an outrageous request for identification had Mr. Gates been white … or cyan … or simply not quite as black).

Again, read the report filed by Officer James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department.

And, of course, keep in mind that Mr. Gates was not being arrested for breaking into his own home. He was being arrested for disorderly conduct. Apparently, after Mr. Gates finally took a nanosecond in between his exhibitions of “loud and tumultuous” behavior to produce his Harvard identification – and as the police were actually leaving his home satisfied that all had been explained – Gates followed the exiting cops out onto his porch, continuing his tirade about racism and racial profiling and other related blah-blah-blahs.

That’s when Gates was arrested.

And, sadly, that may be exactly what he wanted.

“I’m outraged,” Gates said in extensive comments made to TheRoot.com, a Web site he oversees. “I can’t believe that an individual policeman on the Cambridge police force would treat any African-American male this way, and I am astonished that this happened to me; and more importantly I’m astonished that it could happen to any citizen of the United States, no matter what their race.

“There are 1 million black men in the prison system, and on Thursday I became one of them,” he said. “I would sooner have believed the sky was going to fall from the heavens than I would have believed this could happen to me. It shouldn’t have happened to me, and it shouldn’t happen to anyone.”

On his radio program on Wednesday, talk show host Dennis Prager suggested that Mr. Gates’ outrage may have been rooted in the fact that the police did not recognize him or know who he was when they asked for his identification.

From the Los Angeles Times:

The police say Gates asked if the officer knew “who he was.” That may sound arrogant, but many a black man in the same position has asked a similar question. It means: “Can you see who I am, not just what I am?” Because regardless of their achievements, wealth or status, they are vulnerable to the universal black male experience — finding themselves in handcuffs first and charges dropped later. Was Gates fed up and frustrated? Loud and assertive? Even disorderly, as police maintain? Possibly so. It’s tough being a perpetual suspect.

…

In his 1994 book, “Colored People: A Memoir,” Gates wrote that although being black is no disgrace, it can be inconvenient: “When I walk into a room, people still see my blackness, more than my Gates-ness, or my literary-ness.” Even when the room is in his own home.

After reading that last paragraph, Prager correctly commented that in this instance “they came there to protect his house.”

Precisely.

I’m not certain how many academics are readily recognizable to the public at large, but it is not an unreasonable thing that the Cambridge police – or, for that matter, almost anyone outside of the intellectual circles Mr. Gates travels in – would not know who he was on sight. Safe to say, he would have been just as unrecognized and received the same treatment had he behaved just as boorishly and uncooperatively, regardless of the melanin levels in his skin.

Still, it is clear that Gates was set off by far more than just not being recognized. Within moments of being confronted by Officer Crowley, Gates yanked the oft-summoned race card from the top of his deck and threw it in the officer’s face.

And even if, after reading the police report, one is still inclined to criticize – or even condemn – the police for questionable or inappropriate behavior in this case, why is it automatically assumed that any problems or misunderstandings that may have occurred are, by default, attributable to Mr. Gates’ skin color?

No, you need not check your calendars. Believe it or not, this is not 1959.

I draw from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani when I say that the police officers of this country have earned the right to be given the benefit of the doubt.

It’s a shame that the President of the United States did not see it that way at last evening’s press conference. Rather, he chose to offer a spontaneous, compulsory condemnation of the Cambridge Police Department in front of a national audience without the benefit of knowing – or even being familiar with – the facts.

Isn’t it possible – at all possible – that Professor Gates might have been in the wrong?

Perhaps a better question is: Is there anyone who can still doubt Obama’s unworldly ability to unify the American people?

Well done, Mr. President.

Respectfully, maybe you should keep your damned teleprompter shut off until you know what the hell you’re talking about.

-

JIM BROWN – STUCK IN TIME

Democrats, liberals, social activists and other utopia-seekers need to prepare their exit strategies a little better. Whether following a successful and noble struggle (like the civil rights battles that culminated in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964), or a dreadfully unsuccessful one (the so-called War on Poverty that has cost trillions of dollars and has accomplished absolutely nothing), the first and foremost question to be answered is “What happens next?”

Liberals don’t have answers, of course.

They lather, rinse and repeat, with the emphasis on repeat – even though the shampoo is lousy and smells something like Spam.

People like the Reverend Al Sharpton, for example, continue to fuel decades-old skirmishes in a war that has long since been won, simply to hold on to fleeting relevance. Despite the fact that today’s America – the most accommodating, least-racist nation on the planet – is light years from resembling the troubled nation that more than five decades ago began confronting its social demons in earnest means little to the race-obsessed of today. If we – both non-intimidated white Americans and post-racial blacks who are sick and tired of being told that their skin color is their most relevant characteristic – can be reminded by the loudest and most bombastic among us how horrible we still are, then any and all progress in race relations can continue to be labeled as “not good enough.”

It gives them meaning and purpose at the expense of genuine progress.

The soldiers of social change from days gone by are simply not as relevant as they once were – and that is, by definition, a good thing. Those principals and values for which they fought valiantly and heroically for – character over color, equality of opportunity for all – are timeless. But the victory has long since been secured. They have succeeded, thank God. Their irrelevance today is a testament to the social changes they battled for back then.

Thus, I humbly suggest that what is best for this country is for these relics acknowledge the important victories of the past and cease continuing to wage meaningless and counterproductive wars.

This bit of unsolicited advice is respectfully directed to NFL football legend Jim Brown.

Neil Best from NewsDay.com writes:

Football Hall of Famer Jim Brown blasts Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods for their lack of social activism in an interview that is to appear on HBO’s “Real Sports” Tuesday night.

Of Woods, Brown said, “This cat is a mamajama; he is a killer. He’ll run over you, he’ll kick your ass. But as an individual for social change or any of that kind of — , terrible. Terrible.”

Brown criticized Woods in January 2008 for not speaking out against the Golf Channel’s Kelly Tilghman after she used the word “lynch” in a joking reference to him.

Of Woods and Jordan, Brown said, “I know they both know better, OK? And I know they both can do better without hurting themselves.”

Terrible?

Exactly what sort of social change should Woods and Jordan be engineering, according to Brown? What is it they are neglecting to do for their race?

In his day, in the not so distant past, there was no athlete in any sport more revered or admired as Michael Jordan. Today, Tiger Woods is an icon, a living legend, at the very top of his field, probably on his way to being the greatest golfer who has ever lived (if he isn’t already). Both men conduct themselves admirably and are the idols of tens of millions. Their followings transcend every conceivable category of society. They are loved by people from every walk of life from every corner of the country. America has afforded them the opportunity to pursue their dreams, and they have succeeded as men – not just black men (precisely the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King). Neither man has ever been denied a hotel room, or the ability to sit at a lunch counter, or use a water faucet because of their skin color. This is twenty-first century America. Their skin color is positively meaningless. Their achievements are what matters – just as Dr. King had wished.

This has always perplexed me.

If the goal was to have a society that was, for all intents and purposes, color blind, how can someone criticize others who are actually following through and reaping the benefits of the hard fought battles of the past?

I would never suggest that anyone forget the injustices of history, but wouldn’t liberals do better for themselves to actually behave as genuine progressives and look ahead?

To help illustrate my point, think of a busy four-way intersection somewhere without a working stop light and only a stop sign on two of the four corners. Picture how nightmarish the traffic at such an intersection would be, particularly during rush hour. The amount of fender benders and injuries at such an intersection would be unacceptable.

Now imagine a group of people in the community actively working to put genuine stop lights in place, complete with turning lanes and crosswalks. They petition their local government, they hold rallies, they print up literature, they go from door to door building support for their cause. Eventually, the stop lights are put in, the intersection is made exponentially safer and all goals are met.

Success!

Those who lived through the pre-stop light era will always remember how it was. They may even tell stories of how dangerous things used to be at that crazy intersection and how different life was during that time. The good that was done by the people who fought the battle to put in that stop light will never be forgotten – nor should it be.

But the need to keep fighting the original battle to put in that stop light just wouldn’t exist anymore.

Naturally, the presence of a stop light will not keep individual drivers from being careless – the same way one will never be able to completely eradicate racism from the country. But the existence of careless drivers does not mean the intersection is unsafe.

To time to fight the battle of the stoplight has come and gone.

And just because there are racists in America does not mean we are a racist nation.

We are not.

There are deaf people in America. Are we a deaf nation?

There are paraplegics in America. Are we a paraplegic nation?

For my money, I happen to think Jim Brown is the greatest running back in the history of the NFL (with all due respect to Walter Payton, Emmitt Smith and Barry Sanders). He is the only man to average 100 yards a game for every game he ever played – an astonishing accomplishment (Barry Sanders is damn close, though). The era he played in during his prime years is a far different place than the one Michael Jordan did or the one Tiger Woods currently plays in – attributable to those who fought the battles for social justice “back in the day.”

Those who did should be admired.

Sadly, those who still do are an often an embarrassment to that legacy.

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D.L. HUGHLEY – LOVE THOSE DOUBLE STANDARDS

dennis prager

The irony is that while they call themselves “progressive” (instead of “liberal”), Leftocrats continue to stagnate, if not digress – reaching back into history’s dustbins, resuscitating policies and positions that should have long ago been fitted with cement shoes, clinging to concepts and arguments with the obstinacy of an infected corn. That is the modus operandi of the American liberal – not to ask if something works, but to determine if it feels good or if it plays advantageously on the emotions of the electorate.

One old playlist favorite that never seems to lose its luster with the ever-mindful and substantive liberal thinkocracy is the “Nazi Card.”

On Wednesday, during the first hour of his radio program, Dennis Prager commented on remarks made by CNN host (and entertainer) D.L. Hughley, who last weekend proved once again that the only people obsessed with race in this country are Leftocrats. Hughley – deep thinker, social scholar and butcher of coherent English – put on display his intellectual prowess, digging deep into his bag of tired Leftocrat tricks by (once again) equating the Republican Party to the Nazi Party.

Said Hughley:

“The tenets of the Republican Party are amazing, and they seem warm and welcome … but when I watch it be applied – like, you didn’t have to go much further than the Republican National Convention. It literally looked like Nazi Germany. It really did.”

Hughley made the comments speaking with Michael Steele, head of the Republican National Committee, who, frankly, was not particularly compelling during his appearance and failed to react in any way to Hughley’s imbecility.

This little ditty went largely unnoticed, save for some conservative commentators, while the rest of the media was belly-button deep in Rush Limbaugh talk.

With Steele making the rounds and being bombarded with questions on the influence of Rush Limbaugh – a radio personality – on the Republican Party, Dennis Prager went on to make this excellent point:

… if Michael Steele is being asked to respond to Rush Limbaugh, then the head of the Democratic National Committee should be asked to respond to this CNN host. “What do you say about a host who says that the Republican Convention looks like the Nazi Party?”

In all candor, I was in the process of composing an article on this very subject, but in deference to the great Dennis Prager, who articulated my point as good, if not better, than I could have, I am simply commenting on the commentator here.

Prager went on to say:

d. l. hughley

“I assume he meant because there were so many white people there. It’s quite a remarkably stupid comment aside from being a vicious comment.

So, if it’s overwhelmingly white, it looks Nazi.

If it’s overwhelmingly black, what does it look like? What does that look like? … I would say, “Hughley, Did the Constitutional Convention look like the Nazi Party? Did the signing of the Declaration of Independence look like a Nazi Party?

Were you born foolish or did you become foolish when you adopted liberal ideas?”

Of course, there were “people of color” at the Republican National Convention, so in the most literal sense, Hughley is wrong. But the foolishness of Hughley’s position is best illustrated to liberals by turning the tables – although I’m fully prepared to field the inevitable birrage of comebacks from outraged leftists explaining to me how it is not the same.

Still, how do you think these words would play?

“The tenets of the Democrat Party are amazing, and they seem warm and welcome … but when I watch it be applied – like, you didn’t have to go much further than the Democratic National Convention. It literally looked like an inner city welfare office. It really did.”

As God is my witness, it turned my stomach just to write that, but you can bet if someone on the conservative side would have been asinine enough to say something such as that, it would have been splashed across every newspaper in the country and would have already spawned three MSNBC news specials on the ugly face of modern racism in America.

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MURDOCH APOLOGIZES, RACE BAITERS GAIN GROUND

i'm sorry ... so sorry

Earlier this morning, CNN had a link to this blog – specifically to an article I “penned” called “Race Baiter On The Attack.” It was part of CNN’s “From The Blogs” section, underneath the headlining story of Rupert Murdoch’s apology for publishing a cartoon deemed “offensive” by old-school racists and victimized societal dinosaurs.

My “inbox” and I may never be on speaking terms again.

After all the ruckus of what should’ve been less than a non-story, it occured to me that it may, indeed, be time to resurrect and redefine the term “yellow journalism” for the twenty-first century. Fear, intimidation, apology and appeasement are becoming the cornerstones of today’s free press. The mainstream media exists almost entirely to reinforce the protective cocoon that surrounds Barack Obama. The Messiah is, for now, untouchable, and any reference to anything that could even appear critical is roundly disposed with.

Let’s be truthful … if anyone other than Barack Obama – and I mean anyone – got up in front of the media and said that federal spending was out of control and needed to be tamed after signing a nearly one trillion dollar porkfest into law, they’d be skewered (and rightly so) by every journalist, pundit, blogger, talk-show host, cab driver and columnist in creation.

The “objective” American press is a disgrace.

I was disappointed – but not surprised – to see that Robert Murdoch, owner of the New York Post (NewsCorp), felt it necessary to issue yet another apology for the now infamous dead-chimp cartoon published last week that some took as a racial attack on the President. Never have so many been so outraged over so little. It is both disturbing and embarrassing.

The paper already apologized for this, you may recall, immediately after the cartoon was originally published.

But like the less-than-relevant sniveling radio speck Don Imus did a couple of years ago, Murdoch caved.

Does Mr. Murdoch truly believe that this latest apology will finally be the end of this saga? Does anyone honestly believe that these disgraceful race merchants will go away now? Sharpton and Crew have been empowered. There’s blood in the water. They won’t stop.

When do liberals ever stop?

The haters have already called for the firing of the editor-in-chief of the Post as well as the cartoonist. What next? Will they be satisfied to see those who did the actual printing of the paper canned as well? Or the folks who supplied the ink?

As expected, many happy readers of CNN are in line with Reverend Al:

-Sharpton was right on about this one. The Post has a history of using monkeys to portray black people. Because of this I hesitate to only call it thoughtless.     –Matt

-Another neocon speaks. I thought you people died off like the dodo bird. Yes Sharpton is extreme and can be a race baiter however even a klansman would have seen the NYP’s cartoon to be racist. Rupert gave a half assed apology by saying he was sorry if anyone was upset by the cartoon; which is the equivalent of apologising for your emotions rather than his racist content … Thanks for writing your blog, you have reminded me why I left the Republican party. It was once a party of intelligent people, real conservatives (not neocons) who had complex solutions to complex problems. Now it is populated and supported by monosyllabic idiots who see everything in either black or white and hate anything different.     –Andy H

-If you’re so offended by Al sharpton then i would have to assume the sight and sound of the prejudice, racist and all out black race hating commentaries of Sean Hannity, Rush limbaugh and the rest of the ”white race is superior posse” makes u want to puke. It amazes me how people such as yourself get so upset abt sharpton but dont say or condeem any of the bigotry and racist comments tht come out of their mouths. The cartoon was racist and offensive and sharpton had every right to complain.     –Tammy

Another Neocon, says the other Andy. Too funny.

And isn’t it interesting, as demonstrated by Tammy, that all roads (naturally) lead to Rush Limbaugh?

Speaking of Rush, a blogger by the name of Ben Sprouse said he actually agreed with my assessments of Al Sharpton as a racist. However, being an a confused moral relativist, Ben attempted to paint Rush Limbaugh with an equally unflattering racist brush, going so far as offering a series of “direct quotes” from Limbaugh that supposedly illustrated his hatred of non-whites. These quotes included:

-I mean, let’s face it, we didn’t have slavery in this country for over 100 years because it was a bad thing. Quite the opposite: slavery built the South. I’m not saying we should bring it back; I’m just saying it had its merits. For one thing, the streets were safer after dark.

-You know who deserves a posthumous Medal of Honor? James Earl Ray [the confessed assassin of Martin Luther King]. We miss you, James. Godspeed.

-The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies.

-They’re 12 percent of the population. Who the hell cares?

-Take that bone out of your nose and call me back (to an African American female caller).

Valiant effort, Ben, but no dice.

First off, most of these so-called direct quotes are not even correct. Second, they are taken completely out of context – to such a degree that Ben ought to be embarrassed for attempting to use these as a point of argument. These “quotes” were used either to illustrate the absurdity of others who regularly attributed comments like these to Limbaugh (without proof) or they were used in demonstrating the ugliness of racism itself.

These things are verifiable with minimal effort.

There is no one in all of conservative talk radio to whom race matters least than Rush Limbaugh.

To those on the right, overwhelmingly race is a non-issue. Not so on the Left.

Are there conservatives who are racist? Of course.

But no one group finds more ways to interject matters of race into more different issues in more different ways than the modern American liberal.

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RACE BAITER ON THE ATTACK

This is one of those instances that force me to come clean. On Friday, I predicted that the re-emergence of the deplorable and wholly repugnant Reverend Al Sharpton onto the public stage would be short-lived – perhaps a couple of days at best – once America remembered how entirely irrelevant he really is.

I was wrong … and I wish to extend both my apologies and some cherry Maalox chewables to those who put any validity in my assertion.

The race-baiting, riot-inciting, hateful, “civil rights” windbag – who is often far from civil and hardly ever right – is in full “don’t-fire-until-you-see-the-whites-of-their-skin” mode. He has not only called for a special session of the New York City Council to keep the city from advertising in the odious, conservative-leaning New York Post, but he is also asking the FCC to give a look-see at a waiver that currently allows Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (owner of the New York Post) to own more than one newspaper and television station in the same city.

And all because of a dead chimp, a very bad spending bill and knee-jerk racism.

From WPIX TV in New York:

Outrage and protests continue to mount over The NY Post’s controversial cartoon interpreted by many as comparing President Obama to a chimpanzee that was shot and killed by police in Stamford, Connecticut last week.

“I think that they have sadly tried to reduce this to some personal fight than to really understand the level of offense,” Sharpton at a press conference on Sunday. “It seems that we cannot have a true level of democracy in terms of how the newspapers and airwaves are used in this city.”

The New York Post issued an editorial on its website last Thursday saying the cartoon was meant to mock the federal economic stimulus bill, and apologized to those who were offended by it.

The chairman of the NAACP, Julian Bond, spoke out about the cartoon on Saturday, and called for the firing of both the cartoonist and the editor-in-chief of the New York Post.

Of course he did.

While you’re at it, Mr. Bond, why not strip them of their citizenship, have them hung by their short-hairs in the village square and set them adrift on a wooden raft?

These are the same people (Bond, Sharpton, et al) who say that terrorists in Guantanamo Bay are entitled to a fair trial in this country, yet demand that a newspaper editor and freelance cartoonist lose their jobs for “offending” them.

First off, just about everyone – outside of a few crotchety, insignificant old race merchants locked in disgusting antiquity – knows what the New York Post cartoon was supposed to represent. Everyone with any sense of reality (and honesty) knows damn well that the cartoon was not meant in any way to be a racist slam at President Obama. I would wager the deed to my house that Sharpton, too, knows this.

The truth is … if it was meant as a racial incursion against Barack Obama, it wasn’t particularly smart, because President Obama did not write the bloody stimulus bill.

How much more clear can this possibly be?

If intended to denigrate Obama, it should have said, “They’ll have to find someone else to sign the stimulus bill.”

It was, in actuality (as has been explain thirteen million times) a direct hit at the “monkeys” in Congress – in other words, the real authors of the $787 billion pork-meat extravaganza. The bill, as seen by folks like me, was a stupid bill (to say the least), beneath the sensibilities of those who are charged to serve the American people. It was so dim-witted and ill-conceived, the cartoon lampooned, it could have been written by a temporarily world-famous chimp that just got killed in Connecticut.

It was satire.

Do the race-baiting haters think the cartoon’s artist, Sean Delonas, was just sitting around waiting for something – anything – to come across the news wire so that he might cleverly craft it into a timely racial attack on President Obama?

Second, Sharpton and Bond – and all of the other melanin-obsessed whinycrats – are only happy if they believe they have the power to see people’s lives ruined on demand. It affords them credibility. That they can insist the livelihoods of people be stripped at their whim bestows upon them a position of influence they should have long ago lost.

These haters seek to control the content of what’s published and – yes – what’s broadcast.

Can there be any doubt that Sharpton has been waiting for something like this to pounce on ever since the Don Imus “nappy-headed ho” scandal of 2007?

As I wrote back then, the Imus affair was the first real battle in the war that will be waged (and is now under way) in attempting to reinstitute the “Fairness Doctrine“:

In the aftermath of this incredibly overblown controversy, the gauntlet has officially been thrown down by Al Sharpton in his successful attempt to vanquish Don Imus from public view. With an authority vested in him by the state of his own love of publicity, speaking like he was FDR addressing Congress after Pearl Harbor, he has fired the first real shot in what is the latest, full-bodied, unexpurgated revival in the battle to bring back the Fairness Doctrine.

With Imus (temporarily) excommunicated from the church of tolerance, Sharpton has decided there are bigger fish to be fried. Said Mr. Sharpton,”It is our feeling that this is only the beginning. We must have a broad discussion on what is permitted and not permitted in terms the airwaves.”

Thank goodness he’s around.

Translated, using my Sharpton/English dictionary, his rousing words read like this: The “our” he is referring to is, of course, himself, his crony race-baiters and petrified guilt-ridden white liberals. The term “only the beginning” is self-evident – there are a whole bunch more evil, racist, sexist, whatever-ist radio talk-show scum who need to be examined and dealt with. When he uses the phrase “broad discussion,” he means that he and his ilk will dictate what is acceptable for the airwaves while the media continues to do all they can to demonstrate how unbiased and straight up the middle they are. The word “airwaves,” naturally, means talk radio.

The progression is a natural one.

Julian Bond also said, “This is tastelessness taken to the extreme and its something you expect from this publication. But for the publication to suggest that the only people who object to it are constant critics of the New York Post is beyond ridiculous.”

If not for bona-fide racists like Bond and Sharpton manufacturing this scandal and making this a “story,” would any of this really be an issue?

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GUTLESS WAPO APOLOGIZES BEFOREHAND

Gutless recreants. Or as Michelle Malkin puts it, “Behold a nation of cowards…”

And so it was yesterday, the Washington Post issued an apology – on Page A02 – for a cartoon issued the same day in its Sunday magazine. Call it a pre-emptive move, if you like. Say it was cautionary, if it suits you.

I prefer any of the following: intimidated, terrified, frightened, whipped, scared, owned, yellow, lily-livered, liberal … it all works.

Indeed, master (race) baiter Al Sharpton has suddenly become important again, screeching racism as only he can do, muscling the FCC and the New York City council, along with the New York Post, after a completely racially benign cartoon published last week has given relics like him something to do.

The Washington Post decided to bend themselves over the davenport voluntarily – before being bullied into doing so by Sharpton and company – by issuing the following apology for a cartoon that is about as racist as Sean Penn is conservative:

The headline, illustration and text of “Below the Beltway,” a column in The Washington Post Magazine today, may cause offense to readers. The magazine was printed before a widely publicized incident last week in which a chimpanzee attacked and badly mauled a woman in Stamford, Conn. In addition, the image and text inadvertently may conjure racial stereotypes that The Post does not countenance. We regret the lapse.

Lapse. Funny word to use there.

Here’s the thing …

The story that this cartoon is attached to has nothing – absolutely nothing - to do with politics, President Obama, blacks, or anything of the nature. There is nothing about race anywhere in this article, nor is it implied in any way. It is actually a piece written by Gene Weingarten called “Monkey Business – The good news for men: Women love apes.” It’s all about a scientific study dealing with what arouses men and women.

The study suggests that while straight men were only aroused by images of women (and gay men aroused only by men), women “were turned on by absolutely everything … including videos of bonobos having sex. Bonobos are apes.”

Yet, the spineless Washington Post decided that it was prudent to cut off the race-baiting brigades at the pass before the Sharptonites started strong-arming them.

Such courage.

Word has it that the WaPo research team is combing through Post articles dating back to 1877, so that they might prepare apologies for the use of such phrases as “black eye,” “monkey around,” “ace of spades,” “guerilla warfare (before spellcheck)” and “dark chocolate.”

Retroactive apologies are also in the works for any and all articles about filmmaker David Lynch published through 2009, and any articles dating back to 1991 in the arena of computer technology that insensitively made reference to master drives and slave drives.

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RELIC SHARPTON OUT OF MOTHBALLS … CRIES RACISM … POST SAYS BACK OFF

Like cockroaches and reality television, old race-baiters die hard. The truth is, however, there just hasn’t been a whole lot for Al Sharpton to do in recent times, except maybe tinker around with his Turbo Tax software. The papers simply aren’t plump with bogus stories of young black girls being raped by white cops anymore, or of nooses being hung from trees by young whites.

Not like they used to.

Those were the days, eh Al?

Today, it’s hard to imagine anyone more insignificant or more detached from the societal realities of American life than Reverend Al. After all, what’s an old blowhard with bad hair to do now that a black man has been elected President of the United States and Donald Trump has already chosen the cast of Celebrity Apprentice?

Visions of Sharpton wandering the floors of his home waiting for something – anything – to happen that would require him to spring into action as a civil rights crusader aren’t difficult to conjure.

Enter the New York Post – my candidate for the Attaboy Award for February 2009.

The Post has decided not to take the crawling-on-hands-and-knees-for Sharpton’s-forgiveness approach mastered so brilliantly by radio talker Don Imus in 2007 after he made his silly – and now infamous – “nappy-headed-hos” comment (in reference to the Rutgers girls basketball team) that cost him his jobs at both MSNBC and CBS Radio.

The Post is not rolling over.

On Wednesday, they published a cartoon by artist Sean Delonas that brought Big Al scurrying (or rumbling) out of his Rice Chex and Twinkie hibernation to cry racism. (Fancy that). The cartoon was nothing more than effective commentary on a very bad spending bill signed by President Obama coupled with the very bizarre story (that has captured headlines everywhere) of a chimp shot dead by police in Connecticut after it attacked a house guest. Al and Company have called it offensive, because it supposedly depicts President Obama as a chimp, and also because it depicts him as dead.

These people really need something more to do with their days.

In truth, the most “offensive” aspect of the whole thing is that the Post cartoon will keep Sharpton’s face (and voice) in public view for a couple of days until America is reminded of how irrelevant he is.

On Thursday evening, the Post responded to the absolute inanity surrounding this cartoon and its phony controversy:

Wednesday’s Page Six cartoon – caricaturing Monday’s police shooting of a chimpanzee in Connecticut – has created considerable controversy. It shows two police officers standing over the chimp’s body: “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill,” one officer says.

It was meant to mock an ineptly written federal stimulus bill.

Period.

But it has been taken as something else – as a depiction of President Obama, as a thinly veiled expression of racism. This most certainly was not its intent; to those who were offended by the image, we apologize. However, there are some in the media and in public life who have had differences with The Post in the past – and they see the incident as an opportunity for payback.

To them, no apology is due.

Sometimes a cartoon is just a cartoon – even as the opportunists seek to make it something else.

Nice.

The cartoon is very funny and very smart … but let me correct the nothing-better-to-do Sharpton race warriors on something.

Obama didn’t write the bill.

True, it is certainly his in the sense that he is the President and it was written with his blessing and misguidance, but the “chimps” here – in the most literal sense – would be Pelosi and company (and all of the other Capitol Hill morons who shaped it into what it was when it was signed).
Another thing … can so-called legitimate news outlets stop affording this lying, hurtful, riot inciting, unapologetic, race-jockey credibility as some sort of arbiter of all that is just and fair?

To CNN, for example, he is a civil rights activist:

A New York Post cartoon Wednesday drew fire from civil rights activist Al Sharpton and others who say the drawing invokes historically racist images in suggesting an ape wrote President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package.

Barf bag, please.

Sharpton is as much a civil rights activist as Al Gore is a scientist.

Sean Delonas, creator of the extraordinarily clever cartoon, said in a brief interview with CNN, “Absolutely friggin’ ridiculous. Do you really think I’m saying Obama should be shot? I didn’t see that in the cartoon. It’s about the economic stimulus bill.”
I applaude the New York Post for not throwing Delonas under the bus and for taking the correct steadfast approach. Some may legitimately argue that the Post shouldn’t have even offered the apology they did, but that didn’t bother me.

I have no problem with it because the Post ultimately asserted what we all know to be true in no uncertain terms – that whenever there is any segment of the media that expresses a conservative point of view, it is swiftly criticized, labeled and attacked by any number of victims’ groups, special interest brigades, publicity-starved leftists or Oprah Winfrey with the predictable arsenal of “-ists” and “-phobes.”

Good for you, Post.

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NBA HALL-OF-FAMER CRIES RACISM, AGEISM … AFTER TWENTY-TWO YEARS

back in the day

From The “I’m With You, Reverend Joseph Lowery” file …

The naivety of Americans who believe that blacks are not still being asked to get in back, or that brown is not given the chance to stick around, is astounding. No matter how much we shake America, she is not responding to our wake-up call. Racism abounds, along with a veritable rainbow of other juicy “isms.” The reality that our President is black, that the majority of American athletes and pop music stars are black, that our favorite motion picture stars are black, that the most powerful star and TV talk-show mogul in all of the country is black, is irrelevant.

NBA Hall-of-Famer Elgin Baylor apparently agrees.

Baylor, who played from 1958 to 1971 and subsequently spent twenty-two years as the Los Angeles Clippers’ Vice President of Basketball Operations, is suing not only the Clippers, but the NBA and team owner Donald Sterling for alleged employment discrimination based on age and race. Baylor was released by the team last fall.

From ESPN:

The lawsuit maintains that Baylor was “discriminated against and unceremoniously released from his position with the team on account of his age and his race” and that he was “grossly underpaid during his tenure with the Clippers, never earning more than $350,000 per year, when compared with the compensation scheme for general managers employed by every other team in the NBA.”

The NBA is named in the lawsuit, according to Douglas’ fax, as “a joint venturer/partner of condoning, adopting and ratifying this discriminatory practice since the league is fully aware of salaries paid to all of the general managers.”

It’s interesting how Baylor never mentioned anything about unfair treatment or discrimination during his tenure or in the months following his departure from the Clippers. He was certainly in the position to do so while he was there, and he would have been allowed to say whatever he wanted about any racism he perceived.

I might add that in twenty-two years with Mr. Baylor serving as VP of Basketball Operations, the Los Angeles Clippers made the playoffs three times – three lousy times. That he kept his job as long as he did is by itself astounding. That one could make the case the team bent over backwards to avoid any appearances of racism by keeping a wholly unsuccessful man employed for that long is reasonable.

Clippers attorney Robert H. Platt said in a statement Wednesday night that he had not seen the lawsuit and couldn’t comment on Baylor’s specific allegations.

“However, I can categorically state that the Clippers always treated Elgin fairly throughout his long tenure with the team. Prior to his decision to leave the team last October, Elgin never raised any claims of unfair treatment,” Platt said.

“It’s hard to believe that he would now make these ridiculous claims after the organization stood by him during 22 years and only three playoff appearances. It would be hard to find any sports team that has demonstrated greater loyalty to its general manager.”

…

“I can’t imagine because Elgin has always been very, very close to me,” the owner said in the team’s locker room. “He’s a fabulous person. I think there’s some mistake.”

Since, 2003, Elgin Baylor made $350,000 a year – more than the vast majority of white Americans make – after several salary increases over the course of his career with the Clippers. Is it possible – I say, possible – that he wasn’t paid as much as others in the NBA because of his less-than-stellar performance record as General Manager?

Baylor said, “I did not retire. I have so much more to give. The way I was treated by the NBA and the Clippers was unfair, and many ways discriminatory.”

Was it unfair that he held onto a position for more than two-decades with a track record that would have had him expunged anywhere else much sooner?

What exactly was discriminatory, Mr. Baylor?

Does anyone honestly believe that the Clippers deliberately chose to pay Mr. Baylor less than others after realizing that the melanin level in his skin was too high to warrant more salary? And if it wasn’t deliberate, how will Mr. Baylor’s disgusting publicity-seeking lawyers prove it?

Shameful, Mr. Baylor.

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