Mugged (36 page)

And that’s how Clinton whipped the nation’s crime problem.

It’s racist for Republicans to actually do something about crime or welfare, but after it works, the Democrats will claim credit, despite having fought Republicans every step of the way. It’s the exact same thing Democrats did with civil rights: They battled Republicans for a hundred years, and when civil rights were finally achieved, Democrats claimed all the glory.

The Democrats’ only consistent theme is accusing their opponents of being racists.

JAMES BYRD

In the 2000 presidential race, the NAACP ran a notorious ad suggesting that Bush didn’t care about the dragging death of James Byrd, a black man, in Texas. Showing a video of a pickup truck dragging a chain, Byrd’s daughter said, “So when Governor George W. Bush refused to sign hate crimes legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.” Under Bush, two perpetrators of this heinous crime were put to death and the least culpable defendant got life in prison. Death! It was surely small consolation to them that they were not also adjudged guilty of “hate.”

HILLARY LEAVING THE GOP

In 2008, CNN’s Anderson Cooper reported that Hillary left the Republican Party after discovering the Republicans’ dasdardly plan to win the South by appealing to racists.
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Hillary’s dash from the racist Republican Party became a gem Cooper would repeatedly present to viewers. Again and again Cooper asserted that it was Nixon’s racist southern strategy that sent erstwhile “Goldwater Girl” Hillary Clinton fleeing from the Republican Party. “In the summer of sixty-eight,” Cooper said, “she snagged an internship with a House Republican conference under then minority leader Gerald Ford and attended the Republican National Convention in Miami, where the party adopted the infamous southern strategy, exploiting racial tensions to win white voters.”
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It was as if “Appeal to racists” were an actual plank in the GOP platform.

Cooper’s interlocutor, Alan Schechter, who was billed as Hillary’s thesis advisor, concurred, noting—more in sadness than in anger—that “if the Republican Party hadn’t moved to the right at that time” she might have remained a Republican. (We really dodged a bullet there!)

One expects Cooper to be an illiterate. But Schechter surely recalled that less than a year after Hillary allegedly fled the Republican Party because of its (nonexistent) racism, she was publicly humiliating the first black person elected to the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction. (The earlier ones were Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, both Republicans from Mississippi.)

Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, also a Republican, was the Wellesley graduation speaker in 1969—the spring following Hillary’s famed exit from the Republican Party. Unfortunately for Brooke, this was also the year Hillary became the first person to give a student address at commencement. She used this honor to attack Brooke’s speech. “I find myself reacting,” she said, “to some of the things that Senator Brooke said.” She then lectured the honored guest, saying, “the problem for empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn’t do anything.”

Brooke later remarked, charitably, that Hillary “came that day with an agenda, pure and simple.” Hillary’s father, watching her bizarre attack on the elected official, said he wanted to “lie on the ground and crawl away.”
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Four decades later, Barbara Walters claimed to have had an affair with
Brooke, marking the second time he was publicly humiliated by a liberal white woman.

Could we review the pure grain alcohol–level insanity of claiming that the “Goldwater Girl” was fine with a candidate who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but was driven screaming from the party by Nixon’s calling for “law and order”? Do liberals even listen to themselves?

With the Vietnam War demonstrations, the peace-and-love generation spawning Charles Manson, Timothy Leary’s acid experiments, and the Supreme Court’s
Miranda
decision, there was considerably more going on in 1968 and 1972 than resentment of the civil rights movement. Everything wasn’t always about the blacks. Except with Democrats. They were either denouncing blacks to get votes or they were denouncing Republicans for nonexistent racism to get votes.

Ironically, Democrats are going back to their demagogic segregationist roots by constantly stirring up racial hatreds to motivate a small slice of the population to vote for them.

Race obsessives in the South were Democrats then, and they’re Democrats today. Genuine racists were a distinct minority, but they were a minority that voted on one issue. Opportunistic politicians played to their fears to win 100 percent of the vote of this minority group, giving them an automatic 10-point advantage in any election.

Which party does that sound like today?

Which party’s presidential candidate lyingly told them that the U.S. Constitution once considered blacks three-fifths of a human being?

The three-fifths clause had nothing to do with the moral worth of black people or even their right to vote. Rather, it allowed southern states to count nonvoting black slaves and freedmen as part of the population in order to increase the size of their all-white, slavery-supporting congressional delegations. It was southern politicians who wanted blacks to count for more, not less, in order to have more seats in Congress.

The candidate of which party falsely suggested to blacks that as governor of Texas, George W. Bush had not sought the highest penalty for thugs who dragged a black man by a chain from the bumper of their pickup truck?

Two of the three perpetrators were sentenced to death; the third received life in prison.

Which party ran a presidential candidate who made the demonstrably false statement that in the 2000 election “more than one million African
Americans were disenfranchised in one of the most tainted elections in history.”

After a six-month investigation into alleged voter disenfranchisement in Florida in the 2000 election, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights did not find a single black person who had been improperly denied the right to vote. The one million figure is an estimate of the number of spoiled ballots, which averaged about 3 percent of all votes cast in Florida that year.

The answer is: Gore, Gore and Kerry—Democrats. This isn’t normal political pandering, like kissing babies and promising to fight for labor unions or prolife causes. These are malicious lies told to black people to make them fear imaginary oppressors, so they will turn to the big, strong Democrats to protect them.

There was a sudden upsurge of racism in America starting right around February 10, 2007, when Obama announced he was running for president. It got so bad that by the end of the year MSNBC was forced to dedicate nearly its entire prime-time news coverage to racism in America.

When Barack and Michelle Obama appeared on
60 Minutes
the day after Obama declared, CBS’s Steve Kroft asked Michelle if she were “worried about some crazy person with a gun.” I don’t recall Laura Bush being asked if she feared for her husband’s safety the day after he announced his candidacy. Or ever. But Michelle doubled down, saying, “I don’t lose sleep over it, because the realities are that, you know, as a black man, Barack can get shot going to the gas station.”
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As a black man?
The only reason black men are more likely than others to be victims of homicide in America is because of other black men killing them. The danger doesn’t come from
being
black, but from
being shot by
blacks. Except Obama didn’t live in a public housing project. He lived in Chicago’s Hyde Park, where he was no more likely to be shot “going to the gas station” than his white neighbor Bill Ayers.

Unless…unless Michelle was talking about the mythical white racists running wild in America, slaughtering black men, putting crack cocaine in their neighborhoods
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and impotence-inducing drugs in fried chicken, Kool cigarettes and grape soda!
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(These are all actual myths that have been pushed in black neighborhoods, one by U.S. congresswoman Maxine Waters.)

The point was to constantly call America racist—so racist that even a pleasant black man like Barack Obama was at enormous risk in running for president. Then we’d all feel guilty about living in an awful country packed to the gills with racists and vote for Obama to teach America a lesson.
Another incidental benefit of the racist assassins myth was that it required that Obama not be criticized—for fear of setting off the racist hit squads.

The media were happy to oblige the Obamas’ fantasy of white racists terrorizing black Americans. Obama had the far-left politics of Paul Krugman without looking like Paul Krugman. This made him a precious jewel that had to be protected at all costs, much like a member of the Kennedy family.

Endless news stories told of the grave danger facing Obama because he was a black man running for president. No facts were ever cited. There were none. Instead reporters cited “fears.” The fear was so all-consuming that for a while, there were more special reports on the danger of a white supremacist killing Obama than the danger of women dying from anorexia.

It was classic liberal magical thinking: They’re afraid, so it must be a national problem.
I couldn’t sleep last night, I was so worried about an assassination attempt on Obama! What does that say about this country?
It could either mean the country is racist, or—hear me out—it could mean liberals are neurotic nuts.

It wasn’t clear where journalists were getting their information about white people mobilizing to assassinate a black candidate for president. The Secret Service is tight-lipped about security to avoid giving people ideas or revealing the agency’s methods. In any event, neither the Secret Service nor any other government agency was ever cited as the basis for these frantic claims.

Rather, journalists quoted one another, invented facts, cited anonymous “reports” and their own fears as evidence that Obama was in a state of mortal danger.

News reports about the heightened danger toward Obama generally consisted of one liberal quoting another liberal about their shared delusions of a burgeoning white supremacist uprising.

Before Obama even said he was running, CNN issued a somber dispatch on the “personal safety factors” in Obama’s deliberations, beginning with quotes from Jesse Jackson about his apprehensions when he ran for president (“I had the most sensitivity to the fact that we had to have security at home”) and concluding with Obama’s aides confirming that “of course, racism and security issues were among the factors Obama and his wife considered.”
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An ABC News report on the danger to Obama largely consisted of black people denouncing supposed white racists:

All we had were liberals’ subjective fears, which turned out to have as much relationship to reality as liberal fears usually do.
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Frank Rich wrote that “the biggest fear” about Barack Obama had been that “a crazy person might take a shot at him.” The
New York Times
’s Bob Herbert raised the “widespread” belief that Obama “might be assassinated because of his race” and cited a poll showing “that 6 in 10 Americans said that they were worried that someone would try to harm Senator Obama if he became the Democratic nominee.”
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In February 2008, Nobel Prize–winning novelist Doris Lessing was quoted far and wide for her prediction that Obama would be assassinated because he is black. She said it “would certainly not last long, a black man in the position of president. They would murder him.”
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This mysterious “they” apparently failed to activate. Reagan took an assassin’s bullet to the chest within two months of becoming president. Just a year after Ford assumed the presidency, two people pointed loaded guns at him and pulled the trigger. Lessing’s prediction was just another hysterical liberal fantasy about racist America. We get lots of overwrought predictions about racist Americans, but we never, ever get the admission,
Okay, I overreacted.

Newsweek
reported: “As the wife of the first African American to stand a good chance of becoming president, Michelle Obama is understandably nervous about her husband’s safety.”
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The
New York Times
ran a front page article titled “In Memories of a Painful Past, Hushed Worry About Obama.” It began, “There is a hushed worry on the minds of many supporters of Senator Barack Obama, echoing in conversations from state to state, rally to rally: Will he be safe?” The hard evidence just piled up from there: Two sisters “pray daily for his
safety,” a mother “feared that winning would put [Obama] in danger” and a woman “expressed worries that a message of hope and change, in addition to his race, made him more vulnerable to violence.”
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Liberals can never understand that their demented reactions to things doesn’t constitute proof.

In November 2008, the Associated Press proclaimed in a headline: “Obama has more threats than other presidents-elect.” The article admitted that the “Secret Service would not comment or provide the number of cases they are investigating.”
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So what was their source? Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and source of all white-supremacist hysteria, said it was “not surprising that a black president would galvanize the white supremacist movement.”

In other words, they had nothing. Less than nothing, actually. Although the AP claimed that “[c]hatter among white supremacists on the Internet has increased throughout the campaign and since Election Day,” the AP reporter didn’t actually check to see if that was true. In fact, there was no such uptick, according to Alexa, the Internet traffic tracker.
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As long as liberals liked the point of a story, there would be no fact checking.