Mugged (40 page)

White men got the possibility of not being called racists.

The status of white men didn’t improve after Obama became president. In a 2010 midterm election video sent to thirteen million supporters, Obama said: “It will be up to each of you to make sure that the young people, African Americans, Latinos and women who powered our victory in 2008, stand together once again.”
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In Obama’s 2008 swipe at people in small towns who “cling to their guns and religion” he also called them racist xenophobes. Although generally unnoticed because of the show-stopping “guns and religion” part, Obama said these “bitter” small town people harbor “antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
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Only liberals could attack people who are different from them by saying they dislike people who are different from them.

A few months later, Obama began warning in his stump speech that Republicans were going to attack him for being black. “They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”
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No Republican had said anyone should be “afraid” of Obama because he was black—the idea is absurd. Race mongering is the Democrats’ thing. Obama was so desperate to be attacked for his race that he was launching racist attacks on himself and blaming Republicans.

Amazingly, Obama proclaimed: “We know the strategy because they’ve already shown their cards”—cards that were apparently so free of racism that he had to race-bait himself. “Ultimately I think the American people recognize that old stuff hasn’t moved us forward. That old stuff just divides us.” He was both a victim of racist attacks—delivered by himself—and a uniter against those who would make racist attacks!

Over the next month, Obama expanded on his self-race-baiting. Warming to the theme that Republicans were going to attack him because he was black, Obama said, “John McCain and the Republicans, they don’t have any new ideas. The only strategy they’ve got in this election is to try to scare you about me. He’s got a funny name. And he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five-dollar bills.” The press took little notice of Obama’s claim that Republicans would attack him for being black until July 31, 2008, when McCain campaign manager Rick Davis called Obama on using the race card and “play[ing] it from the bottom of the deck.”
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For the next twenty-four hours, the Obama campaign pleaded innocence, stoutly denying that Obama’s dollar-bill remark had anything to do with race.
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Maybe he’d be the first Hawaiian on a dollar bill. Apparently, there were limits to the press’s credulity and eventually, the Obama campaign admitted that, yes, the dollar bill line was about race.
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Liberals went gaga over Obama because he was a very left-wing candidate, whose blackness could insulate him from criticism. The media would simply brand any opposition “racist.” It used to be left-wing women who couldn’t be attacked. But then Hillary got dumped for the left’s trophy wife, Obama.
We’re growing apart, Hillary. Obama makes me feel alive and opens a whole new world for me. Can’t you be happy for me?
From that moment on, charges of sexism would take a backseat to charges of racism.

During the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton was assigned the role of Bull Connor, instead of some hapless Republican.

In March, Geraldine Ferraro, Hillary’s finance chair and Walter Mondale’s history-making female running mate, gave an interview in which she said: “A woman becoming president takes a very secondary place to Obama’s campaign—a kind of campaign that it would be hard for anyone to run against.” She said the media had gotten caught up in the idea of the first black president, adding, “if Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position…He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”
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Obama immediately pounced on Ferraro’s comments. He had spent his
entire life learning how to assert a black identity for purposes of advancement, and then blew up when Ferraro had the effrontery to mention it. On the NBC
Today Show,
Obama accused Ferraro of engaging in “slice-and-dice politics that’s about race and about gender” and “that’s what Americans are tired of because they recognize that when we divide ourselves in that way, we can’t solve problems.” Refusing to give up the mantle of victimhood, Obama suggested, preposterously, that it actually hurt him to be black.

In an interview with the
Morning Call
of Allentown, Pennsylvania, Obama said: “I don’t think Geraldine Ferraro’s comments have any place in our politics or in the Democratic Party. They are divisive. I think anybody who understands the history of this country knows they are patently absurd. And I would expect that the same way those comments don’t have a place in my campaign, they shouldn’t have a place in Senator Clinton’s either.”
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Obama campaign advisor David Axelrod called Ferraro’s comments “offensive”
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and demanded that she “be denounced and censured by the campaign.”
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Obama senior advisor Susan Rice called the remarks “outrageous and offensive.”
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Even Jesse Jackson hadn’t played the race card when Ferraro said the exact same thing about him during his 1988 run for president. Jackson simply said, “Millions of Americans have a point of view different from Ferraro’s.”
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When you have a faster racial hair-trigger than Jesse Jackson, you might not be the man who is going to move this country past race.

Within days of the Obama campaign’s attack, Ferraro was off the Clinton campaign.

A few months earlier, in December 2007, Obama-supporter Andrew Sullivan had written a much-acclaimed article in the
Atlantic,
arguing that the “logic” of Obama’s candidacy was not about his policy proposals, political skills, ideology or speaking skills. Rather, it was his ability to be a “transformational” candidate—because he was black.

The young Pakistani Muslim would suddenly realize that we’re soft and loveable! Some Americans might have preferred that the Pakistani Muslim turn on his TV and see that America is strong and resolute, but the point was, Sullivan had cited Obama’s “brown-skin” as a major selling point. We’d finally prove to the world that we weren’t racists!

Isn’t that what Ferraro was saying?

Why was the Obama campaign offended by Ferraro’s comment that it helped him to be black when all his supporters were saying the same thing?

Not a week after the shock and awe campaign against Ferraro, another Obama supporter was droning on and on to the
New Bedford Standard-Times
about how great it was that Obama was black. The Democrats’ 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry said: “It would be such an affirmation of who we say we are as a people if we can elect an African American president.”

Kerry also said that Obama could have a moderating influence on the Islamic world “because he’s a black man, who has come from a place of oppression and repression through the years in our own country.” (Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961.) Still Kerry continued: “We only broke the back of civil rights, Jim Crow, in the 1960s here. Everybody in the world knows this is a recent journey for America too. And everybody still knows that issues of skin and discrimination still exist.”
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So liberals considered it an advantage that Obama was black. But if anyone
else
said it was an advantage that Obama was black, it was “absurd,” “offensive” and “divisive.”

The day that Ferraro resigned from the Clinton campaign, also happened to be the day ABC News began revealing sermons of Obama’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who seemed to hate America almost as much as Michelle Obama did.

As Wright’s zesty comments about America and white people became known, Obama had to engage in some quick damage control by giving a speech on race.
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He began his speech by talking about slavery: “And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide
men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States.”

All of blue-collar America said, “I wasn’t there, I didn’t hear any of it.”

Reverend Wright and Obama are slavery nostalgics. They have no experience of slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow—anything other than abject white patronization. And yet the further slavery recedes into history, the fresher a memory it becomes!

(Indeed, as the son of a Kenyan Muslim, Obama is more likely descended from slave traders than the average American: For much of its history, the slave trade in Africa was controlled by Arab Muslims
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and a key slave trade port, Mbasa, is located in Kenya.
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On the eve of the Civil War in 1860, only 8 percent of Americans owned slaves.
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)

Why was Obama talking about slavery? As liberal blogger Mickey Kaus said: “We know about slavery. We want to know why Obama picked his paranoid pastor!”

In another light touch from his tedious, guilt-inducing speech, Obama compared his raving racist loon of a minister howling
“God damn America!”
to…poor Geraldine Ferraro. Just as some saw Wright as “a crank or a demagogue,” he said, others saw Ferraro as harboring “some deep-seated racial bias.” This was an outrageous smear, tempered only by its silliness. It was bad enough to score a campaign point by falsely accusing Ferraro of racism. To multiply that by claiming her obviously true remark proceeded from the same rancid racism as Reverend Wright’s tirades was laughable.

Obama also compared Wright’s anger to white people concerned about crime and to his grandmother who “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.”
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Once again, we turn to Jesse Jackson as the voice of reason on race. In a famous 1993 speech to Operation PUSH, Jackson said: “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.…After all we have been through, just to think we can’t walk down our own streets, how humiliating.”
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According to Obama, Jackson is a racist.

It was as if the entire 1980s and the OJ verdict had never happened. Liberal racism detectors were turned on high and we were back to Jimmy the Greek–style instant-career executions for dumb remarks.

Liberal racism hunters hit a gold mine with Don Imus, who is a Mount Vesuvius of dumb remarks. In April 2007, he slimed the Rutgers women’s
basketball team as “nappy headed hos.” (A year earlier, Imus had made an inane, grandstanding, “Stupid White Men” remark to try to get in with the brothers, telling basketball star Charles Barkley—a black man who grew up in Alabama in the 1960s: “In my view, just as a white man, it doesn’t seem to me that a lot has changed since those marches in Selma.”
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I think Barkley knows the difference.)

Obama not only called for Imus’s firing, but he compared Imus’s stupid, comment to the mass shooting at Virginia Tech by a psychopathic student. In a speech about violence the day after the massacre, Obama said there was “another kind of violence”— the “verbal violence” of Don Imus.
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Al Sharpton has too much dignity to say something like that.

The OJ verdict had ripped the scales from people’s eyes—but Obama put them right back. Indeed, a few years into the Obama administration, Al Sharpton, author of the Tawana Brawley hoax, was given his own show on MSNBC.

After even our racial watchdogs in the media had stopped leaping on every arrest of a black person as prima facie evidence of racism, Obama tried to turn a disorderly conduct charge against a Harvard professor into an incident of racial profiling.

The reader will recall Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates’s aggressive reaction to police who responded to a neighbor’s call reporting two men jimmying Gates’s front door in July 2009. Gates didn’t have his house keys, so he and his driver had broken in.

Sergeant James Crowley, a white police officer, showed up—along with a black and Hispanic officer—and asked Gates for identification. Anyone would have been annoyed, but Gates seems to have overreacted a tad, going on a tirade against the officer, accusing him of racial bias and saying the officer didn’t know who he was messing with. He followed the officer outside to continue haranguing him, drawing a small crowd. So Crowley arrested the professor for disorderly conduct.

Gates claimed he had been harassed by racist cops, apparently unaware that there are huge areas of the country where people don’t think it’s heroic to bully cops after you break into your own house, for example, 99 percent of the country outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A few weeks later, as the professor was vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard, the black president of the United States accused Crowley of acting “stupidly” for arresting a black Harvard professor, and then going into a long soliloquy about racial profiling. (Also, for the journalists indignant over any passing reference to assassination in connection with Obama, he
made a joke about his getting shot by the Secret Service if he tried to break into the White House.)