Mugged (41 page)
Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.
As you know, when I was in the state legislature in Illinois, we worked on a racial profiling bill because there was indisputable evidence that blacks and Hispanics were being stopped disproportionately.…
And so on.
Obama kept saying that he didn’t know the facts, but he still somehow knew that the incident was an example of racism.
The country exploded in rage at this playing of the race card by the most powerful person in the universe in order to denounce a defenseless white cop, on behalf of a gilded Harvard professor, no less. We finally had a real-life version of the white power structure with all its cruel humiliations—except the power structure was black.
Instead of agreeing with Obama that Crowley had acted “stupidly,” everyone wondered what might have happened to the cop if he hadn’t been a model policeman, who taught diversity classes and once famously gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a black athlete. They wondered what would have happened if the 911 caller
had
identified the suspected burglars as black—which it turns out she did not. What if Crowley hadn’t been fully supported by other cops at the scene, including two minority officers? What if, at some point in his life, Crowley had been accused—falsely or not—of racism? His life would have been ruined.
Gates was tired, he was sick, he was cranky. And he was standing in his own house. Him, we understand. What was enraging was seeing the most powerful man in the universe stepping into the middle of an ordinary dust-up to accuse a white person of racism. That ought to be a serious charge in America.
Another state criminal matter Obama injected himself into was the 2012 claimed self-defense shooting of Trayvon Martin by a mixed-race Hispanic, George Zimmerman. During a White House news conference, the president said, “My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin: If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
Obama looks remarkably like Michael LaSane, the kid who killed a white school teacher because he wanted her car, but there’s no point in mentioning it.
It was just the encouragement the media needed. Like Captain Ahab searching for the great white whale, journalists are constantly on the hunt for proof that America was a white-supremacist wonderland.
The Hispanic instantly became white. Zimmerman was the villain, so he couldn’t be “Hispanic,” mixed-race or “Lah-TEE-noh.” (We don’t call French people
les Français
or Germans
Deutsche
—why are we suddenly speaking Spanish to identify Hispanics?) Liberals seem to imagine black victims heaving a sigh of relief when they’re shot by other black people:
Thank heaven I was shot by a black so at least I wasn’t a victim of racism!
Martin’s family behaved with the utmost dignity, despite it being their son who had died. Meanwhile, the media charged off, manufacturing evidence and doctoring tapes to whip up a phony race crime. Reminiscent of the KTLA Rodney King edit, NBC edited Zimmerman’s 911 call about a suspicious character in his neighborhood to make Zimmerman sound like a race-obsessed bigot.
This is the actual exchange Zimmerman had with a police dispatcher during his 911 call:
ZIMMERMAN:
This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.
DISPATCHER:
OK, and this guy—is he black, white or Hispanic?
ZIMMERMAN:
He looks black.
This is the version played on NBC:
ZIMMERMAN:
This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.
The edited version, with Zimmerman reporting nothing more suspicious than a black person in his neighborhood, aired twice on the
Today
Show,
on NBC’s Miami affiliate and on its Web page. The truth about NBC’s deceptive editing came out only when Brent Bozell exposed it on his
Newsbusters
Web site and Fox News’s
Hannity.
35
After MSNBC had given the story nonstop coverage for two months, as soon as the murder case against Zimmerman began to collapse, the network buried it at the bottom of the sea, never again discussing the case in its prime-time programming.
36
After Obama’s false charges of racism against Ferraro, McCain, Palin, and various police forces around the country; Bill Clinton’s false accusations of racism against the people of Arkansas and Special Forces; Bob Shrum’s sleazy ad in the Maryland gubernatorial race falsely accusing a Republican of racism; Gore’s loony claims of racism against Bush and the founding fathers, we didn’t need a road map to notice that liberals cry “racism” for political advantage.
But we got one anyway, when, in the summer of 2010, the private chats on JournoList, were leaked, exposing the fourth estate plotting to protect Obama and smear conservatives.
The
Daily Caller
began publishing the once-secret online chats of this members-only e-mail list of liberal journalists, bloggers, activists and professors, that included
Time
magazine’s Joe Klein, the
New Yorker’s
Jeffrey Toobin and
New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman, as well as staffers from
Newsweek
,
Politico, Huffington Post
, the
New Republic
, the
Nation
, and many others.
As soon as the Reverend Wright scandal broke, there was a flurry of commentary on how to protect Obama. Chris Hayes of the
Nation
urged members working in the “mainstream media” to ignore the story, complaining that “hand wringing about just how awful and odious Rev. Wright’s remarks are just keeps the hustle going.”
But the poison-tipped arrow in the journalists’ quiver was to randomly call Republicans “racists.” Thus, Spencer Ackerman of the
Washington Independent
suggested to his fellow journalists (as if Paul Krugman needed to be reminded) that they should make false racism charges:
What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.
[T]ake one of them—Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares—and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes
*
them
*
sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.
When some members objected that it would tarnish the Obama campaign to make accusations of racism, Ackerman clarified: “I’m not saying OBAMA should do this. I’m saying WE should do this.”
37
And that’s exactly what happened.
THE MEDIA CRY “RACIST” IN A CROWDED THEATER
As Obama played peek-a-boo with accusations of racism, the media searched for the evidence. Unable to find anything, they flung accusations anyway. Suddenly everything was racist. The word “the” was racist.
A partial list of the many, many words or actions proving a racist heart in the era of Obama are:
stating the obvious fact that Obama was helped by his race;
running a campaign commercial against Obama;
mentioning that Obama’s friend is Bill Ayers, a domestic terrorist;
not electing Obama president;
Scott Brown’s pickup truck;
opposing Obamacare;
opposing Obama’s stimulus bill;
opposing Obama’s jobs bill;
joining the Tea Party;
using Obama’s middle name;
demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate;
arresting a black Harvard professor;
being a Republican;
supporting gun rights;