Mugged (44 page)

OBAMA’S MIDDLE NAME AND BIRTH CERTIFICATE

The strangest “racism” allegation concerned the use of Obama’s middle name and demands to see his birth certificate.

It wasn’t that “Hussein” was a black middle name: It was that it was the same name as the dictator we had just deposed in a war. It would be as if Thomas Dewey, running against FDR in 1944 and Harry Truman in 1948, had been named “Thomas Hitler Dewey.” That doesn’t have anything to do with race.

The birth certificate brouhaha was started by Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries and was quickly shot down by every respectable conservative opinion journal, including
Human Events,
the
American Spectator, National Review
and the Sweetness & Light blog.

But it was crazy to suggest that the birth certificate issue was “just another form of racism”
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(Ed Schultz) or “borderline-racist garbage” (Rachel Maddow’s blog)
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among many other liberals claiming the birth certificate issue was racist.

Do liberals think African Americans are foreigners? Illegal immigrants perhaps?

Black people have been in the United States as long as the earliest white settlers—before the
Mayflower
arrived, with the first Africans in Virginia appearing in 1619.
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The descendants of slavery have an American pedigree that is centuries older than the average American today.

But liberals take the position that if a conservative said it, it must be racist and reason back from there. It got to the point where some Tea Partiers began carrying signs that said, “No matter what I put on this sign, you’re going to say it’s racist.”

JIMMY CARTER SAYS SO

In September 2009, Keith Olbermann opened his show with a breaking news bulletin: Jimmy Carter—“the 39th president of the United States”—had 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, that he’s African-American.”
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Ah ha! What do you have to say now racist deniers?

Who cares what Jimmy Carter says? It was as if Keith were producing a scientific study. At MSNBC, they simply can’t grasp the difference between opinion and evidence. The Jimmy Carter quote amounted to Keith’s saying, “Someone I think is really cool agrees with me, therefore, you have to acknowledge you’re wrong.” I think the more common line of reasoning would be: If, at any point Jimmy Carter agrees with me, I must be wrong.

SCOTT BROWN’S PICKUP TRUCK AND THE “KITCHEN CABINET”

In 2010, Scott Brown’s pickup truck came in for a charge of racism. Olbermann said that what Scott Brown voters truly opposed was having “an African American president.” When this insane point was met with gentle resistance from Howard Fineman, Keith produced the smoking gun: “What were the Scott Brown ads, though? Every one of the Scott Brown ads had him in a pickup truck.”
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Unheralded civil rights hero Olbermann also detected “racist messages” coming from Rush Limbaugh, which he claimed had led many people to react “with just shock that anybody would say that in public.”

Limbaugh had called Obama…a “Halfrican-American.”

You could get that past the NAACP. Unable to explain what exactly was “racist” about anything Rush had said, Olbermann called it “sleek racism.” Glenn Beck’s statement that Obama appeared “colorless” to him, Olbermann called “an even slicker racism.”
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Should there be civil rights statues to Keith? Because I’ve never heard a black person mention him.

In 2012, Mark Thompson, a guest on MSNBC’s
Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell
said that Mitt Romney’s description of a black advisor as
being in his “kitchen cabinet” was racist. “To talk about being in the kitchen” he said, “is really not a good metaphor to use with African-Americans.” The phrase “kitchen cabinet” to mean informal advisors was coined in the early 1800s in reference to President Andrew Jackson, who was incidentally, a racist Democrat.
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Liberals’ racism meter in the Obama era was even more delicately tuned than the racist “microaggressions” in the
American Psychologist,
ridiculed by Manhattan Institute scholar John McWhorter. As he summarized the designated “microaggressions”:

This is what “racism” had come to. As McWhorter said, “It’d be interesting to open up a discussion with a Darfurian about “microaggressions.”
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CODE WORDS

When Republicans say something a team of scientists could study without finding racism, liberals say the Republicans are using code words.

Not only photos of Paris Hilton and Scott Brown’s pickup truck, but standard Republican positions on small government, low taxes and tough-on-crime policies are supposed to be proof of racism. That’s convenient. Since there is nothing objectively racist about these policy stances, liberals explain that they are “dog whistles” “slick racism,” “subtle racism” or “code words” that secretly convey: “I hate black people.”

This is as opposed to liberals who actually make racist statements all the time—but they have good hearts, so it doesn’t count.

We had Biden calling Obama “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean.” Former CBS newsman Dan Rather said the argument against Obama would be that “he’s very articulate…but he couldn’t sell watermelons if you gave him the state troopers to flag
down the traffic.” Senator Harry Reid praised Obama for not having a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
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But because they are liberals, their use of actually racist phrases becomes code for “I love black people!”
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As French philosopher Jean-François Revel said of the left, while most regimes are judged on their records, only communism is judged only by its promises. Similarly, modern liberals are judged on their motives; conservatives are judged on what liberals claim we really meant.

The Tea Party was held responsible for every single person who showed up at their rallies, including random nuts or liberal infiltrators as if it proved something about the whole movement. Meanwhile, the explosion of sexual assaults, drug overdoses and property damage at Occupy Wall Street events were never thought to impugn the admirable motives of that group. (The first month of Occupy Wall Street protests included more than a dozen sexual assaults; at least half a dozen deaths by overdose, suicide or murder; and millions of dollars in property damage.
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)

Hordes of young liberal nitwits sport T-shirts featuring Che Guevara, a vile racist who described blacks as “indolent,” spending their “meager wage on frivolity or drink” who lack an “affinity with washing.” This isn’t a big secret: He wrote it in his book
The Motorcycle Diaries
. No one calls them racist.

When it comes to black conservatives, liberals drop the subtlety and tell us that blacks are stupid, unqualified and oversexed. It’s as if all the fake fawning over black nonentities creates a burning desire in liberals to call some black person an idiot—and all that rage gets dumped on black conservatives.

Democratic Senator Harry Reid called Clarence Thomas “an embarrassment to the Supreme Court,” adding, “I think that his opinions are poorly written.” Name one, Harry.

White liberal
Washington Post
reporter Mary McGrory dismissed Thomas as “Scalia’s puppet.” The
New York Times
’s Bill Keller called Justice Thomas an affirmative action appointment.

Bill Clinton slyly demeaned Colin Powell by citing him as a product of “affirmative action,” slipping it in during a televised town hall meeting in his 1997 “national conversation” on race. “Do you favor the United States Army abolishing the affirmative action program that produced Colin Powell?” he asked. “Yes or no?”
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When Bush made Condoleezza Rice the first black female secretary of state, there was an explosion of racist cartoons portraying Rice as Aunt
Jemima, Butterfly McQueen from
Gone with the Wind,
a fat-lipped Bush parrot and other racist clichés. Joseph Cirincione, with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Rice “doesn’t bring much experience or knowledge of the world to this position.” (Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose experience for the job consisted of being married to an impeached, disbarred former president.) Democratic consultant Bob Beckel—who ran Walter Mondale’s campaign so competently that Mondale lost forty-nine states—said of Rice, “I don’t think she’s up to the job.”

When Michael Steele ran for governor in Maryland, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee dug up a copy of his credit report—something done to no other Republican candidate. He was depicted in blackface and with huge red lips by liberal blogger Steve Gilliard. Oreo cookies were rolled down the aisle at Steele during a gubernatorial debate.

And of course, both Clarence Thomas and presidential candidate Herman Cain were slandered with racist stereotypes out of a George Wallace campaign flier.

But a Republican drives a red pickup truck and that’s “racist.”

Liberals step on black conservatives early and often because they can’t have black children thinking, “Hmmm, the Republicans have some good ideas, maybe I’m a Republican.”

The basic set-up is:

Step 1: Spend thirty years telling blacks that Republicans are racist and viciously attacking all black Republicans.

Step 2: Laugh maliciously at Republicans for not having more blacks in their party.

Republican positions are not code words for racism. Rather, liberals use “racism” as a code word for Republican positions. The basic difference between the parties is that Republicans support small government, low taxes, and tough-on-crime policies, while Democrats prefer behemoth national government with endless Washington bureaucracies bossing us around, taxes through the roof and releasing criminals.

Republicans also oppose abortion and gay marriage, but those are touchy issues for Democrats since black people don’t like them either. So those aren’t “code words.”

In lieu of arguing with Republicans, Democrats simply brand all words describing their positions as a secret racist code, visible only to liberals. (To be fair, they should know.)

Bill Moyers distributed tapes of Martin Luther King’s adulterous affairs to the press. But this sensitive soul claims Republicans hated LBJ’s Great
Society program because they hated black people. Yes—Republicans were only pretending to care about bankrupting the country. That was a pretext, but deep down they didn’t care one way or another about a gargantuan, useless government spending program, requiring heavily staffed Washington bureaucracies. What reason, other than racism, could Republicans have for objecting to that?

How has the War on Poverty improved black people’s lives again? Try comparing how black people were doing before and after the Great Society before answering that.

Democrats claim “states’ rights” is racist code, but they are the only ones who ever used the phrase as a front for racism. Democrats love enormous, metastasizing national government for everything under the sun
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—but, strangely, they wanted “states’ rights” for their Jim Crow policies. Republicans want a tiny federal government with the states running everything else. The only times in the last century that Republicans have supported a broad federal remedy was when the Democrats were denying black people their civil rights in the South.

As has been overwhelmingly demonstrated over the past few decades, when Republicans talked about things like “states’ rights,” “law and order” and “welfare reform,” what they meant was: states’ rights, law and order and welfare reform. And as soon as their policies were implemented—most aggressively during the post–OJ verdict paradise—blacks suddenly had better lives and started being murdered a lot less. There are your Republican racists.

White people using elections to prove that they like black people has never turned out well. It does not move us beyond race. What moves the country beyond race is to move beyond race. But, to make up for what a small band of racist Democrats did, we keep being asked to wreck the country.

Consider a few examples.

Liberal New York Mayor John Lindsay (in office January 1, 1966— December 31, 1973) “made every issue a matter of race,” the Manhattan Institute’s Fred Siegel says, and “treated New York’s outer-borough Catholics as right-wing racists.”
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Even vandalism had to be celebrated as a tribute to cultural diversity, with Lindsay’s parks commissioner nonjudgmentally explaining, “Some people like to sit on the benches; others like to tear them up.”
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Lindsay was one of the principal authors of the Kerner report on the black riots of 1967. When the Irish staged the bloody, racist draft riots during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln sent federal troops to New York to smash the riots. When Newark and Detroit were nearly burned to the ground by black rioters in 1967, we got a report explaining the rioters’ grievances and calling for new government spending programs.

Under Lindsay, the official NYPD approach to dealing with race riots was to refuse to call them “riots.” To preserve his presidential aspirations, the mayor simply defined them out of existence, then turned around and boasted that New York was a sea of ethnicities living in peace and harmony. The only downside was that cop killers walked free and the crime rate skyrocketed.

On Lindsay’s watch, the head of the Black Liberation Army, Twyman Meyers, murdered four New York City policemen and sprayed another police car with machine gun fire in front of witnesses. When Meyers’s license plate number was released to the press, the cop-killer—Meyers, not
Lindsay—responded by mailing the plate to the
New York Times
with a note vowing to “mete out justice in the fashion of Malcolm X” to “the fascist state pig police.”
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