Discriminations

I have written a number of times about the absurd lengths, or depths, Democrats, liberals, journalists, editorial writers (but I repeat myself) will go to in order to find racism in the Republican campaign. I believe many of these examples will live on, after this campaign is over, in the annals of political derangement, or perhaps collections of unintended political humor.

Thus David Gergen, former confidential advisor to just about everybody and the very icon of establishment rectitude who often sounds like a schoolmarm correcting the rubes for their uncouth attitudes, actually argued with a straight face (but then his face is always straight) that criticizing Obama for his lack of experience, his lack of achievement, and his far left notions was in effect calling him “uppity,” which is not-so-coded racism. This “uppity” claim became a ubiquitous trope on the left, i.e., in the mainstream media (such as this OpEd in the Los Angeles Times). As I pointed out here,

So, for Republicans to criticize Obama as “elitist” is really accusing him of being “arrogant,” and that in turn is really nothing more than the old racist slur of calling him “uppity.” This view strikes me as so bizarre that I would say the nation’s media elite has race on the brain ... if I thought it had a brain.

In a similar vein of unintended humor, the director of digital media at National Public Radio wrote that McCain ads poking fun at Obama as an empty-suited celebrity were “subliminally racist” because they contained comparisons to Paris Hilton, thus “subtly playing on racist impulses that fear black men with white women, or that preyed on the idea that black men succeed only in celebrity arenas like sports and music....”

More recently Sarah Palin has been widely and loudly denounced as a racist for pointing out that Obama has maintained a long-standing friendship (has been “palling around,” is how she put it) with a white former but unrepentant terrorist. And Congressman Barney Frank, of Fannie Mae fame, through his supersized analytical abilities has been able to determine that Republican criticism of the role the Community Reinvestment Act played in bringing on the current financial crisis (by requiring banks to lend to unqualified borrowers) was no more than “a veiled attack on the poor that’s racially motivated.” This charge, of course, is simply another example of the frequent Democratic litany that Republican efforts (there are efforts, aren’t there?) to oppose ACORN’s fraudulent registration of thousands of “voters” (or maybe its tens or hundreds of thousands) is an effort to suppress the vote by intimidating upstanding, legitimate voters.

In the past week or so, however, the thundering herd of independent minds making these risible charges has become even more frenetic, becoming, it seems to me, almost clinically deranged, delusional, as I called one recent example. Thus E.J. Dionne has McCain leading “the reemergence of the far right as a power in American politics,” his campaign “playing with extremist themes to denigrate Obama.” (Dionne better be careful and choose his words more wisely, or the Obama campaign and its journalistic minions may turn on him with the accusation that “denigrate” is really a coded, sub-textual racist slur.)

McCain and his campaign do not pick up the most extreme charges. They just fan the flames by suggesting that voters don't really know who Obama is, hinting at a sinister back story without filling in the details.

Apparently Dionne does know who Obama really is, though he hasn’t told us.

Dionne’s belief that concern about a potential (and now likely) president’s associates, friends, mentors is no more than a racist version of McCarthyite “guilt by association” also found expression in a recent Time column by Peter Beinart (last encountered making an “egregiously dumb” argument here). To Beinart, when Palin describes Obama as palling around with terrorists and says of him that “I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America,” she is — you guessed it — “injecting race” into the campaign.

In 2008, with their incessant talk about who loves their country and who doesn't, McCain and Palin are doing something different: they're using race to make Obama seem anti-American.

Exactly how they’re “using race” to criticize Obama’s associates views and associates is never explained. One can be forgiven for thinking that just about any criticism of a black candidate’s position on anything is impermissibly “using race.”

By far the most offensive of these recent accusations of Republican racism came, however, from perhaps the only widely recognized saints in American politics, the civil rights veteran and Georgia Congressman John Lewis. Or I should say, someone who was formerly widely recognized as a saint, for Lewis’s recent comment has permanently tarnished his halo and soiled the angelic white robes in which an adoring press (and not only the press, as demonstrated here) always clothes him. The Wall Street Journal nicely captured Lewis’s descent into the depths of race-baiting:

By raising questions about Barack Obama’s relationship with terror-bomber William Ayers, the Republicans are “sowing the seeds of hatred and division,” Mr. Lewis said. “During another period, in the not-too-distant past, there was a governor of a state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their Constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.”

Mr. Lewis’s over-the-top analogy is nastier by far than anything the GOP nominees have said during this campaign. In any case, Mr. Ayers is white....

I can’t say I knew George Wallace (though I knew some of his cousins), but I did see him up close, as did John Lewis. To compare McCain and Palin with Wallace and say they are creating a climate of violence comparable to the one that resulted in Birmingham church bombing is not just ridiculous; it’s nothing short of despicable.

Now that Lewis has discarded his halo for vitriolic partisanship, other examples have begun to surface. Thus Red State reports an example from 2006 where Lewis drew upon his iconic status to bash racist Republicans:

In 2006, John Lewis cooperated with a radio ad for John Eaves, the present Chairman of the Fulton County Commission in Georgia. The ad played on black radio stations. In it, Lewis said this:

On Nov. 7, we face the most dangerous situation we ever have. You think fighting off dogs and water hoses in the ’60s was bad. [Now we] sit idly by, and let the right-wing Republicans take control of the Fulton County County Commission.

This was followed with Atlanta’s current mayor Shirley Franklin claiming the efforts of Martin Luther King, Jr. might be undone and of former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young saying they couldn’t afford to turn the clock back.

Lewis, though, got the last word, saying:

Your very life may depend on it.

The message is clear: Vote Republican and you go back to slavery.

Moving now from a (formerly) secular saint to a Catholic priest, Andrew Greeley is even less subtle than Lewis, describing Sarah Palin as, like Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, “an All-American girl as racist, this time a racist with her eye on the White House.” Greeley, with the impressive ability to peer into the hearts and souls of ordinary Americans that fortunately is so widely shared among liberal pundits, tells us that when people say they don’t know enough about Obama to make a decision about him (“as if there were not two books about his life”!), what they are really saying is

that they don‘t know enough about him to accept his strange name or his skin color. It is, of course, impossible that they could ever know enough. He isn’t one of us.

At this point Greeley slides, still with no evidence, from what he knows doubting Americans really believe to what the McCain campaign is purposefully and knowingly doing:

Playing the race card explicitly merely guarantees what I have thought from the beginning -- racism in this country precludes the possibility of a sepia-colored man becoming president. However, the last-ditch attack on him guarantees that McCain and Palin will be blamed as the candidates who were content to hear crowds calling for the death of Obama....

McCain increasingly acts like an angry, befuddled cancer survivor and treats his rival like a field n----- who is just barely human. He does not talk to him, will not shake hands with him, will not even look at him, walks behind him when he is speaking to distract the audience....

Crowds calling for the death of Obama? In the same vein Greeley describes McCain as “a shallow man who is running on the basis of his skin color.”

At this point I’m prepared to believe that Greeley really does see visions and hear inner voices speaking to him, but it’s not the voice of God. Greeley sounds like a Rev. Jeremiah Wright who decides to abandon tact and say what he really believes.

Some questions these guys ask, however, can be easily answered. When Palin brought up Obama’s relationship with Ayers, accusing him of “palling around with terrorists,” E.J. Dionne asks, “What other “terrorists” was she thinking about?”

Easy. Bernadine Dohrn.

ADDENDUM

Anyone who thinks my warning to Dionne that he may be exposing himself to attack from his politically correct if uninformed allies by using the term “niggardly” was exaggerated obviously doesn’t recall the 1999 case of Washington D.C. mayor’s aide David Howard, mentioned in passing here. Howard was forced to resign after using the word “denigrate” in a conversation, as described in this Washington Post article:

The director of D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams’s constituent services office resigned after being accused of using a racial slur, the mayor’s office said yesterday.

David Howard, head of the Office of Public Advocate, said he used the word “niggardly” in a Jan. 15 conversation about funding with two employees.

“I used the word ‘niggardly’ in reference to my administration of a fund,” Howard said in a written statement yesterday. “Although the word, which is defined as miserly, does not have any racial connotations, I realize that staff members present were offended by the word....

Howard said the rumor that he had used a racial slur “has severely compromised my effectiveness as the District’s Public Advocate and in the best interest of my office, I resigned,” effective Monday....