From the disgraced and hapless former President Jimmy Carter, Democrat: “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.”
From US Representative Hank Johnson, Democrat from Georgia, who happens to be black: “We’ll probably have folks putting on white hoods and white uniforms again, and riding through the countryside intimidating people.”
So much for Obama’s promise to usher in a post-racial America. Obama and so many of his Democrats are all about race and racial grievance, real or feigned. This most recent “national conversation about race” began when Republican Representative Wilson shouted “you lie” to President Obama in his recent speech to a joint session of Congress when he (Obama) said that illegal aliens would not be covered under his health care reform. Ultra-liberal columnist Maureen Dowd of the NY Times apparently spoke for many Democrats when she wrote that when Wilson said “you lie” he really in his heart meant the racial slur “Boy, you lie.”
In the Bush years, to gloss over their gross incivility and at times near traitorous behavior, some Democrats would assert that “dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Now, as the new quip goes, according to Democrats for Republicans “dissent is the highest form of racism.” (link)
Accusing those who oppose Obama’s policies of racism is despicable, and I can only hope will be a major losing strategy for those Democrats who embrace it, explicitly or tacitly. Charles Krauthammer on Fox News (link):
“The accusation of racism is a sign of desperation by people who know they are losing the national debate, and they want to hurl the ultimate charge in American politics…. it is a disgusting tactic. It's done as a way to end debate…. Accusations of racism are the last refuge of the liberal scoundrel.
Some conservatives (link) take a defensive stance, which is quite wrong as it almost seems to concede the premise. The only way to respond is to denounce those who charge racism every time they lose a policy debate.
Victor Davis Hanson writes (link) at National Review Online:
[I]n the Bush wilderness years, the Left assumed permanent political marginalization, adopted an ends-justify-the-means strategy of street rhetoric against Bush, then found themselves unexpectedly as the establishment, and now are appalled that anyone might emulate their own past emotional outbursts…. [T]he larger question is why the Left is now nearly unhinged about criticism of a black liberal president, when it was silent … about the racial implications of the constant and vicious anger directed at Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice…. For that matter, the ubiquitous [ultra-liberal Democrat US representative] Pete Stark once said some particularly unkind and racist things about former health and human services secretary Louis Sullivan (who is black).Here’s Peter Wehner at Contentions (link):
[This is] evidence of how unhinged and desperate many liberals and some within the Democratic party are becoming. The hatred and fury that consumed them during the Bush years is returning with a vengeance. It turns out that the cause of their derangement during the Bush years may not have been Bush after all; he may simply have been the object of their crazed attacks. It’s fascinating to watch how furious liberals have become despite Obama’s being president and Democrats’ controlling the Senate and the House by wide margins. This period should be—they expected it to be—years of milk and honey for them. But events and reality have intervened. They see the Anointed One, Barack Obama—their “sort of God”—failing. He is not only a mere mortal but also a deeply flawed one.
They see support for Obama’s effort to nationalize our health-care system collapsing. They see the American people rising up against his brand of liberalism. They see Republicans with all the intensity on their side.
Many liberals simply cannot process this new data, this horrible turn of events. What we are seeing is the equivalent of a computer crash. As a result, they are returning to what has become for some liberals an emotional and psychological norm: anger and fury, overheated and reckless charges, bitterness and pettiness…. We’re only eight months into the Age of Obama—the period in which he promised to unite our divided country, heal our wounds, and bind up our divisions—and Obama’s critics are now routinely labeled as unpatriotic, racists, liars, mobsters, evil mongers, practitioners of un-American tactics, and more. As Obama’s failures mount up, it will only get worse. The volume will only get louder. And the charges will only get more desperate and incendiary.
Obama promised us all a post-racial America. Instead, this is what we’ve gotten.
John M Greco
