Reductio ad Klanum, in the mainstream media*

MSNBC "award winning journalist" and anchor Thomas Roberts reported that Mitt Romney's slogan "Keep America America" is similar to one the Ku Klux Klan used in the 1920s.  The report includes a graphic stating "ROMNEY'S KKK SLOGAN?"  Roberts made sure to include the fact that the slogan was "a rallying cry for the group's campaign of violence and intimidation against blacks, gays and Jews."  That darn Mormon Romney must have the same intentions, right?  At least that's what MSNBC implied.




* Or at least as mainstream as MSNBC can claim to be with its couple of dozen viewers.

The race card is maxed out

I'm not a fan of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.  However, they recently had a segment by TDS correspondent Larry Wilmore, who is black, in which he tried to use the race card to excuse Maxine Waters who has had her problems recently.  Wilmore scans a physical Race Card ("never leave home without it") only to find that it's been maxed out.  The clip is worth watching.

Since racism's in the news

The Daily Caller -- admittedly a right-leaning website -- has recently posted a series of columns illuminating how Liberal media types conspired to promote the Liberal Democrat agenda, and Barack Obama's presidential campaign specifically. The series is explosive and revealing.


The media types, along with Liberal university professors and activists, were members of a now defunct listserv called Journolist. They would post comments in what they considered a private, safe and confidential environment, secure in the knowledge (or so they thought) that their posts would never see daylight. They were wrong.


Some of the participants:
Richard Kim - The Nation
Spencer Ackerman - The Washington Independent
Michael Tomasky - The Guardian
Thomas Schaller -- Baltimore Sun columnist and college professor
Jonathan Stein - Mother Jones
Jared Bernstein - eventual top economist for VP Joe Biden
Holly Yeager - Columbia Journalism Review
Joe Conason - columnist
David Greenberg - Slate contributor
David Roberts - The Grist
Todd Gitlin - journalism professor, Columbia University


Okay, you get the idea. These were people with influence. Literally hundreds of Liberal journalists were members of this listserv. The particular episode I want to address was what these folks did during the brouhaha over Jeremiah Wright during the 2008 campaign. Here are some examples of their postings during that time (with some summary.)

• Chris Hayes of the Nation urged "those in the ostensible mainstream media” who were members of the list.to ignore Wright.
• Spencer Ackerman: "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."
• Ackerman again: "...take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists."

Some members of Journolist, disagreed with the tactic, saying that such a gutter fight would hurt the Obama brand. Ackerman's response: "I'm not saying Obama should do this. I'm saying WE should do this."


Makes you rethink all the media talk about Tea Party racism, doesn't it? (And yes, Andrew Breitbart really did offer $100,000 to anyone who could produce a video of Tea Partiers calling black congressmen racial epithets at the protest against the healthcare legislation in March. That money remains unclaimed.)

The Daily Caller also reveals how these same media conspired to ruin Sarah Palin's 2008 VP candidacy. Check it out.

Shocked, but not surprised

Here's a Fox News story about a black USDA official resigning her job. Shirley Sherrod resigned because she admitted in a speech to the NAACP that she didn't help a white farmer as much as she could have. Read it carefully and fully, because there are lessons to be learned.


Okay, now here's the video, so you can see it for yourself. It's not really required viewing, other than to be able to say you saw it with your own eyes and heard it with your own ears.





Two points to be made here. First of all, Sherrod felt completely comfortable talking about her racism in a public forum. Even in the telling of her story, she displays her racism -- "one of his own" "it IS about white and black." She also tossed in that it (whatever "it" is) is about "poor versus those who have." Her whole message seems to be that opportunity is predatory. Blacks must fight whites, poor must fight those who are not poor.


Whatever the point of her story, she apparently believed that in that particular forum, the audience would either understand her racism, or sympathize with it. Now imagine the firestorm that would follow if a white official casually made such a statement. He would likely be prosecuted, and his name would be used as a verb for decades.


To its credit, the NAACP has condemned Sherrod's statements and actions. My first point is this -- why would anyone ever feel comfortable enough to admit such a thing in public? Doesn't such conduct call for head-bowing, toe-scuffing embarrassment?


My second point is at the very end of the Fox story. Here's the quote from Sherrod: "There are jobs at USDA and many times there are no people of color to fill those jobs because we shy away from agriculture. We hear the word agriculture and think, why are we working in the fields?" she said. "You've heard of a lot of layoffs. Have you heard of anybody in the federal government losing their job? That's all I need to say."


'Nuff sed.

Imagine If a Republican Had Said It

Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid apologized Saturday for what he called "a poor choice of words." What were the words? And why was Reid apologizing?

In their new book Game Change, about the 2008 Presidential campaign, Time magazine reporter Mark Halperin and New York magazine writer John Heileman quote Harry Reid as calling Barack Obama a "light-skinned" black man "with no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one."

While you would imagine a white politician would be driven from office, tarred and feathered, and drawn and quartered when exposed publicly for making such a remark, Reid seems to be okay because a) he's a Democrat; and b) Obama "accepted Reid's apology" (on behalf, presumably, of any and all other black people who might be offended.)

Obama's Trump Card

The Washington Post recently ran a story about the racism that Obama volunteers are running into while campaigning for the candidate. According to the story, "field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season." They've been called "racially derogatory names" and endured "malicious rants and ugly stereotyping."

There are numerous anecdotes of what you'd expect, including one person telling a campaign worker to "hang that darky from a tree." (Note: I have known a lot of bigots in my time, and I can't think of one who would use such a phrase. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but it sounds like something from a poorly-written old movie.)

Then, an incident of racism occurred when a campaign office was vandalized, and comments like "Hamas Votes BHO" and "We don't cling to guns and religion" were spraypainted on the walls.

Huh?

As stupid as vandalism is, and as much as the criminals should be punished, could those phrases really be classified as "racist?" I don't believe they are -- but the Washington Post used them as an example of the racist tendencies of many white Americans.

Think about that for a second. A major newspaper has classified spraypainted phrases against the black candidate as racist, even though there was no mention of race in either remark.

Do we see a template of how the campaign for the general election will be covered in the media? Any negative statement against Obama will immediately be designated as "racist," and the content of the point can be discounted without being answered.

The Post story goes on to say that Obama "has struggled to attract white voters who didn't attend college and earn less than $50,000 a year." Read that as "ignorant, poor white people." You know, the only group that is racist (merely by virtue of being poor, non-college-educated, and white.) The clear implication is that these people are not voting for Obama because he's black.

Meanwhile, Obama's support among black voters is a given. Political pundits blithely predicted Obama's victories in states such as South Carolina, Louisiana and North Carolina because of the large number of black voters in those states. (Obama received 78% of the black vote in SC, 90% in LA, and 91% in NC.)

Yet although much has been made about the blatant racism Obama faces among white voters, there is absolutely no outrage over the racism shown by 1) The huge percentage of black voters who support Obama, presumably because of his race, and 2) The "given" nature of that fact by political pundits, as though it were normal and expected, and 3) The lack of any sort of comment on the hypocrisy shown by all involved.

Apparently racism in favor of Obama is acceptable and the norm, while racism against Obama is to be abhorred and condemned in the strongest possible language.

A person with any sense doesn't use race as a factor in making decisions such as electing a candidate. That includes those who vote for a candidate based on his race. The problem is that not only is there a double standard regarding racism when it comes to Obama, but the definition of racism has been broadened to include almost any remark a person can make about him -- unless it's a glowing endorsement.

To avoid being labeled a racist myself, here are some of the reasons I am against Barack Obama:

• He's a Democrat.
• He's a Liberal.
• He has no clue about the war on terror.
• He wants Americans to pay a tax to the United Nations.
• He is pro-abortion.
• He wants to take away the Bush tax cuts.
• He voted "no" (twice) to reduce the federal deficit.
• He believes global warming is caused by humans.
• He believes government has the right to ban handguns.
• He's a Liberal Democrat.

Okay, you get the idea. Go to ontheissues.org to see more of Obama's positions and votes.

My thought is this: there are so many other reasons to vote against Barack Obama that his race isn't even an issue.