RangerDave wrote:
Conservative freak outs over race-related b.s. stories like
Obama's citizenshipWe'll take these one by one. First, I already pointed out that Obama has a Kenyan father. The allegation that he was born in Kenya is hardly a "freak out", since his mother lacked the ability to transmit citizenship. Moreover, quite a few conservatives have issues not with the assertion that he was born in Hawaii since what evidence there is does support that, but with the legal tactics used in the case. How either of those points has anything to do with racism is beyond me; if his father had been german the exact same situation would exist.
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In this situation, almost everyone was lied to, including possibly even the blog poster that touched off the whole shitstorm. Sherrod later received a great deal of apology from both sides, including Bill O'Reilly, a favorite demon on the left.
Moreover, the case highlighted the hypocritical attitude towards racism on the left, who began ranting in outrage at a false allegation of racism against a black person, but are willing to drop charges of racism against whites/the right at the drop of a hat and essentially ignore it when later developments show the charge to be absurd. Your own article highlights this:
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Denver Post columnist David Harsanyi commented that "the Sherrod incident should be a teachable moment for the left... It illustrates how easily a reckless charge of racism can destroy someone" and expressed his belief that the incident brought an "onslaught of manufactured distress and outrage" – inconsistent with the lack of such outrage shown when those on the right were attacked for remarks also taken out of context.[87] David Limbaugh, writing for NewsMax, said that even though "two wrongs don't make a right"; still, "How about the irony in the castigation of Breitbart for smearing someone as a racist by people who routinely smear an entire group of people (conservatives) as racists?"[88] Journalist Ben Smith of The Politico remarked,
The America of 2010 is dominated by racial images out of farce and parody, caricatures not seen since the glory days of Shaft. Fox News often stars a leather-clad New Black Panther, while MSNBC scours the tea party movement for racist elements, which one could probably find in any mass organization in America. Obama's own, sole foray into the issue of race involved calling a police officer 'stupid,' and regretting his own words [the Henry Louis Gates incident]. Conservative leaders and the NAACP, the venerable civil-rights group, recently engaged in a round of bitter name-calling that left both groups wounded and crying foul. Political correctness continues to reign in parts of the left, and now has a match in the belligerent grievance of conservatives demanding that hair-trigger allegations of racism be proven.
The bottom line in this case was that the public was initially presented what appeared to be incontrovertible evidence of black racism. The fact that it was later revealed to be false hardly establishes that the reaction was motivated by racism against blacks; indeed the assertion that it does largely illustrates one of the points here: The left/blacks feel that only they are allowed to explore issues of race, much less make accusations of racism and any such activity by whites/the right must itself be racist because it does not agree with the left's position. In fact, this is precisely what Sherrod did to O'Reilly:
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Fox commentator Bill O'Reilly took issue with Sherrod's referring to the white lawyer she sent the white farmer to as "one of his own". He described her as a "long-time liberal activist", described her winning $300,000 "for her and her husband" when she sued the Department of Agriculture and expressed his belief that she should not be "doing the people's business [work in government]".[96] In response to Sherrod's statement that Fox News "would love to take us back where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and be a whole person", Fox News journalist Bret Baier said: "Miss Sherrod, that is just not true. It's not true." Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer said "She was a victim, but that doesn't entitle her to victimize others and to use these kinds of attack."
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This case was primarily about the response to the behavior of he two idiots in Philadelphia. Had they been white, the elft would ahve demanded strong action, but in fact the case showed that not only did the DoJ not give a **** if they were black, but also that mant DoJ lawyers have personal objections to prosecuting civil rights cases against blacks because it does not fit their worldview.
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Wright is an appalling racist, with an even more appalling excuse for theology. The right pointing out his behavior does not make anyone doing so racist any more than pointing out the WBC's behavior makes one anti-baptist or anti-christian.
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The only controversy I'm aware of here is the fact that it suddenly disappeared during the campaign, and the feeling was that there might have been something in it that someone wanted to hide, especially in light of an ill-advised comment or two by Michelle.
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Obama's supposed
"Kenyan anti-colonial" worldview,
Never even heard about this one, and I really have no idea what it's all about, so I have a very hard time beleiveing it received much attention.
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more race-baiting rants than I could possibly link to from people like Hannity, Limbaugh, Malkin, etc....
What exactly is a "race-baiting rant"? What, in fact, is "race-baiting"? This is sounding suspiciously like "dog-whistle politics", a term that becomes whatever it needs to become to support it's users' assertions and which can never be demonstrated or disproven.
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There's a long-running theme of racially-tinged portrayals of Obama and complaints against him. The right hated Clinton too, but he was just a bleeding-heart, draft-dodging liberal. Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist using Alinsky-like tactics to infiltrate our government, undermine the American way of life, and get some racial payback. There's no way to quantify how much of a factor that crap is, but it's there, and it's not just limited to the fringes and fever swamps of the web.
You're demonstrating precisely what I'm talking about - the simple assumption of racism whenever it might convceivably be true in order to dismiss cricticism of the behavior of the left. Excepting the anti-colonial thing from comment since I still don't understand what that's all about, not a single one of these points can be attributed to racism. Every single one involves a call of attention to the
hypocrisy that racism charges have become on the left.
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Sure, but taken together they add up to a pattern, and when you consider the intensity of the response to them, that pattern becomes even more clear.
They do add up to a pattern - the pattern of addiction to the use of racism as a bludgeon in political discussion by the left, and the attempt to hold onto it. Any attempt to point out hypocrisy or inconssitency is simply met with more charges of racism because the fact is not that there is still significant anti-black racism; the fact is that race politics has largely become about blacks continuing to be told there is racism by the press and politicians and holding onto that, and whites being sick and tired of there being no discussion, just decade after decade of lecture about "privilege" they supposedly have just because there are rich people with the same skin color, and and other racial groups are essentially ignored.
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No, because these things don't occur in a vacuum; there's a long history of intense racism toward black people in particular in this country. There's no comparable history of widespread bigotry toward white people and Texans, despite the recent embrace of victim/identity-politics on the right.
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This doesn't make any sense. "There can't be racism against whites now because there is a long history of racism against blacks in the past". That's unsupportable; it relies on the notion that racism requires some power component, and that assertion exists for no purpose except to restrict charges of racism to those whom the users find it conveneient - a semantic trick to leave bad behavior in racial regard by nonwhites with no term to describe it and therefore immune from cricticism or even discussion.
More importantly, the right has not "embraced victim/identity politics"; what it has done is begun calling attention to how that has been used by the left over the past 20-40 years. 40 years ago, racism was still prevalent in this country, although vastly less so than it had been 40 years before that. By the time 20 years ago rolled around, racism in this country was essentially dead, but we first started seeing attempts to prop up its supposed continuation as a boogeyman, and a tool to suppress viewpoints that the politicians and press on the left didn't like.
The fact of the matter is that racism in this country is a joke anymore, and that "long history of intense racism" has been dead for about 30 years, while the pendulum has swung the other way - in some ways in overt discrimination on things like college scholarships, but far more importantly in using it's spectre to suppress serious discussion, because the left does not want a discussion or dialogue about race; it wants a lecture podium. The right has simply grown sick and tired of this, and these incidents you cite above are not anti-black freakouts; they are people simply making it clear that they will no longer tolerate certain behaviors being acceptable from blacks and the left, castigated when on the right or from whites, nor will people any longer tolerate "racism" being a term that means whatever the NAACP wants it to mean.