Posted by
Deadpan on Thursday, January 17, 2008 4:01:07 PM
For years liberals have pandered to minority groups, inviting them to feel victimized and castigated others for being "insensitive" to the point where these groups have begun to feel entitled to special regard and treatment.by whoever they deem the majority. It's now become so reflexive that even using the word "niggardly" raises hackles. And of course, any allegation of racism brings Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and their ilk parachuting in to organize protests and demand satisfaction, which often takes the form of kissing his ring and donating to his causes.
Now, having pandered so well as to be declared to be the first African American President, Bill Clinton is living his political career through Hillary, and finds himself (he doesn't really think of her as an independent entity) facing a true African-American opponent who beat them in Iowa.
Margaret Carlson writes:
Bill Clinton, in particular, was furious at Hillary's loss,
indulging in the kind of red-faced rants vividly described in
George Stephanopoulos's tale of White House life, ``All Too
Human.''
How dare this upstart backbencher steal this election from
Hillary! The press? What a lazy bunch of enablers swallowing
this &%*# fairy tale, all this hooey about what we share being
so much greater than our differences.
Carlson believes that race becoming an issue will damage Obama, but I don't see how.
So Hillary has gone negative, and the Clintons are notorious for playing hardball. The first salvo was attacking Obama's admitted use of drugs as a teen. The second was the implication that Martin Luther King couldn't have changed the nation's race laws without the efforts of LBJ. It took a white president, LBJ.
The implication is that American blacks need white patrons to grant them their rights. So much for Dr. King's dream. How that hurts Obama's cause, I'm not sure. If I were black, I'd be angry and energized.
George Will notes that it did take a southern white Democrat president to push the civil rights laws through Congress, but it's not likely that he'd have been so inclined without the courage and leadership of Martin Luther King.
It is unfair, and wonderful, that Clinton has been castigated for
her insensitivity in uttering the incontestable truth that President
Lyndon Johnson, as well as Martin Luther King Jr., was indispensable to
enactment of the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965. To his credit,
Barack Obama seemed not quite able to conceal his boredom with his
assigned role of slighted victim in the charade of being offended. His
campaign, however, methodically played a muted part in the required
dance of agreement.
Clinton's clanking, wheezing political jalopy, blowing its gaskets
and stripping its lug nuts, has moved on from faulting Obama for a
kindergarten essay (in which he supposedly revealed a presidential
ambition that was unseemly around the teeter-totter) to accusing him of
wanting to be reasonable, even likable. Is there nothing the man will
not stoop to?
America has passed another milestone on its march to equal
opportunity thanks to Robert Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment
Television, who this week proved that a black billionaire can be just
as witless as are certain white billionaires who think their wisdom is
commensurate with their net worth. Introducing Clinton at a rally,
Johnson called Obama a "guy who says, 'I want to be a reasonable,
likable Sidney Poitier in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.'" For the uninitiated, that is how you call someone an Uncle Tom in an age that has not read "Uncle Tom's Cabin."