I have a confession to make – I like NPR. Even worse, I like Juan Williams, probably one of the best known black independent commentators out there – not only is he a regular contributor to NPR, but he’s a regular on the O’Reilly Factor. He often brings balance and sanity to polarized discussions, and has even written a book criticizing African Americans for their victim mentality.
But yesterday on O’Reilly, and this morning on NPR, he broached the idea that underlying the Tea Parties, the 75,000 people who marched on Washington this past weekend, and the outburst of S.C. Senator Wilson is racism – that’s right, what is really driving these people is hatred for a black man in the Presidency. Wanna hear this tripe? Audio and transcript here.
But I’ve got news for you – making erroneous claims about your ideological opponents’ motives only emboldens them. But go ahead, here’s some more rope to hang yourself with – oops, was that a racist remark? Or just black humor. Oops, was *that* a racist remark? Whoa, was that a demon behind that Bush…hey, was THAT a racist remark?
This morning, Rush Limbaugh played a montage of all of the liberal media’s conjecturing over the motives of racism among those who oppose Obamacare, and it was a disgusting cacophony of idiocy. I won’t spend much time debunking them, since any clear minded person can see that they are being obtuse. But let me say this:
- Posters of Obama made up to look like Hitler is not racist (unless Obama is perhaps Jewish)
- Gun owners showing up wearing their guns as protest against Obama’s gun control (and control in general) policies is not racist, esp. if you are BLACK and bring your guns (talk about liberal media hypocrisy). However, it is dumb to bring guns to any presidential appearance.
- Supporting the flying of the confederate flag might be construed as racist, but it is not necessarily so, and reading that support forward into Joe Wilson’s outburst is circumstantial at best.
- I noted NOT ONE racist sign at the 9/12 rally (which the dishonest liberal media ignored or buried), even though what little the liberal media did show were some of the most fringy people at the rallies. I mean, where were the signs with the N word on them? Where were the slave references, or the ‘boy’ references, or the white face? They WERE in one place – in the minds of the fearful, hateful liberals.
What’s really illustrative is Maurine Dowd hearing voices when she remarked that Wilson implied the word ‘boy’ at the end of his ‘you lie!’ outburst – you know, like ‘slave boy.’
What is really going on in the minds of liberals, IMO, is a combination of anachronistic paranoia (living in the past and projecting it onto the present) and inability to transcend their own worldview – that is, they can’t even comprehend that people could be so angry over Obama’s well-meaning ‘socialist’ policies, so they look for some other more ‘reasonable’ motive, which in their minds, must be racism.
But the problem is, every criticism I’ve heard from the anti-Obama camp has nothing to do with race, but instead concerns his leftist policies, his out-of-control spending, his effort to railroad healthcare, and his disrespect for his opponents.
The only people playing the race card are the liberals and liberal minorities themselves, still living in the past abuses in their minds, and projecting that onto the anger and criticisms of conservatives and independents.
They have this conspiracy theory that there is some racist thread woven through the birthers’ contentions that Obama is really a Kenyan, his Islamic sounding middle name, Senator Wilson’s previous support for the Confederate flag flying over the SC capital, and the relative whiteness of the Tea Party and anti-tax rallies.
Never mind that this last point can be easily explained by the fact that 90% of African Americans voted for Obama, so of course they are not at these rallies. And really, it is the many African Americans who support Obama *because* he is black rather than based on his policies who are being racist, at least in a generic sense – they prefer him because of his race. Soft racism, but racist nonetheless.
However, this demonization by the left of the anti-big-government plans of Obama is sure to backfire in two significant ways.
- Spreading falsehood not only emboldens those accused, it wins sympathy for them among the independents
- Second, it actually CREATES racist anger on BOTH sides, the very thing that liberals are supposed to be eschewing in Obama’s ‘post-racist’ administration.
I don’t have time to search the polls, but let me say that the more liberals cry ‘racism,’ the more they are CREATING IT where it does not exist. And they are losing sympathy from common people who haven’t drunk their Kool-aid.
Juan Williams may be right that minorities feel that Senator Wilson’s disrespect for Obama, and the anger at the Town Hall’s and anti-tax rallies are fueled by racism, but that fear has little basis in fact, and is instead embedded in the race-conscious victim mentality that liberals need to leave behind.
Until then, keep crying ‘race!’ to get a rise out of people and comfort yourself, and laugh at how people jump when you say it, just like the boy who cried wolf. But when you really need people to see injustice, they may not answer you. Instead, they will make Obama a single term president. And I can live with that.
