Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader and all-around racist

Los Angeles Times

Shortly after the first Tax Day tea party, last April, political scientist, American historian, and noted psychologist Janeane Garofalo appeared on the suitably high-brow news analysis show “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” to give her learned assessment of the protesters and their motivation.

“Let’s be very honest about what this is about,” she intoned with grave studiousness. “This is not about bashing Democrats. It’s not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea party was about. They don’t know their history at all. It’s about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.”

And to prove her own intellectual maturity and fair-mindedness, she dismissed the protesters as “nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks”—borrowing a pejorative term for a rather obscene sexual act popular among some homosexuals.

Since that time, Republicans, conservatives, independents, and even, one presumes, moderate Democrats who have expressed reservations about the job Barack Obama has done as president have been branded  racists. Is it possible that those of us who claim to find fault with the Obama presidency (which increasingly is gaining such unlikely adherents as lefty commentator Maureen Dowd, who slammed Obama hard again today in her New York Times column) simply find fault with the Obama presidency? No! shout back the acolytes. You’re a racist for even asking!

How is it that Democrats are so adept at sniffing out the racism in seemingly innocent comments? Could it be that they know the brand so well because at least some of them smoke it themselves?

That theory would seem to explain as well as any the unfortunate portrait Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid painted of Barack Obama, whom Reid praised for being “light-skinned” (for a black man) and for not using a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Negro? I haven’t heard that term since Samuel L. Jackson’s character used it whimsically in addressing his black boss in Pulp Fiction. I’ll bet Joseph Conrad couldn’t have gotten away with using the word Negro.

“I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words,” Reid said when called out. Blah, blah, blah. Afterward, when the cameras were off, he went on to allow as how some of his best friends were black people (although none of them dark-skinned—perish the thought).

Obama subsequently issued a statement absolving Reid of any wrong-doing. Then again, who is Obama to talk. This, you may recall, is a man who described his own grandmother as “a typical white person” and jumped to unfortunate conclusions about the Cambridge, Massachusetts police—immediately after declaring that it was too early to reach any conclusions about the case involving Obama’s friend (and fellow racist) “Skip” Gates.

When you get down to cases, it doesn’t matter whether Obama thinks Reid’s remarks were racist. Any rational observer would have trouble seeing them as anything other than racist—and the ugliest kind of racism at that that: the backhanded compliment. But not to worry. Harry plans on showing his benevolent intentions by inviting the Obamas to dinner. He has even hired for the occasion a cook famous for her fried chicken and has ordered a whole mess of watermelon for dessert.

Cross-posted at Manhattan Conservative Examiner

[W]e have a president whose benign—and therefore desirable—blackness exempted him from the political individuation process that makes for strong, clear-headed leaders. He has not had to gamble his popularity on his principles, and it is impossible to know one’s true beliefs without this. In the future he may stumble now and then into a right action, but there is no hard-earned center to the man out of which he might truly lead.

And yes, white America conditioned Barack Obama to emptiness—valued him all along for his “articulate and clean” blackness, so flattering to American innocence. He is a president come to us out of our national insecurities.

Shelby Steele- “Obama and Our Post-Modern Race Problem” – WSJ.com.

In what can only be seen as an example of reflexive bias, BU President Lois DeFleur immediately characterized Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani’s alleged attack on Professor Richard Antoun as a mere “act of senseless violence.” This despite the fact that Professor Antoun was a notorious apostate from the Religion of Peace and the author of an inflammatory book titled Understanding Fundamentalism: Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Movements.

How long must we tolerate university administrators who refuse to give credit where due for innovative work merely because of the deeply felt religious beliefs of the student?

http://www.stargazette.com/article/20091205/NEWS01/912040386/Suspect-identified-in-fatal-stabbing-of-Binghamton-University-professor

Award winning blogger Pamela Geller is determined to see that Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani gets proper credit for his work.

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2009/12/muslim-grad-student-stabs-jewish-convert-professor-to-death.html 

As an aside this innovative work by the 46 year old Al-Zahrani also calls into question the ageist discrimination being practiced against older muslim men by profilers who insist that only “young muslim men” are capable of understanding and acting on their religious duty.

http://www.parapundit.com/archives/006734.html

He’s also at an all-time low on Presidential approval.

Daily Presidential Tracking Poll – Rasmussen Reports™

Numerous other polls of broader samples – registered voters or even all adults, groups which have tended historically to skew left and are less predictive electorally – confirm the same trajectory.  (In other words, Happy Political Thanksgiving at HP’s place!)

Normally, an address of the sort the President is set to give next Tuesday, on war policy, should yield an approval bump.  He could use it.

Meanwhile, we read this:

The President earns approval from 97% of African-American voters and disapproval from 61% of white voters.

It suggests to me another aspect of a potentially very steep cost to to the country if this “post-racial” president is as disastrous a failure as he is currently on a trajectory to becoming.  As attention to the laws of historical irony warned us well before November ’08, the nation’s “easy” anti-racist gesture of voting for “the black candidate” seems at least to threaten, if not to require, a wrenching confrontation with racial polarization.

The Van Jones firing brought a whole new round of cries of “foul” from all across the left-leaning commentariat, from the likes of Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Mary Mitchell, herself a veteran racist, to super-racist Jeremiah Wright, who offered the following gem of a response (in case you missed it):

There is one voice that has been conspicuously silent during this full-on assault, and it’s one that could possibly make a difference. It’s that of Barack Obama. Surely, the man who proclaimed during the campaign that the country needs a dialogue on race has heard — or at least heard of — some of these ugly slurs that have been hurled at conservatives. Does he himself believe that conservatives are racists? I recall during the campaign when Geraldine Ferraro stated that Obama had received preferential treatment because he is black that he spoke up.

So let him speak up now. I think it could help the country immeasurably if he politely asked the Garofalos and Olbermanns to back off. Then again it might not, but it’s worth the try.

Unless . . . Obama himself believes that conservatives are racist. It would also be helpful to know that.

h/t HotAir Headlines

UPDATE: We’ve stolen some laughs and enjoyed no small amount of schadenfreude over Gatesgate, and taken some well-deserved shots at Gates and the President, but I find this photo, subject of a “caption contest” at HotAir, kind of touching:

Sure, you can read some symbolism into it – Gates’ age and the exhaustion of his ideology, Obama’s obliviousness with its own peculiar vulnerability and therefore its pathos, Crowley the “public servant.” A painter could have done something with this subject (not “The Blind Leading The Lame,” though the title works…).

What’s as striking to me is how it puts the whole incident on a human scale in a way that the main event couldn’t. As I said in the HotAir comments, I think it’s a nice pikcha. Don’t know if I want to get complicated.